Donated Atari Mega ST Gives A Peek At Game Development History

October 25, 2024 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

[Neil] from The Cave, a computer and console gaming museum in the UK, has a treat for vintage computing and computer gaming enthusiasts. They received an important piece of game dev history from [Richard Costello], who coded ports of Gauntlet 2, Mortal Kombat, and Primal Rage for Atari ST and Amiga home computers. [Richard] brought them his non-functional Atari Mega ST in the hopes that they could get it working again, and demonstrate to visitors how game development was done back in the 80s — but sadly the hardware is not in the best shape.

The Atari ST flagged deleted files for overwriting but didn’t actively wipe them, allowing an undelete utility to work.

That doesn’t stop [Neil], however. The real goal is seeing if it’s possible to re-create the development environment and access the game assets on the SCSI hard drive, and it’s not necessary to revive every part of the hardware to do that. The solution is to back up the drive using a BlueSCSI board which can act as a host, scan the SCSI bus, and dump any device it finds to an SD card. The drive didn’t spin up originally, but some light percussive maintenance solved that.

With the files pulled off the drive, it was time to boot it up using an emulator (which begins at the 16:12 mark). There are multiple partitions, but not a lot of files. There was one more trick up [Neil]’s sleeve. Suspecting that deleting everything was the last thing [Richard] did before turning the machine off decades ago, he fired up a file recovery utility. The Atari ST “deleted” files by marking them to be overwritten by replacing the first letter of the filename with a ‘bomb’ character but otherwise leaving contents intact. Lo and behold, directories and files were available to be undeleted!

[Neil] found some fascinating stuff such as mixed game and concept assets as well as what appears to be a copy of Ramrod, a never-released game. It’s an ongoing process, but with any luck, the tools and environment a game developer used in the 80s will be made available for visitors to experience.

Of course, modern retro gaming enthusiasts don’t need to create games the classic way; tools like GB Studio make development much easier. And speaking of hidden cleverness in old games, did you know the original DOOM actually had multi-monitor support hidden under the hood?

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Adding AI To NPCs Is Easy, Doing It Well Is Hard

January 10, 2024 by Donald Papp 18 Comments

Adding natural language interfaces to software is easier than ever, and that led [creikey] to prototype a game that hinges on communicating with NPCs. The prototype went through multiple iterations during which he mainly discovered things that did not work well. Ultimately, it led to [creikey] settling on a western-themed game called Dante’s Cowboy which he hopes to release as an experiment. He begins talking about the game around the 4:43 mark in the video, which directly precedes a recording of a presentation he gives at as an indie developer.

Games typically revolve around the player manipulating entities in an environment in order to make things happen. This interaction drives engagement and interesting decisions. But while adding natural language AI to NPCs makes them easy to talk with, talking by itself is a shallow interaction. Convincing NPCs to do things? That’s complex and far more difficult to implement. [creikey] realized the limitations large language models (LLMs) had and worked to overcome them to make a unique game experience.

The challenges boil down to figuring out how to drive meaningful interaction, aligning AI behavior with the gameplay context, and managing API costs. In his words, “it’s been a learning experience to figure out where [natural language AI] even belongs in a game, if it belongs at all.”

We’ve previously seen ChatGPT used to grant NPCs the ability to communicate naturally which is a fascinating tech demo, but gameplay-wise can boil down to being a complicated alternative to pressing a button. As [creikey] discovered, adding this technology into games in a way that feels meaningful takes a new kind of work.

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Finally! The ROM You Wished Your Sinclair Spectrum Had!

November 27, 2020 by Jenny List 10 Comments

If there is one thing that Sir Clive SInclair was famous for, it was producing electronic devices that somehow managed to squeeze near-impossible performance out of relatively meagre components. This gave us some impressive products, but it’s fair to say that sometimes this philosophy pushed the envelope a little too far. Thus even some of the most fondly remembered Sinclair products concealed significant flaws, and this extended to both their hardware and their software.

The SInclair ZX spectrum’s ROM for example had more than its fair share of bugs, and its BASIC programming experience with single keypress was unique but also slow to run. It’s something [Jonathan Cauldwell] has addressed with his Arcade Game Designer ROM, a complete and ready to run replacement for the original Spectrum ROM that contains a scripting language, a compiler, editors for in-game assets, and a game engine upon which to run your games. It’s the ROM you wanted back in 1983, when you were struggling to fit a bit of Z80 code in a Sinclair Basic REM statement.

If you’re a Spectrum enthusiast and think this sounds a little familiar then you are of course correct. It builds upon his past work with his Arcade Game Designer, with the distribution by ROM allowing the developer to use the full 48k available on all but a very few early 16k machines. You’ll need your own EPROM on which to burn it, but we suspect that if you’re the kind of person who has a Spectrum and has writing these games in mind, you already have access to the relevant equipment.

If you’re new to all this Spectrum stuff and where its ROM came from, then maybe it’s time for a trip down memory lane.

Simple Sprite Routines Ease Handheld Gaming DIY

May 26, 2020 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

Making your own handheld games is made much easier with [David Johnson-Davies’] simple sprite routines for the Adafruit PyBadge and PyGamer boards. Sprites can be thought of as small, fixed-size graphical objects that are drawn, erased, moved, and checked for collision with other screen elements.

xorSprite() plots an 8×8 sprite, moveSprite() moves a given sprite by one pixel without any flicker, and hitSprite() checks a sprite for collision with any screen elements in a given color. That is all it takes to implement a simple game, and [David] makes them easy to use, even providing a demo program in the form of the rolling ball maze shown here.

These routines work out-of-the-box with the PyBadge and PyGamer, but should be easy to adapt to any TFT display based on the ST7735 controller. The PyGamer is the board shown here, but you can see the PyBadge as it was used to create an MQTT-enabled conference badge.

If you really want to take a trip down the rabbit hole of sprite-based gaming graphics, you simply can’t miss hearing about the system [Sprite_TM] built into the FPGA Game Boy badge.

Game Builder Lets Kids — Even Old Kids — Build Games

June 17, 2019 by Al Williams 4 Comments

One rite of passage back in the good old days of owning a TRS-80, Commodore 64, or similar vintage computer was writing your own game. It probably wouldn’t be very good, but it wouldn’t be much worse than most of the stuff that was out there, either. Today, trying to get a kid interested in “hunt the wumpus” is probably not going to fly and having them create a modern-looking game is out of the question. Or is it? Disguised as a game itself, Game Builder offers an interactive way to create interesting games without having to get too detailed into programming. On the other hand, it supports JavaScript, so you can get to programming if you need to or want to. We could easily see a kid — or even an adult — easing into programming using this game which is free, from Google.

In the old days, hardware was a limiting factor and Basic made it pretty easy to whip out some text or crude graphics. Our favorite was a high low game that guesses your number. But everyone had some little game they’d create so they said they could. Today’s games, though, have good graphics and music and 3D shapes and a host of other things you didn’t have to contend with back then. Game Builder, though, makes it pretty simple. You can work on a game by yourself, or with friends, or with the general public. Everyone involved can play the game, but they can also edit the game. The tool runs under Steam so even though it is marked for PC or Mac, it will also run on Linux if you have Steam installed properly.

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