solidcorp

Atari Age is probably not the best venue for topic but I will answer your questions. SOLID Corp. is the name of my first corporation, which I still own and operate. SOLID Software, SOLID Technologies... were all divisions of SOLID Corp. Now I just use SOLID Corp. SOLID Corp. originally contracted with Accolade to work with the Genesis team to develop the SNES Bubsy. Accolade had reverse engineered the Genesis and was making the game unlicensed. Sega sued them and the courts injuncted the development of Bubsy on the Genesis, at that point the SNES became the lead SKU at SOLID Corp. After many months, an agreement was reached between Accolade and Sega and development could resume on the Genesis product but for whatever reason the team was unavailable. Accolade contracted SOLID Corp. (me) who in turn contracted Al Baker & Associates (Al Baker is a friend of mine) to assist in the port of the finished SNES Bubsy back to the Genesis. It was just the two of us and there was a tremendous amount of pressure to make up for the months the Genesis product was dormant. It only took 13 weeks start to finish for Al and me to complete Genesis Bubsy. I don't know. The Lynx has fantastic sound hardware - multichannel, multi-bit feedback registers, white noise, with a sound system that allowed you to make ADSR envelopes and instrument banks. There were tools to convert MIDI music to game music. All of that was used in Toki for example. I also wrote compressed digitized sound drivers and tools for the Lynx that were available to developers and a fully digitized sample music system. Digitized sound was used in RoadBlasters and the compressed digitized sound effects were used in S.T.U.N. Runner and Toki. The compression was a 4 bit delta compression. Where the 16 deltas were from a table that could contain any data. Usually powers of 2 were used, but we experimented with manual tables, the golden ratio, and the Fibonacci sequence. If I had stayed longer, the plan was to create the table to best match each sample itself. It ended up being similar in that regard to the Sony BRR sound format used by the SNES sound processor later. IDK, Maybe homebrews don't have access to the tools, or maybe they don't know musicians. Homebrew devs are typically programmers, and programmers are well known for not necessarily being the best artists and musicians (although I did all the art for S.T.U.N. Runner on the Lynx).

Tursi, Very interesting, nicely done. I see what you see. Now I want to try to get the source code off that old Amiga drive. (Don't hold your breath, I'm not holding mine)

The Lynx was just great tech*. What I mean is an Xbox360, PS3, or Wii is just a fancy computer until someone makes a Halo, Drakes Fortune, or Zelda for it. The Lynx suffered from too many coin op style games and ports and no truly GREAT games, no platform sellers. I don't think we (I want to say "they" but I was there too) understood the value of the killer app, even though titles like Super Mario Brothers (1985) and Zelda (1986) were already driving NES sales like crazy. The Lynx was also not distributed as well as the GameBoy. Nintendo got into all the retailers, and from what I remember Atari couldn't keep manufacturing up with demand. The result was that retailers made better deals with Nintendo than Atari and the vastly inferior** GameBoy "won". The marketing was also anemic. Anyway, that's my two cents on how the superior Lynx didn't come out on top. *Man those guys at Epyx were really technical geniouses, Dave Needle, RJ Michael, (both credited for the creation of the Amiga, and later 3DO) Stephen Landrum... they not only made the extraordinarily innovative platform, they wrote the best set of manuals, examples, and libraries I had seen to date. The development material blew anything Atari had done clean out of the water. ** I wrote BattleZone & Super Breakout on the GameBoy for THQ so I know exactly the features and shortcomings of both platforms. I think it's funny, that even when I wrote for the GameBoy, I was porting Atari games

Aw shucks! <blush> I was an Atari zealot since about 7th grade - I even wore an Atari windbreaker in high school. Maybe I shouldn't be so proud of that, heh. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I was a fan before it was a [dream] job, I'm still really into it which is why I made Star Castle for the 2600.

