shahid

Haha, I'd love to turn back time, but sadly, that's unlikely to happen.

The reasons for leaving were widely reported and accurate, but to sum up, I'd achieved more than I ever hoped to achieve at PlayStation, so I wanted to leave while on a high and I wanted to make games again and at my age, I didn't know if I'd ever get the chance again. I didn't want to have any regrets and not trying gamedev again would have been something I would have had terrible regret about. I'm very happy to answer any questions about the original Chimera here. There will be another version of Chimera at some point, but not for Atari, as Tezz has already done the definitive version

Haha, thanks, sadly it didn't, but it's probably just as well or I would have been a truly obnoxious rich kid! I left PlayStation last year to go back to my developer roots, and I'm working on a new VR project, which I'll share with you as soon as I can!

What an amazing thread! It's been a while, but I'd like to thank Tezz again for doing Chimera justice and making it way better than I did. Amazing skill. And a lovely person too.

Hello everyone! In preparation for the full reboot I'm working on, I've been putting together a remake (reasonably faithful to ZX Spectrum version) of Chimera. Full details are on my blog at http://www.chimera2010.com - you can download latest builds there for Mac and PC. Nothing fancy yet. The Mac version requires Mountain Lion sadly, but other than that, they should both work. Remember, this isn't the reboot with the new features I'm going to put in, but just a remake (re-release?) of the original, written from the ground up in C++ using the Cinder Library for the OpenGL stuff, not that it needs any hi tech or anything. I've been working on this in what little spare time I have. I'd love your feedback! Oh and possibly also your help. I'd like to know if anyone is able to get the original Atari graphics for Chimera for me in some modern format. It would be dead easy for me to replace the existing Speccy graphics and I'd like the player to be able to select which port they'd want to play. Personally, I always loved the look of the Atari version, and it was the version I loved the most, even if it ran way too slowly! All the best!

My 1982 copy of the Atari 400/800 Operating System Source Listing, complete with coffee stains is up now: http://chimera2010.com/atari-400800-operating-system-source-listing/ Enjoy! :-)

It's been a year since I was last here. I've picked up Chimera again and am making progress there. Also, yesterday I decided to finally scan my entire Atari 400/800 Operating System Source Listing. I'm going to post it on my Chimera blog and when I do, I'll check back here and let you know. Not sure how useful it will be, but I Recall some people saying they'd like to see it. It's at 600dpi, so you can see the coffee stains on the cover and the grain of every page! It weighs in at over 400MB, so if anyone has any ideas on how to bring that down a bit without degrading the quality, I'd appreciate it.

It was The Comet Game. And it was rubbish. My first published Atari game in 1983 was "Storm in a Teacup". That was also rubbish, but it was my first, so I love it for that. I might have done more, I don't remember. BTW, I just bought The Comet Game on Atari off eBay. I felt like J.R. Hartley from that old Yellow Pages advert

Thanks for the welcome DragonStomper, and many thanks for your Eid greetings. I have never been to Saudi, but would obviously like to go one day! Really appreciate the sentiments about Chimera. I continued to do quite a lot of coding, but mostly on other platforms. I ended up doing two more games on the 8-bit Atari. After 1990, I got into music production and started making music for video games, featuring in games by Virgin and Core Design; then in 1992, joined BITS full time at first to head up their music dept and eventually moved into production. After that I left to join Virgin as a PRoducer, then Hasbro as a Senior Producer, then Exec Producer, then I set up a funding outfit called START! games, which got quite a bit of attention. I think some of this is mentioned in the About page on the chimera2010.com blog - really appreciate the interest.

Thanks for the explanation. By priority I assume you mean depth "into" the screen? Yes. I came up with "DPA" because I was making fun of all the silly acronyms people were coming up with at the time to make it seem they were cleverer than they were. I had no idea that over a quarter of a century later, people might make the same mistake with me! :-) :-) It was just a bit of fun.

I could have done the spaceman using PMGs, but I'd still need to do the other sprite, like the terminal, the electric fence, and the other stuff I don't remember. :-) Even avoiding PMGs, using DPA would have been much quicker, if I'd had more time, I would have taken this approach for the Atari version. Of course, the interesting thing nowadays is that none of these performance issues prevent you from doing pretty much anything you want to do (within reason) So I'm very much looking forward to doing my remake, though it will be significantly different from the original in gameplay. The scream will remain of course!

The Dynamic Priority Allocator (DPA) sounds interesting. What was the theory of operation behind that? 1) Work out what the dirty rectangle was for each movable object (usually two, the player sprite and one other, like the electric fence, bread etc.) 2) Draw the relevant section of the background screen into a buffer the size of the dirty rectangle 3) Draw the sprite over the top in the new position At this stage you have what you need, except that the sprite will be in front of everything, so... 4) Overlay all higher priority objects into the buffer 5) Draw the buffer(s) onto the screen There are two speed advantages to this approach: i) The entire screen doesn't need to be drawn back to front as it was on Spectrum and Atari versions ii) The lower priority objects don't need to be drawn again This technique is very similar to Chris Stamper's Filmation engine. The C64 version was better still, in that you didn't need to use dirty rectangles at all. I'd just cookie cut the higher priority objects from the sprite.

There were very few people who wanted Atari product in those days. I had to convince Firebird to take it in the first place. At the time of release, I don't think the 128k machines had even come out. (My memory on that is a bit hazy though) - I had to keep insisting, and eventually they took it. I doubt they would have wanted it if it had exceeded 48k. My first Atari game had to fit into the 16k machines, but only actually took about 4k. It was rubbish, but it got me into the business. :-) My biggest regret with the Atari version was that I didn't do the same technique for screen updating that I ended up doing on the Amstrad, which was to update only the dirty rectangles. It was a complete screen update, like the Spectrum version. Despite the fast 2MHz processor on the Atari compared to the pedestrian 1MHz 6502 on the C64, the latter was the faster version because I used sprites and a cookie cutter technique to mask the hidden pixels. Obviously, once the 130XE was out, I bought it - and absolutely loved it. Sadly, it was stolen, like all the rest of my equipment, including my treasured Apricot Xen, bought for me by Firebird, with an opulent 20MB hard drive and a paper white screen.

Thanks for your kind welcome! I was pleased with that pause screen too. I got the bands by using quad width PMGs the full height of the screen, so I could cycle those colours independently. I was a big fan of DLIs Apart from the old stuff at chimera2010.com, there is the excellent resource here: http://www.birdsanctuary.co.uk/chimera/i.php A transcript of the diary I did can be found here: http://www.birdsanctuary.co.uk/chimera/xt.php

Yes it was me. From memory, I did the sample on the Spectrum version first. I redid the C64 version using the Covox Voice Master. I varied the pitch every so often. My family thought I'd lost it when I was recording the samples.