Rob Nicholson

True but Atari were panicking big style by then and just wanted the product out :-( Rob.

Thank you

That must have been Power Factor - I didn't work on that one much at all, at least I can't remember :-) Cheers, Rob.

Hmm, not sure - I did meet the Lynx hardware designers (Jay & RJ??) at a 3DO console conference in SF (there was another system which never fullfillied it's promise). A Lynx programmer would feel very at home with the 3DO :-) But never had chance to chat too much about the Lynx hardware. I did wonder why the interface to the ROM cartridge was via a serial interface but assumed it was a cost saving excercise. Rob.

The Lynx hardware was excellent - not surprising as it was designed by the same core team who brought us the Amiga. There was very little you'd want it to do better except of course the usual - more RAM and faster. It was a machine ahead of it's time. I never worked on any other handheld device like the Gameboy or Sega offering so can't really comment whether the hardware compared well with the rest but I suspect it was superior. The Amiga guys just knew how to design cool hardware. The biggest limitation unfortunately was Atari :-( I worked on some of low-level stuff for Kasumi Ninja but wasn't the lead programmer. At the time we were caught with Atari believing their own marketing (that the Jaguar was an awesome console) and the reality of the limitations and bugs in the hardware. They wanted lots of high resolution and high colour graphics but ROM prices were still too high to allow this. We (HMS) had written a PC port of a console game called Total Carnage. The last thing I did on the Jaguar was code up the sprite rendering engine in the GPU (bloody hard going!) but relations between myself and HMS at that point were strained. I was owed nearly six months wages which I never got. Cheers, Rob.

The encryption bit was pretty fast - it was the loading of the program and data from ROM that took time as it was loaded via a serial interface. We also compressed our data in cartridge using LZW compression algorithms to squeeze more levels in there. Cheers, Rob.

Neat :-) I was quite proud of the ComLink driver in Lynx although I'm sure there were still some bugs in there. I seem to remember that I even commented it quite well. Our driver came into it's own with BZ2K whereby the flexible messaging system made things possible. I think I used to upset some assembly developers by using structured assembler using a series of macros (EasyMac?) to allow you to write things like: lda Score cmp #10 .if ge then jsr DoSomething .endif Ahh yes, the architechure is coming back to me now. Main memory (64k?) with data loaded from cart using a serial interface. Ahh, memories :-) I used to love trying to make things faster and the download speed of our development system from a PC was way faster than the Handy. I remember bit tweaking the byte loader routine. Did a similar thing (as did many others) with the C64 disk interface. The native protocol used by Commodore was very slow. Got disk loading running about 8 times faster. We always had multiple modules in our Lynx games. A kernel of core routines and then load a module for each part of the game like front screen titles, main game, high score etc. It was a common practise with games back then when memory was tight. Cheers, Rob.

The Elite work was purely potential business development and a technical test as to whether it was possible. It was effectively a straight port of the ST or Amiga version (can't remember which). I was always a pretty structured programmer so down-grading from 68000 to 65C02 wasn't too difficult. The hardware mutliplier was a boon as well as the ability to draw horizontal pixel lines in hardware. It was shown to Atari as a technology preview - we didn't own the rights to Elite (haven't a clue where it was at then) so that was possibly one of the reasons it never got anywhere. It would be have been an excellent version though. Loopz was the obvious game that never made it to market. Audiogenic I think was the publisher. The brief for that game was one of the best I'd worked from. I loved puzzle games but Atari once again didn't see that as their market. Power Factor (for which I've got 1 of 3 floppies) was a platform game wasn't it - was it ever released? We used PCs as our standard development platform so using an Amiga was alien to us. We used it for Awesome Golf but I'd learn/reverse engineered enough to allow me to write a loader/ROM emulator for our PC based development system with a parallel port bit of hardware. It was never fast - I remember 15 minute assembly times and the debugger was non-existent :-) I loved the Lynx hardware as it always reminded me of the Lynx. The supplied libraries were a bit variable and we tended to try and write it ourselves. Working on the Lynx naturally moved us onto the Jaguar. I remember when the hardware manual arrived in the post. A very powerful machine on paper. Unfortunately, Atari rushed it to market - it needed to go through a few more hardware revisions. Therefore, it was crippled, sadly. No - I don't work in the games industry anymore. I left HMS, spent a couple of years at Mirage and then six months at Sony Psygnosis in Chester. Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed myself from 18 to 32, my personal circumstances changed towards the end - met a girl and realised that there was more to life than coding. But I'm still coding but I've sold my soul and I work in the Windows world managing and developing Visual Basic NET applications for Windows and the web in the medical communications field. Windows and web programming often offends the bit twiddler in me :-) Cheers, Rob.

Speaking of which... are there instructions for the "real" BZ2K tucked away in your archives anywhere (I mean, more detailed ones than what you already released)? Is it even possible to win? Always blew my mind that the easter egg in that cart was bigger than and more elaborate than the actual game. Not from me sorry and the email address I have for Dave Ellel (the lead programmer) stopped working several years ago. The solid 3D game was never fully tested although as you can see, it was almost complete. Cheers, Rob.

Thanks :-) Awesome Golf was our first Lynx game. I still can't play golf but at the time, I understood the math pretty well. Cheers, Rob.

I seem to remember the frame rate was pretty reasonable. Helped by the hardware math function in the Lynx. It's been 10 years since I left the games industry (mainly around the time of the collapse of Atari and HMS) and the detailed memory is fading fast. I still have the Amiga and ST source code for Elite but very little for the Lynx. Both on 5.25" floppy disks which I have no way of obviously reading :-) I've got Disk 1 of 2 of Lynx Tennis and Disk 1 of 3 of Lynx Power Factor (I can't for the life of me remember that) which are pretty useless without the other discs. I did have some Lynx backup disks (as my house was the off-site backup) but they disappeared in a big sort out a few years ago. Elite would have been *easy* to complete for the Lynx - the 3D engine was the hardwork. But Atari just weren't interested. Ho hum. Cheers, Rob.

Quick note to say hello to everyone and thanks for still keeping the Lynx alive. It was always a lovely bit of kit. I worked at Hand Made Software through most of it's life (being one of the founding people) and worked on most of our Lynx games. I tended to work on the low-level libraries that we tried to use across our games with other talented programmers doing much of the important game play aspect. I think Awesome Golf and Beach Volleyball was entirely coded by me, although designed by Jim and Atari. It's been a while! The BZ 2000 non-solid 3D was one of the most amazing marketing decisions I've every come across Dave Ellel did most of the coding on that although I did a bit of the 3D engine stuff. Don't know if this was known but as I wrote the Amiga and ST conversions of Elite, I converted the core Elite 3D engine to the Lynx. It got as far as the spinning Cobra on the home page. I did it primarily to see if the Lynx was capable of solid 3D graphics. Anyway, got to fly. More later... Cheers, Rob (Nicholson)

Good morning, the said Rob Nicholson here You have just reminded me of days I spent getting the HMS ComLink driver working for Lynx games. More later... Cheers, Rob.