Yea, I was going to say that Whomper Stomper was the first game I played that used digitized sound but Rybags is right, the question is what pushed the A8 the hardest, and the real answer is I don't know. The later stuff out of Europe and modern demos really blow anything I used to play out of the water. It is interesting though that even though the 2600 and the A8 had the same CPU running at the same clockspeed (1/2 the color clock) and some very similar graphics hardware (players, balls, playfield, colors) that the 2600 tricks for duplicating players on a scan line weren't used to enhance A8 games. It's like once the display list was introduced everyone forgot they could write a tight 76 CPU cycle display line kernel.

I can't get at the original source code because my Amiga is borqued. I don't think there is a bug (programmers never do) but there may be, I'm not calling anyone a liar. Depending on how I represented angles in the tunnel, there may be an alignment or precision error that could skew the timings... for example like having the floor count the same as a low angle on the wall. If anyone is willing to play the game with any scientific rigor, I'd sure like to hear what people think... just remember that you're supposed to cling to the outside of the tunnel, opposite of normal steering, and like a pendulum, not too high. Thank you. (The great thing for me about doing a port is that the design is unambiguously done before you start. It's pure engineering.) I don't know that for sure, but they are still on my resume. I wasn't just a coder, I was the head of developer support for the Lynx too. I was responsible for helping all the Lynx developers and consequently had to know about every aspect of the platform. I also wrote tools and libraries, most notably the compressed digitized audio tools. As far as my career, I left Atari to found SOLID Corp. and the first game we did was Bubsy, Close Encounters of the Furred Kind on the SNES and Genesis. I'm sure that my work at Atari certainly helped me get that opportunity, and Bubsy was a title that seriously lofted my career. I've had many other successes since then but working for Atari and making the first Bubsy are what I consider my roots in the industry.

Tail of Beta Lyre ! - Full mode 7 (or 7+) bitmapped level graphics that were created algorithmically, totally new each time, totally fun until it made a tunnel the ship couldn't fit through but it was awesome. It was also the only game I can remember that ever combined the four 8 bit audio channels into two 16 bit audio channels for those smooooooth frequency sweeps with chorus in the final victory songs. I guess it didn't use every trick in the book, but it was up to 4 players and did some stuff unusually well. I also need to throw Synapse back in there with LucasArts and the rest again, they really used the hardware very well very early in the product's life cycle.

Yea, I think it was released. So, um, well, I don't think it's a very good game... It was my first project at Atari and I co-authored it with Ed Schneider who wrote Lynx TurboSub and RoboSquash and later was a co-founder of NuFX which became EA Chicago much later. Ed had a long list of games he had made on several platforms and I hadn't shipped a title yet. We were originally hired to write games for the Tomahawk. That was the name that Sega gave their new MegaDrive system for North America. From what I know, Atari VP Larry Siegel had been brokering a deal where I believe Atari would be the North American (possibly worldwide) distributor for the system and its games. Sega was looking for an "aggressive American" name for the console, that's what led to the name Tomahawk, but we didn't like it very much. We had an office contest to see who could come up with a better name, I think the prize was a steak dinner. Steve Ryno came up with the name Genesis, either "as the console that would redefine gaming", or after the effect in the Star Trek 2 movie, either way it stuck. The deal later fell through and I don't know if Steve ever got his prize, but that's is seriously how the Sega Genesis got its name. Anyway, I was getting ready to write games on the 68000 and when the deal fell through. The STe was in development and we were asked to make a game for it. I had done a lot of ST programming but had not written any complete games yet. I started with the technology and tools, making the tiled character graphics, sprite blitting, sound, input, etc. Ed guided me, told me what he needed, and wrote the AI code for all the enemies and their projectiles. Later I wrote the ship control, river currents, shooting and collision code. The STe had more advanced blitter and sound capabilities than the ST I recall. I also got the spectrum 512 kernel working for the 512 color title screen - not that it looked like it really was full color or anything, we were a new team and we were getting used to working with each other and the new tools. We kind of made it up as we went, I don't remember any concept art or even a design document. There were plans to port the game to the 2600, 7800, and 400/800/XL, but I don't think that ever happened. Is was a vertical scrolling shooter where you drove your ship/boat around on a river and shot at things that were on the shore while avoiding hazards in the river and things being thrown or shot at you from land. There were also river currents and powerups, but pretty basic stuff. I drew the first ship frames which looked like an egg painted to look like a Porsche 928. I also did all the HUD art, which looks terrible - which isn't so bad for "programmer art". I got the digitized sound drivers working early but we didn't have anyone to do the sound for a long time so the game was totally full of samples of all of us in the office saying words like "pow", "zoom" "pew", "bang", etc. I loved it that way, it cracked me up. The other thing I remember about working with Ed was that he was a chain smoker and we shared an office. I swear he ALWAYS had a cigarette and I NEVER saw him use a lighter. I swear he lit each one with the butt of the last. I don't smoke and I remember feeling sick when I left every day. I guess he was inhaling the good part of the cigarette, and I was breathing the part he didn't like . Bob Nagel, Craig Ericson and I chipped in and bought him a smokeless ash tray which was only marginally helpful. Unfortunately, decades of chain smoking ended up costing him his life only a few years later. Ed was my mentor at Atari, we traveled to Dusseldorf to show Whitewater Madness and the STe at an Atari trade show together, and we stayed in touch even after we both left the company. I still miss him. Before coming to Atari,Steve Ryno was a professional coin op video game player out of southern California who had competed all over the country and held several world records, most notably on what I think was his favorite game, 720. He always signed high score lists with the initials UKN for unknown, which you can see in the jewel of the crown of the thing looking at you on the title screen if you look carefully. Title and gameplay screenshots here: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-whitewater-madness_10837.html http://www.atarimania.de/detail_soft.php?MENU=S&VERSION_ID=10837 LGD (little green desktop) used to have the executable and it worked in STEAM. I see that LGD is now Atari.st.com and that site is apparently closed or locked up or something. Like I said, I have the original release master floppies somewhere but probably not the source code. IDK, I've been rambling a long while, and as much about the history of the people in the Atari Lombard IL, office as the Whitewater Madness game itself. Is there anything else you'd like to hear about it?

