Memo on testing from Leonard Tramiel

[PeterG]

Hey guys in anticipation of my Game Drive arriving tomorrow I went through my Atari Files to see if there is anything in the folder I can check on the GD and I stumbled upon a text document from which I do not know where it originated (probably Atari Museum or one of those Atari HQ Cds) but I completley forgot about it and had a big laugh reading it tonight. Thought some of you might enjoy it too. I did a quick search and did not find anything on it so I thought I share it.

 

Basically it is Leonard Tramiel complaining about the test department and some hilarious stuff like giving examples of bugs and stupod mistakes (Checkered Flag steering) also writing that releasing Club Drive in its state was a conscious decision and so on. Found it quite interesting. Actually it probably would be nice to have all this paperwork collected somewhere in a thread as I alsways find it really interesting to have these insights but I haven't found such or am too stupid to look it up properly. ?

TESTORNO.pdf

[zzip]

Quote

The test department has gone thru many changes of personnel lately. It now consists entirely of people with very little experience in testing and a test leader with virtually no experience in leading. It seems that the test department no longer understands how to test. I fear that the test department no longer knows what test is.

He writes that as though these people just showed up and company executives like himself have no say in what kind of people get hired for the job ?

[+Stephen]

LOL - that's great.

[+eebuckeye]

Wow.. great stuff!

[Zerosquare]

It's an old classic, but rereading it is always fun and shows how dysfunctional Atari was back then.

 

There were also interesting stories from the developers side:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/221243-minter-txk-t2k-and-stuff/?do=findComment&comment=3090113

Edited March 31, 2021 by Zerosquare

[Hyper_Eye]

Quote

The save game is too easy in Wolfenstein 3D

The cheats are too easy in Doom

 

I don't really understand these two points. The first one I actually don't comprehend. What does he mean save game is too easy? Does he mean that the save is too lenient in that it allows you to fail and pickup without losing much progress? I wonder what he would think about modern video games. Then he says Doom cheats are too easy... Doom... cheats... are too easy. Ok first that's not on Atari. The cheats included in the Jaguar version of the game are the same cheats included in the original version of Doom. Second... they are cheats! If you activate them then by definition you want to ditch the difficulty and just have fun! Once you activate cheats all bets are off on challenging gameplay. What strange things to consider bugs or errors.

[PeterG]

4 hours ago, Hyper_Eye said:

 

I don't really understand these two points. The first one I actually don't comprehend. What does he mean save game is too easy? Does he mean that the save is too lenient in that it allows you to fail and pickup without losing much progress? I wonder what he would think about modern video games. Then he says Doom cheats are too easy... Doom... cheats... are too easy. Ok first that's not on Atari. The cheats included in the Jaguar version of the game are the same cheats included in the original version of Doom. Second... they are cheats! If you activate them then by definition you want to ditch the difficulty and just have fun! Once you activate cheats all bets are off on challenging gameplay. What strange things to consider bugs or errors.

What he means is, that you can activate them too easily.

 

In Wolfenstein you save by pressing 1,2 or 3 on the keypad. I once overwritten a save of mine by accident because of that.

 

The cheat code in Doom is activated by a combination option + a number or something like that. Guess he wanted a more complicated way to activate the cheats.

[+jgkspsx]

I have also overwritten Wolfenstein saves by accident. I wouldn’t call it a bug, but it would be nice if it asked you.

[Fadest]

It's not a bug but something a QA service should have warned about...

 

[Hyper_Eye]

7 hours ago, PeterG said:

What he means is, that you can activate them too easily.

 

In Wolfenstein you save by pressing 1,2 or 3 on the keypad. I once overwritten a save of mine by accident because of that.

 

The cheat code in Doom is activated by a combination option + a number or something like that. Guess he wanted a more complicated way to activate the cheats.

I see what you are saying. I do think I activated a Doom cheat by accident once or twice over the years. When I intend to activate them I appreciate that they aren't difficult to activate. I would consider the save game issue to be more notable than the cheat issue. Hitting 1-3 by accident is a lot more likely than pushing multiple buttons on the keypad at the same time.

