(Re)release of Football Fantasies (Football Management game)

[snicklin]

Hi Atari Fans,

Well, after several years I have managed to track down a copy of my old game "Football Fantasies". It's been sat in the Dean Garraghty PD collection all this time and now I would like a wider audience to see it.

 

There's two ATR files here, one for either side of the disk. They must remain R/W'able as the game writes to the disk constantly. I'm using 'Atari800win' to play the game. Please note that the digitised speech comes out a lot slower than on a real Atari (I programmed/tested it on a 65XE). I've had a quick try of it with Altirra and it doesn't appear to work. (Garbled graphics and an 'Unimplemented Command' error).

 

Please note, it was my first real attempt at a game which took me a year to write. I can see that there's things that need working on, for a start, the "Steven Nicklin's Fantasies" screen really should go!!! It's nothing compared to the modern management games, but it had more to it than other games that used to be available for the Atari.

 

Rough overview of game:

Football management game from the English Premier League of 1995/1996

Uses tables of real footballers names (unlike Football Manager which uses the same few players no matter which team you select)

It was inspired by the Championship Manager games and Premier Manager on the ST

... heavily disk reliant!!

and plenty more....

 

There's a few missing features, i.e. another league, cup competitions etc. It was rather restricted due to the lack of disk space on the 1st disk. I wanted a game whereby in the main section of the game, you were not flipping disks all the time.

 

Oh well, take a look anyway, I may be prepared to work on an updated version with bug fixes.

FootballFantasies.zip

Edited February 11, 2010 by snicklin

[carmel_andrews]

Strange, this one isn't mentioned on his PD catalogue (mind you it is 1993)

[snicklin]

Strange, this one isn't mentioned on his PD catalogue (mind you it is 1993)

 

Hi Carmel,

It is #185 of his PD collection, I released the game by going to the Staffordshire County Showground. There's a video of me in my scruffy student days which he has!

 

Steve

[carmel_andrews]

Obviously didn't make my catslogue...only goes upto 160 odd

 

I think you mean the AMS shows (Stafford), I saw Dean, Mark (wrathchild) Twaug and others there (I sort of knew the people behind Bapaug, as we kept bumping into eachother at thew various atari shows)...makes me cry now, because I remember people walking out of there with literally armfuls of 1050's

[snicklin]

Obviously didn't make my catslogue...only goes upto 160 odd

 

I think you mean the AMS shows (Stafford), I saw Dean, Mark (wrathchild) Twaug and others there (I sort of knew the people behind Bapaug, as we kept bumping into eachother at thew various atari shows)...makes me cry now, because I remember people walking out of there with literally armfuls of 1050's

 

That's it, the AMS shows. I went to a couple of these as I attended the University just down the road from there. I remember a man from TWAUG. He was an elder gentleman, shortish and with a big tummy. He always had a smile on his face and always appeared drunk! He gave me a massive box of Atari cassettes for free as he said that it was better that I have them than him having to carry them back in the back of his car!

 

I think that those were the days inbetween Atari being new and Atari becoming fashionably retro - which was great at the time because everything was so cheap!

[AB Positive]

... I don't know why but I first assumed this was a Handegg management game. Alas. I'd love an 8-bit handegg game

[snicklin]

... I don't know why but I first assumed this was a Handegg management game. Alas. I'd love an 8-bit handegg game

 

I had to look up the definition of "hand egg", I thought that it was a euphemism for something else!!

 

Oh, by the way, with the game, if you have an SIO patch in place, you may see some screens whizzing by too quickly. I relied on the slowness of the disk to give reasonable times to read some text!

Edited February 11, 2010 by snicklin

[Bob The Bug]

That's it, the AMS shows. I went to a couple of these as I attended the University just down the road from there. I remember a man from TWAUG. He was an elder gentleman, shortish and with a big tummy. He always had a smile on his face and always appeared drunk! He gave me a massive box of Atari cassettes for free as he said that it was better that I have them than him having to carry them back in the back of his car!

 

I think that those were the days inbetween Atari being new and Atari becoming fashionably retro - which was great at the time because everything was so cheap!

 

Hey Steve, I've just been reading about your old football game (which I am about to download) when I found the above...