Wow, that explains a lot very clearly. I hadn't realized you are in Germany. I'm sorry, my comments were indeed from the limited perspective of someone completely immersed in US game culture (Think Flynn's arcade in the original TRON movie). Thanks for replying as thoroughly and nicely as you did. Oh, and thank you for your kind words regarding the titles I worked on too.

Pardon me for pointing this out, but if you were born in February 1981 as your profile says, then you'd have been six years old when RoadBlasters was released in 1987. That's pretty far "back in the day", you and presumably your friends were in first grade at the time which may explain your perspective (which is perfectly valid). Coin op was huge into the late 80's, arcade games like APB, Robotron, PacLand, Hydra, Shinobi, Joust, Xenophobe, RoadBlasters, S.T.U.N. Runner, Toki, ... were hot and you couldn't play anything like them at home. The Lynx with it's unlimited scalable color sprites and advanced sound was able to bring those games home at a quality never seen before - and it was a handheld!. There are still some games that even the Genesis and SNES still couldn't do and that was pretty exciting. Comparing coin op ports (which were originally designed to be 3 minute pay to play experiences) with the depth of a game like Super Mario Land made with almost unlimited resources at Nintendo by some of the most brilliant people ever to make video games is not exactly fair. I see where you are coming from and have to agree that the Lynx did not have any games, ports or original, that had that kind of depth and appeal, and that's a shame. Seriously, could you imagine a genuine Lynx Mario, Donkey Kong, or Metroid title? It would be astounding. [Tangent] Back at Atari, a few of us pointed out to Sam Tramiel that Atari didn't have a killer app or a well developed character like Mario, Donkey Kong, and the later Sonic, and Bonk. We tried to come up with something but all the ideas were all obvious and lame. Looking back, I think the development department was short sighted too, fixated on the quick return on coin op licenses and trying to make projects on smaller scales. After all, until then they had been making games for the 2600 & 7800 which, due to their limitations, despite the difficulty in making a title, were small scale short term low budget developments. There was no one I recall having a grander vision for a license, or a desire to revolutionize game-play, or a strong desire to tell a story through a game. It was a great place to work at an exciting time, but looking back now with 20 years of game development experience I see so many ways we could have made it better.