[PeterG]

7 hours ago, Fadest said:

It's not a bug but something a QA service should have warned about...

 

Definatley not a bug... the buttons are marked on the overlay. ?

Wolfenstein Overlay

 

[+jgkspsx]

I don’t know about y’all, but I hit that map button a lot, and I’m not looking at the controller when I do it.

[youxia]

It really sounds like the testing department was just some dudes who still believed what we all did as kids: that testing is the best job in the world, you just play games all day and get paid for it 

[roots.genoa]

Maybe they should have asked the developers to provide bug free games. ?

 

[Yak]

On 3/31/2021 at 1:24 AM, Zerosquare said:

It's an old classic, but rereading it is always fun and shows how dysfunctional Atari was back then.

 

There were also interesting stories from the developers side:

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/221243-minter-txk-t2k-and-stuff/?do=findComment&comment=3090113

oh good lord I remember that incident! I never saw the post back in 2014 or whenever or I'd've explained it. Can't even remember who it was on stage at the time but he was trying to explain how the Jag graphics hardware worked and he was making a right pig's ear of it, making it sound waaay more complicated than it really was. I'd been working with the Jag for a while and knew that the guy was doing it a disservice by not explaining it well to a room full of developers. My thought was that the guy wasn't a programmer, so he wasn't explaining the hardware in a way that a programmer would 'get' straight away, and as a result he was making it sound awful and hard. All I did was take over and describe what he was trying to describe but in a way that my fellow coders would understand :D.

 

I just didn't want a room full of devs to get the feeling that the Jag was unnecessarily complex to program and therefore be put off from working on it.

[Lostdragon]

On 4/4/2021 at 1:29 AM, Yak said:

oh good lord I remember that incident! I never saw the post back in 2014 or whenever or I'd've explained it. Can't even remember who it was on stage at the time but he was trying to explain how the Jag graphics hardware worked and he was making a right pig's ear of it, making it sound waaay more complicated than it really was. I'd been working with the Jag for a while and knew that the guy was doing it a disservice by not explaining it well to a room full of developers. My thought was that the guy wasn't a programmer, so he wasn't explaining the hardware in a way that a programmer would 'get' straight away, and as a result he was making it sound awful and hard. All I did was take over and describe what he was trying to describe but in a way that my fellow coders would understand :D.

 

I just didn't want a room full of devs to get the feeling that the Jag was unnecessarily complex to program and therefore be put off from working on it.

Bill Rehbock at the time was director of applications software I believe and it was Bill who visited the likes of Interplay, put on a big, lengthy presentation about the Jaguar, Atari's plans to get the Lynx back in the stores once Jaguar was launched, Manufacturerung issues with Tom and Jerry chips meant Atari would only have around 50,000 units for the initial test launch etc. 

 

 

But I believe his talk of the Jaguar colour handling abilities and palatte ranges, conflicted with the press literature Atari themselves were handing out. 

 

 

 

Bill talked of 24-bit true colour, the literature 32-bit colour or something along those lines? 

 

 

The impression i have taken away from various industry figures talking about how Atari presented the Jaguar to them and how the found it, once they actually started coding for it, is one of utter confusion and one where even Atari themselves contradicted themselves. 

 

 

It wasn't just in terns of graphics performance either, this quote from the musician at HMS responsible for Kasumi Ninja:

 

 

.

“I was promised this amazing music system from Atari for KN on the Jaguar so I wrote loads of cool music and then it turned out the system couldn’t handle it and Atari’s code was dreadful.”..

 

 

Darryl Still got absolutely slaughtered in the letters page of C+VG, saying Jaguar was more powerful than the Saturn, only slightly behind the Playstation in terms of performance and had been held back by being cartridge based from the start. 

 

 

He openly admitted he only went on information he was given, sounds like Bill Rehbock was doing the same, reading from a script or briefing notes he'd been given and totally out of his depth when pushed on subjects.