 

I wonder if the guy from TWAUG who gave you the box of tapes was Dave Ewans? It was Dave who bought all my Atari gear from me when I had a lapse of judgement around 1992 and upgraded to an Amiga...

I'm afraid Dave died of a heart attack many years ago. I never actually got to meet him but I had many conversations with him on the phone. There was always plenty of laughter with Dave!

[snicklin]

 

Hey Steve, I've just been reading about your old football game (which I am about to download) when I found the above...

 

I wonder if the guy from TWAUG who gave you the box of tapes was Dave Ewans? It was Dave who bought all my Atari gear from me when I had a lapse of judgement around 1992 and upgraded to an Amiga...

I'm afraid Dave died of a heart attack many years ago. I never actually got to meet him but I had many conversations with him on the phone. There was always plenty of laughter with Dave!

 

Hi Bob,

 

I wouldn't bother downloading the game. Something has happened to it and it doesn't seem to work now, it crashes when it shouldn't. It didn't do that back in the day though. I did start on a fix of the game but I haven't worked on it for a while.

 

As for Dave, I am not sure. It was a big box of tapes and there were duplicate tapes in there, so I suspect that they come from a dealer rather than an individual. I unfortunately binned them in the early 2000s as my Mother wanted space back in her house.

 

He was definitely a humourous bloke, at least the one that I spoke to.

[Fred_M]

I remember Dave very well! Together with ANG Software I went to the AMS 3 times. Every evening before the AMS we met the guys from TWAUG in the bar. And yes, we drinked quite a lot

 

Funny to read that Dave gave lots of cassettes away to several people. I was also one of the lucky people who received loads of cassettes for free, they are still in my collection. My memories of Dean Garraghty are not so good. I received several letters from him when I reviewed some of his commercial games in the Dutch Pokey Magazine and the UK TWAUG magazine. Those games weren't very good and I wrote that. He threatened me with lawyers...

 

But Dave and TWAUG: happy memories with lots of Coke and Bacardi "the Dutch way" :-)

[Guest]

Steve

I've finally got some time to give this a proper workout

 

does it have an team editor?

[snicklin]

Steve

I've finally got some time to give this a proper workout

 

does it have an team editor?

 

Just be aware that it has some issues which you'll find. They're mainly around having issues if the disk can't be written to. [ It'd be best to try it on real disks ]

 

No, there's not a team editor, if you're referring to being able to amend the players names and so forth. There are two options, either have real names of players or you have a random mix of names.

 

I've got a little project going to "harden" the program and do some slight updates.

Edited March 24, 2016 by snicklin

[baz67]

Steve,

 

Hi there - 8Bit Baz - one of Brenski's pals over at atari.boards.net

 

We're currently reviewing your 'incredible' footie management simulation (indeed, it might well be the best of its kind in the Atari 8 bit world - it's more akin to titles released on the Amiga/ST/PC equivalents that came out around that time - ie. Championship Manager - and would literally take days in realtime to play a season, weeks to get promotion and months to get your team into Europe etc etc - your program has that 'large database' feel).

 

One obvious point is the amount of disk access - it can take anything between 30-60 secs sometimes after making menu selections - and that can happen 3-4 times before playing a match - have you been able to do anything at all to reduce this/use banked memory in the case of the 130XE?

 

Another feature I'm looking for (just 5 games in - it's begining to hook me: Pld 5, L3 W2 as Man Utd... where's the save game option, fella?!

 

PLEASE don't tell me it only appears at the end of a season as it's taken me over an hour to get this far and I assume there'll be 38 fixtures to play....??!

 

Steve - it's a great Turbo Basic simulation game and I love the nostalgia buzz generated by the player database from just a couple of decades ago... when the Premiership was still a newly born league.

 

A full review of the game will appear soon - please do come over and join us at our forum as you'll be made extremely welcome.

 

Cheers, fella.

8BB

[snicklin]

Steve,

 

Hi there - 8Bit Baz - one of Brenski's pals over at atari.boards.net

 

We're currently reviewing your 'incredible' footie management simulation (indeed, it might well be the best of its kind in the Atari 8 bit world - it's more akin to titles released on the Amiga/ST/PC equivalents that came out around that time - ie. Championship Manager - and would literally take days in realtime to play a season, weeks to get promotion and months to get your team into Europe etc etc - your program has that 'large database' feel).