I co-wrote Whitewater Madness with Ed Schneider. It was the first game I worked on at Atari. It was STe only. I think it had a silver box, maybe it was grey. I still have the master disk of the game.

Oh yea, definitely add AR!!!!

Topping my list would have to be Rescue at Fractalus with its realtime 3d fractal landscape and almost entirely bitmapped graphics. It had awesome sound too. BallBlazer, excellent use of all of the hardware available, custom display lists, multiscale players, individual line playfield scrolling and colorchanges... all to deliver a really awesome smooth gameplay experience. Star Raiders, while not terribly complicated for its use of the hardware was one of the first games available and did make excellent use of most of the features listed above to, again, deliver a deep, smooth, space combat experience. Eastern Front and other similar strategy games that came later may not have looked all that great but the AI was truly ahead of its time and monopolized the CPU for long periods of time. Just about all Synapse games made great use of the character sets, graphics modes, and players, also an early game company. Canyon Climber, Slime, Shamus, Necromancer, Drelbs, Claim Jumper, Quasimodo... The Jawbreaker PacMan clones and Droll and made the best use of CTIA aliasing to combine high resolution (mode graphics with color, usually black, white, pink and green due to the pixels being half a color clock wide. I liked Preppie and Preppie II Frogger clones much better than Chicken, it seemed to rely less on player graphics and actually animated color playfield graphics in mode 7+ in scrolling bands which led to higher quality more expressive and colorful graphics in a funnier game. Music and sound is often overlooked in these technical discussions, my favorites would have to be Boulderdash, Rescue at Fractalus, Droll, Necromancer, and M.U.L.E.

I've noticed this about S.T.U.N. Runner too! No wonder I can only make it about 3 levels into the game, you actually slow way down when you ride the walls. Graphically and audibly this game is an astounding port of the arcade game though. The gameplay is ass backwards however lol. Well, um, I did the game like 20 years ago (1990-1991?). I still have the source code, sort of... The Amiga 3000's battery leaked in storage and ruined its motherboard. The hard disk *might* still work, I did just recover all my old ST files last year from 25 year old Supra and Mega drives. I also have the Amiga floppy disk backups somewhere and *might* be able to restore them *if* I can find a floppy drive and the right software. Anyway, I thought you would complain about the aiming of the gun first. It's really hard to port a dual analog control input scheme to the four switches in a D-pad. As far as speed is concerned, there is (or at least should be) a sweet spot, or what is now in racing games called a blue line, an optimal path through the levels. In stun runners tubes it would be on the outside, where a pendulum would swing if you were truly racing around the corners. The stars in the first levels are placed on that line to train you where you should be on the track for maximum speed. In the flat areas only the walls slow you down, and I don't think anything slows you down while boosting. The problem you *may* be having with S.T.U.N. Runner (if there is not a bug) is that the controls are touchy and you really can be harshly penalized for climbing too high up the walls. I put a lot of work into the centrifugal sweet spot aspect, if I didn't then the star placement painstakingly reproduced from the coin op wouldn't work.

Thank you so much, those were great years. I am credited in RoadBlasters, and Toki which I wrote at Atari and I also programmed and did all the art for S.T.U.N. Runner under contract. I'm not credited in S.T.U.N. Runner, there are no credits. I was also the head of developer support for the LYNX. Since then I've had two software companies, SOLID Corp. where I made the first Bubsy among other things, and Inland Productions who had multiple million sellers. I've been luckier than I deserve and I'm still making games. I'm currently the head of the Advanced Technology Group at High Voltage Software who aside from a mountain of excellent licensed products made the Conduit for the Wii. Oh, and I also just made Star Castle for the 2600.