 

One obvious point is the amount of disk access - it can take anything between 30-60 secs sometimes after making menu selections - and that can happen 3-4 times before playing a match - have you been able to do anything at all to reduce this/use banked memory in the case of the 130XE?

 

Another feature I'm looking for (just 5 games in - it's begining to hook me: Pld 5, L3 W2 as Man Utd... where's the save game option, fella?!

 

PLEASE don't tell me it only appears at the end of a season as it's taken me over an hour to get this far and I assume there'll be 38 fixtures to play....??!

 

Steve - it's a great Turbo Basic simulation game and I love the nostalgia buzz generated by the player database from just a couple of decades ago... when the Premiership was still a newly born league.

 

A full review of the game will appear soon - please do come over and join us at our forum as you'll be made extremely welcome.

 

Cheers, fella.

8BB

 

Hi 8BB,

 

I'm glad to see that you're playing it, I never really got any feedback back in the day when it was created.

 

Yes, disk access is a big issue with the game. I was trying to do all the game in one load originally when I first created it. The problem was that with all the data and trying to run the program, I quickly ran out of space in Turbo Basic before a lot of the features were implemented. Therefore I had to break it all up into parts and just had to accept the disk access. The way that I looked at it was there was a lot in the Championship Manager games at the time and said that if the "progression pace" of the season was roughly the same then this would have to do.

 

As for the save game feature, it is built in. I probably didn't explain it well enough in the game. I was low on disk space. If you get yourself back to the main menu, all of your game has been saved at this point. If you re-start the game, it'll carry on from where you left off.

 

There's a lot of things that I would change about the game if I was to do it again. I have a plan in my head....

1) Toughen up the game for the modern environment (different set-ups and emulators) and re-release. The constant disk saving causes problems when trying to save to Read only disks. I'd also eliminate any other obvious bugs / game flaws, some of which I've seen since re-looking at the game.

2) Write a new version of the game. Now I do not know when this will be done because I have too many projects on the go in real life, PC/Android development and for the Atari.

--> I've worked out that it would be best to write a new version for a 128K setup.

--> I've started to write a database driver. The database will work from disk and the driver is minimal, <1K in size. This needs completing first.

--> I have lots of ideas for game improvements. With storage options that there are now, it could be massively expanded. I don't really understand cartridge programming yet though. I have the idea of having lots of data on cartridge with saving to disk (or cartridge if a modern solution allows).

--> I'd like it so that new data could be downloaded from a web-site whenever players want an update.

 

You pointed out that you're losing a lot as Manchester United. I'd like to point the overly simplistic algorithm for decided your game result. I wasn't too sure how to implement the solution so I went for something easy and it goes like this if memory serves me right:

* Goals occur at random times within the game and then the game tries to work out which team should have it. Each team has a "points" value assigned to them. That is made from the abilities somehow mixed with the fitness values (I think!) and all added up. Lets say that Manchester United are playing Leeds United. If Manchester United have 500 points and Leeds have 500 points, you have a 50/50 chance of being awarded the goal. If it was 900 points to 100 points, you'd have a 9 in 10 chance of being awarded the goal.

 

Such an algorithm has its limitations. You could end up with a 0-0 just because no goal chances have come up.

 

I believe I am a member already, it's just not a board that I go to very often. I'll come on over and take a look.

 

There's a bit of what is almost gloating (though it wasn't gloating, just can't think of the right word) in the original game about how good it was. I was happy because I'd used real player names (though not their abilities) which no other game had done at the time. I thought that it was bug free at the time.

 

Going back to what I'd do with another version....

--> I'd like to dynamically load in code from cartridge. I'd then have lots of mini-programs running, swapping one in for another. So the main game playing feature would be loaded in when wanted and then the player selling routine would load in dynamically when required. This would be very quick off cartridge or extended RAM.

--> One feature that would be improved is that I'd work out which areas of the field that each team are strong in. So a strong midfielder stood next to a weak midfielder would average off in that area as an average strength. This is what most modern games use.

--> I'd rewrite it in Assembly so that speed can be applied. This will allow a new dimension to the game.

--> The main game could be simulated just using the time in the VBI. In the main code, I could have it processing other games results in order to speed up the game flow.

 

Just remember, the new version is just a dream at the moment. I have it all planned out in my head, but whether I can actually implement it is another question.

 

My inspiration for the game was Championship Manager. I had to compromise in many areas in order to get it running on an 8-bit. I never could get it to match the 16/32-bit experience but felt I'd given it a reasonable go within the limitations that I had, and with the language choice. I felt frustrated that whichever team that I chose on other 8-bit management games, I always ended up with the same players. I'd done some calculations in my head and worked out that I could fit a lot more players onto disk than the other games had used.

 

[ EDIT: I wasn't a member of the other board after all, I've now signed up ]

Edited March 29, 2016 by snicklin

[baz67]

Evening/Morning, Steve.

 

It's incredulous you never got any feedback 'back in the day' as this is a really impressive feat now - let alone back then, when it should have blown the socks off ANY serious footie Atari fan playing it - it's streets ahead of ANY other sim I can think of, eg. Addictive's slow/predictable Football Manager and Atlantis' meagre League Challenge (nice try with the 3D graphics 'match action' attempt but the rest is poorly implemented). Am I right thinking this was your FIRST serious effort at Turbo Basic programming? Really, if there was any justice in the software world, your program should have been a commercial release and successfully sold by the bucketload - it is that good.

 

I appreciate your detailed reply - lots of points there and I'm looking forward, as I say, to making a really comprehensive review of the game for our forum members - it's certainly going to be highly recommended. I now know why the disk access is so 'comprehensive' as game saving occurs after all the match results are in, yes? Fair enough!

 

Here are my 5 areas where I really rate and enjoy the game so far:

 

1) The humour is spot on - I like the bribery option in the ground improvements dept and also the comments made by the computer when bidding for other teams' stars!

2) I really like the way the program logs player ratings and goals scored - I've now got Ryan Giggs on 10 goals and Utd are about 6th in the table presently after played 9, won 4 lost 5...lol.

3) I enjoy the match 'ticker/timer' and GOAL scored messages which do the job and are not over-excessive and are at times thrilling when a come back is on (we beat Leeds 3-2 after being 2-0 down!)

4) I really like the team line-ups and formations - graphically shown - which I've never seen in ANY 8bit implementation of any soccer manager program.

5) I was also impressed at the speed that the league table is generated and displayed - this is a major 'ball-ache' on 1-2 of your rival offerings (I think you can make a pot of tea while Football Manager goes about putting the table together!?)

 

Aiming to be constructively critical, Steve, here are the 4 areas where I personally think tweaks/edits would really further enhance the playability experience:

 

1) The player buying procedure crashes if you input a non-numeric value - Error 6 I think at line 250, if memory serves me right. I just typed GOTO 250 and it continues fine and THEN prompts you to input a negative value if you want to come out of the bidding process - I was going nowhere trying to 'steal' Chelsea's best player for £1m - again, I love the humour/responses from the program!

2) Presently, as you know, there's no option to review your formation/team/tactics at half-time - Blackbollocks/Blackburn were thrashing me 4-0 at the break and I would have loved to have gone to 4-2-4 to try and get a fightback on!

3) Again, no option for a sub - Lee Sharpe was playing like he was on 'wacky backy'... and probably was!

4) The random value generated for the attendances seems a little on the low side, Steve - the RND function seems to pluck values inbetween 5 and 8K - I would've thought 30-50K for Prem games might be a bit more accurate but perhaps you're trying to reflect the 'early days' factor in an individual manager's regime, yes, ie. these increase as your success/fame hopefully goes in the same direction?!

 

Steve, once more, hats off to you - it's a great achievement and really does 'feel like it belongs on a higher spec machine' - no greater tribute can really be given as you've shown that through imaginative and quality coding, amazing results can be obtained from the Atari 8bit classic - all power to your elbow, fella - I wish you all the best with all your future endeavours (that cartridge data idea sounds fabulous - good luck!).

 

Cheers and speak soon,

ANDY BAZ (8BB)

[Bikerbob]

I am looking forward to trying this myself. I will have to get my sio2pc up and running.. then I guess to get it working best - copy it back to floppy.

 

I am a huge FM player and I did play Champion Manager back as far as 96.

 

James

[snicklin]

Evening/Morning, Steve.