Thanks man, I wrote that one too. RoadBlasters was the first game I did start to finish on my own. I had the coin op right next to my desk at Atari in Lombard IL. There are a couple things I would change about it now but it turned out great. Look up the Easter eggs if you can. If I remember correctly if you hold down A or B or both and drive into the first tree on the right or left of the first level you will see my or Matt Scott's picture and will be able to warp to any level except the last one. We took some liberties with the end of game music too; as I recall, there wasn't any fanfare at the end in the coin op so Matt Whipped out a grand finale theme that turned out really cool. My favorite thing I learned about the coin op from the source code was that the fuel economy (rate of fuel consumption) got worse and worse constantly, only depositing a quarter would fix it - you didn't have to continue or even die, just put in a quarter. There is even a comment in the code that says something like "this is where we embezzle money from the player". I laughed out loud literally and showed everyone in the office when I found that one.

Thanks a lot, I programmed and did all the artwork for it, Matt Scott (who later started Byte Size sound) did the sound and music. It was the first project I did as an independent developer. I poured over the original source code and multiple times a day I'd played the coin op beginning to end. I had to keep the coin op in my garage due to its size which wouldn't have been too bad except it was FREEZING! I remember seeing my breath and the screen would fog up from time to time. I worked hard on that game, funny thing though is my favorite part about it I didn't do - it's that opening chord on the title screen. I couldn't believe when Matt reproduced the coin op sound PERFECTLY without having to digitize the sound. Anyway, thanks again.

Shanghai was a Mahjong game [the first one I got addicted to as a matter of fact] and not based on any coin op as far as I know. Turbo Sub was definitely not an arcade port. Ed Schneider worked on that at Atari with Steve Ryno (designer) , Craig Ericson (producer) Bob Nagel (Artist), Rob Mariani(Aritist) while I was working on Toki. I don't recall if that was the EXACT team but they all were there and I *think* they worked on it.

Of course.

The cartridge I designed for Star Castle can handle up to 64K ROMS in 16 banks of 4k. Since Star Castle is only an 8K game in keeping with the technology on the market in 1981 I had two extra address output lines free. In the Star Castle cartridge I use a PLD (GAL22V10) to watch the cartridge ROM address lines and when certain addresses come up, internal operations are triggered just like other bank switching themes. If you can latch extra address lines for larger EPROMS, you can drive LEDs... and pretty much anything else.

Which ports did you like and why?

Did this article ever get published? I never got a chance to see it. D. Scott Williamson

I also fall into this camp, I will NOT pay for this game if/when it is released as a cart. Nothing personal, I assure you. I really hope no one purchases your version of Star Castle . It would set a bad example for other homebrew developers. Lock this thread already!. That is your prerogative, you can still even download it if it ever gets released. I don't understand the desire to lock this thread, is it simply because you don't like it? There is no trademark on Star Castle screens, marquee, cabinet art, flyers, or service manuals. What do you mean by "bad example"?

Thanks a lot man. I had a lot of 68000/6502 experience with the ST & 400/800 and was hired to work on the Sega MegaDrive. Atari was in negotiations with Sega to buy the platform or the rights to develop software for it, I don't remember. At the time it was called the Tomahawk, a name none of us liked. We had an office pool to name the next generation platform, and professional coin op game player turned producer/designer Steve Ryno won with the name Genesis. I think he won a steak dinner, the deal obviously fell through, but somehow the name stuck. I worked on the STe, Falcon, digitized sound compression tools and drivers for the 2600, 7800, 400/800/XE before the Epyx Lynx was acquired by Atari. After the Lynx, they started a platform called the Panther which was like a more powerful 7800/XE with display lists and no frame buffer. It was eventually replaced with the Jaguar, but by that point I had decided to leave Atari to start SOLID Corp. SOLID's first game was Bubsy for SNES and Genesis... but this isn't a Nintendo or Sega forum so the story will have to stop there. Those were good times - I really dig deep into coin op conversions and feel they should represent the coin ops 100%, no more no less. I even installed a switch on the motherboard of Toki that would pause the processor and if you were lucky, you could unpause it. The author of Ninja Gaiden, Lou Haen, a game developer veteran at the time, later founded NuFX which after a long run of successful EA sports titles was bought by EA and eventually brought us the Fight Night franchise. My good friend Joel Seider wrote Pac Land, later helped me write SNES Bubsy, and eventually became a VP at Midway I think.