 

It's incredulous you never got any feedback 'back in the day' as this is a really impressive feat now - let alone back then, when it should have blown the socks off ANY serious footie Atari fan playing it - it's streets ahead of ANY other sim I can think of, eg. Addictive's slow/predictable Football Manager and Atlantis' meagre League Challenge (nice try with the 3D graphics 'match action' attempt but the rest is poorly implemented). Am I right thinking this was your FIRST serious effort at Turbo Basic programming? Really, if there was any justice in the software world, your program should have been a commercial release and successfully sold by the bucketload - it is that good.

 

I appreciate your detailed reply - lots of points there and I'm looking forward, as I say, to making a really comprehensive review of the game for our forum members - it's certainly going to be highly recommended. I now know why the disk access is so 'comprehensive' as game saving occurs after all the match results are in, yes? Fair enough!

 

Here are my 5 areas where I really rate and enjoy the game so far:

 

1) The humour is spot on - I like the bribery option in the ground improvements dept and also the comments made by the computer when bidding for other teams' stars!

2) I really like the way the program logs player ratings and goals scored - I've now got Ryan Giggs on 10 goals and Utd are about 6th in the table presently after played 9, won 4 lost 5...lol.

3) I enjoy the match 'ticker/timer' and GOAL scored messages which do the job and are not over-excessive and are at times thrilling when a come back is on (we beat Leeds 3-2 after being 2-0 down!)

4) I really like the team line-ups and formations - graphically shown - which I've never seen in ANY 8bit implementation of any soccer manager program.

5) I was also impressed at the speed that the league table is generated and displayed - this is a major 'ball-ache' on 1-2 of your rival offerings (I think you can make a pot of tea while Football Manager goes about putting the table together!?)

 

Aiming to be constructively critical, Steve, here are the 4 areas where I personally think tweaks/edits would really further enhance the playability experience:

 

1) The player buying procedure crashes if you input a non-numeric value - Error 6 I think at line 250, if memory serves me right. I just typed GOTO 250 and it continues fine and THEN prompts you to input a negative value if you want to come out of the bidding process - I was going nowhere trying to 'steal' Chelsea's best player for £1m - again, I love the humour/responses from the program!

2) Presently, as you know, there's no option to review your formation/team/tactics at half-time - Blackbollocks/Blackburn were thrashing me 4-0 at the break and I would have loved to have gone to 4-2-4 to try and get a fightback on!

3) Again, no option for a sub - Lee Sharpe was playing like he was on 'wacky backy'... and probably was!

4) The random value generated for the attendances seems a little on the low side, Steve - the RND function seems to pluck values inbetween 5 and 8K - I would've thought 30-50K for Prem games might be a bit more accurate but perhaps you're trying to reflect the 'early days' factor in an individual manager's regime, yes, ie. these increase as your success/fame hopefully goes in the same direction?!

 

Steve, once more, hats off to you - it's a great achievement and really does 'feel like it belongs on a higher spec machine' - no greater tribute can really be given as you've shown that through imaginative and quality coding, amazing results can be obtained from the Atari 8bit classic - all power to your elbow, fella - I wish you all the best with all your future endeavours (that cartridge data idea sounds fabulous - good luck!).

 

Cheers and speak soon,

ANDY BAZ (8BB)

 

Hi Andy,

 

Well thank you for your great comments and some constructive feedback there.

 

No, I didn't get any feedback other than "it sold a few". I didn't put any email address into the game, nor my home address.

 

As for the humour, that was important for me. I didn't want it to be boring, so I added what I could. Though I seem to remember stripping a load of it out to save space. My memory isn't the finest though, so maybe I didn't!

 

I wanted it to remember numbers of goals scored because this is what people track for their own players in real teams. I thought that you should be able to do what you do in real life there.

 

As for the ticker/timer, I toyed with a lot of ideas there. On an earlier prototype of the game I had it coming up with text like "Lee Sharpe takes a shot", "But he misses". I got a bit bored of mapping out all the combinations and never thought that I could achieve the number of text combinations which would make it feel real, so I went with the idea of being told that a goal has been scored but you don't know which team straight away.

 

The graphical line ups was quite simple to implement though I thought it was good to get in. I think I totted up the number of players in D/M/A and then did a calculation of where the circles should be placed.

 

I seem to remember spending a bit of time working on the league table, I'm glad it is quick. I guess the "Turbo" in the language name helped.

 

As for the player buying crash, darn! I went through trying to toughen up a lot of routines but I always knew there'd be somewhere that I'd forgot.

 

As for changing the team mid-game, I didn't have enough disk space to implement that. If I'd re-used a load of code from elsewhere, it would have required a big rewrite, so I left it out.

 

Subs were also out of the question for the same reason.

 

Yep, the attendances are way off, I spotted that recently too. That needs some work.

 

Disk space as well as memory are low in the original version. Major improvements based on the current game are not possible due to this.

 

Yes, this was my first major attempt at any game. I didn't get a disk drive until perhaps late 1994. I'd got hold of Turbo Basic and thought, "Hmm, I could use the great binary load functionality to good effect". Still to this day, this is the only game that I've ever released. Thanks for the comments that it is streets ahead of other sims and that it belongs on a higher spec computer. It's amazing to be getting this feedback so many years later.

 

As I mentioned on the other board and here, I think that there is a lot of potential for major, major improvements to the game with a rewrite. That rewrite needs to be based around some good database handling code and needs to be able to work from memory as well as disk/cartridge. As the original game was designed for 64K machines, 128K (plus storage) could be very useful.

[snicklin]

I am looking forward to trying this myself. I will have to get my sio2pc up and running.. then I guess to get it working best - copy it back to floppy.

 

I am a huge FM player and I did play Champion Manager back as far as 96.

 

James

 

I hope that you enjoy it! Just make sure that the disk is read/write. The game isn't perfect mind, but it does have quite a few features unavailable elsewhere.

 

I guess that you may like trying this: http://playdosgamesonline.com/championship-manager-93-94.html

 

That Champ Man (or a similar version) was the inspiration for the game. Note that there is a bug in the online version which can hang games (which effectively kills your whole career in the game as it can't save progress for latter use).

[snicklin]

With regards to attendances, it could be due to the stadium being smaller when you first start. You have to build it up. I'll investigate some time.

[baz67]

Brilliant, guys.

 

I was telling our lass that it's taken TWENTY YEARS for your work to be at long last appreciated, Steve!

Mind, some people spend a lifetime and never find any modicum of fame...until they're 6ft under, in some cases, so at least you've avoided that accolade!

 

Yeah, I'm loving the comments and ways forward which will hopefully inspire a few other guys on here& on Atari Sector to come forward and say - hey, I can help there with that module - or design/scan in the club badges etc etc.

 

It's been absolutely years since I last did any coding - and I never completed my one and only attempt at a game in Turbo Basic (Brenski has a WIP copy of my 2 player Dogfight creation but it's barely 'off the ground', excuse the pun!)

 

However, I will assist in any small way possible as I believe that a project like this can definitely help to inject fresh life back in to our hobbies and make them REAL and CURRENT experiences once more.

 

Cheers, Steve - have a good day, fellas.

 

Catch you all later - BTW, I was SACKED this morning as manager of MAN UNITED after suffering the pain of FIVE STRAIGHT DEFEATS - I like the way the program also reminds you of your losing streaks!! Nice. Review to follow - United we stand...LOL!

 

8BB

[snicklin]

Brilliant, guys.

 

I was telling our lass that it's taken TWENTY YEARS for your work to be at long last appreciated, Steve!

Mind, some people spend a lifetime and never find any modicum of fame...until they're 6ft under, in some cases, so at least you've avoided that accolade!

 

Yeah, I'm loving the comments and ways forward which will hopefully inspire a few other guys on here& on Atari Sector to come forward and say - hey, I can help there with that module - or design/scan in the club badges etc etc.

 

It's been absolutely years since I last did any coding - and I never completed my one and only attempt at a game in Turbo Basic (Brenski has a WIP copy of my 2 player Dogfight creation but it's barely 'off the ground', excuse the pun!)

 

However, I will assist in any small way possible as I believe that a project like this can definitely help to inject fresh life back in to our hobbies and make them REAL and CURRENT experiences once more.

 

Cheers, Steve - have a good day, fellas.

 

Catch you all later - BTW, I was SACKED this morning as manager of MAN UNITED after suffering the pain of FIVE STRAIGHT DEFEATS - I like the way the program also reminds you of your losing streaks!! Nice. Review to follow - United we stand...LOL!

 

8BB

 

This is really good of you to give me all this nice feedback now.

 

Do you know what, I do not remember coding it so that it would sack you after 5 straight defeats. Was it the end of the season? If I remember rightly, if you were in a relegation spot it would sack you irrespective of your team. This was only to cover up the fact that there is only league running in the game!

 

Don't worry anyway, you're probably doing better than Van Gaal.

[snicklin]

You've also mentioned about it possibly being a commercial release. At the time it was late in 1996 and nothing was commercial anymore for the Atari and so I gave up that idea due to this. If I'd done it 5 to 10 years beforehand then possibly I could have got away with that.

 

I also knew at the time that I hadn't got enough testing done. I did everything that I thought that I could but wanted someone else to help. I didn't really know any Atari people at that stage as everyone had moved onto other platforms. I'd also just started to use a PC at the release date and had my first year of university to think about.

 

Strangely enough, I chose to go to Staffordshire University. One of the reasons for choosing there was that it was just down the road from the County Showground where I released the game in the end. This reminds me that I must have also gone to AMS '95.

[snicklin]

http://atari.boards.net/thread/394/football-fantasies-feedback-testing-required?page=1&scrollTo=3021

 

Football Fantasies - 20th Anniversary Edition - Beta 1

 

I know there's still some reported bugs in there, but I've done some updates today and would like to release these to anyone who would like to do some testing.

 

If you report any new bugs (but not missing features as it has a million missing compared to modern games), then I'll add your name into the game.

[snicklin]

Critical fixes to Beta 1 (and 2) now implemented.

 

You can find Beta 3 here: http://atari.boards.net/thread/394/football-fantasies-feedback-testing-required?page=1&scrollTo=3024

Edited March 31, 2016 by snicklin

[snicklin]

Critical fixes to Beta 1 (and 2) now implemented.

 

You can find Beta 3 here: http://atari.boards.net/thread/394/football-fantasies-feedback-testing-required?page=1&scrollTo=3024

 

Ongoing work on Beta 4 (not released yet)... just for your info....

 

Beta 4 Updates:

 

Significant updates:

* Moved Turbo Basic to disk 2 to free up space for future extensions.

* Reduced the number of goals scored in player games as they were excessive. (2.5 goals per game average now)

* Increased importance of goalkeeper abilities.

* Increased accuracy of choosing goal scoring team.

* Team strength statistics shown before game.

* Added 20% home advantage.

* Games with teams of more differing abilities bring about more goals.

* Fixed bug where if a player from your team is sold and enters the last position in another squad, they will play

12 players against your 11.

* Added half time score details to main game screen.

 

Minor updates:

* A few optimisations to top scorers sorting routine.

* A couple of optimisations to top scorers data loading routine.

* Optimisation of top scorers sorting percentage display routine.

* Minor amendment to top scorers screen output format.

* Optimisation to league table display routine

* Speeded up game simulation by 20% by reduced pausing.

* Optimised team selection display routine.

* Increased Fergy time to a maximum of 4 minutes.

 

Known Bugs / Gameplay issues:

* Injured players can play the next game.

* Player can be in opposition team twice.

* When a bought player enters the squad, they inherit the average play scores from the previous player.

* Player can buy and sell excessively to create a great team too easily.

* Attendance doesn't seem to reflect stadium capacity.

* Player price offer jumped in a strange way:

Leeds Utd offer 1841765

 

Southampton offer 1842972

 

Leeds Utd offer 1945578

 

Southampton offer 1972554

 

Only Leeds Utd interested

Leeds Utd offer 3950000

Estimated Value 1600000

Do You Accept(Y/N)?

* When you go to buy a player and select a team, there is no way of exitting.

* Player ratings screen doesn't always disappear when loading next part.

* "ROy Wegerle", Coventry City

* "Dion DUblin", Coventry City

* Results of other games need their accuracy improving (which will bring about a slowdown).

* When selling players, number of goals scored isn't correctly displayed

* Shouldn't be able to keep going back to the Council.

* When selling, the number of interested clubs is displayed twice.

* Only 19 games in a season. Why did I code this?

 

Required Features

 

* Rename disk 1 and 2 so that booting is simpler.

* Introduce RastaConverter picture to first loaded disk?