Messages

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / Re: Old Source code]

Hi All, well after much pain (and three broken floppy drives!). I now have the stuff I needed and will talk with the Internet Archive guys to get the source available on-line. If I have no luck I will probably just put them on my own website for the time being.

The two games for the pc engine were indeed Turrican/Gunboat so I have an archive for each. (Not to mention a lot of Gameboy source as well....now which is the best GB dev site I wonder..)

Cheers

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / Re: Old Source code]

Just as a quick update, I have dug out the disks but cannot get anything to read at the moment. I do suspect however that this is not down to the disks but down the my knackered old 3.5 drive that is creaking away desperately..

I'm going to go to the local parts supplier this weekend to get a new one so hopefully things will go a lot better when I drag that out.

I think I will end up putting the data on a public section of my ftp site as I also have a lot of source code for other old systems to upload as well.

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / Re: Old Source code]

(1) how much time did you have? Were the deadlines realistic? Were the milestones delivered?

As I recall, each project was 20 weeks and yes we did do it in time. But the end was always working 18 hour days to fix the bugs

(2) how many people were involved, and what role(s)/responsibilities did each person have?

Just two on each project. One for the coding and one for the graphics. We had a Producer at Accolade but he wasn't in the office obviously

(3) what hardware did you use?

We had the original PC engine dev system from NEC. It was a black box about 12" x 6 " x 4 ". Not this one:-
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?18738-Possible-PC-Engine-Devkit
That is a different one and released later.
Unfortunately is was only on loan so didn't get to keep it...

(4) any info on your resume/employment history you are comfortable sharing...for example, were you a salaried employee of company X or a freelancer for Turrican/Gunboat?

I was an employee/owner of the company Accolade contracted to do the conversions. We got the contract on the strength of our previous work for them.

(5) do you remember any particularly challenging/annoying/duh! Moments.....

Late nights fixing bugs and getting the character based screen of the PC to do 3D was a challenge; mainly because of lack of knowledge and experience. There is so much 3D around these days it would be much easier. And lack of video ram for the graphics of course. That was always an issue

(6) what did you do immediately after Gunboat/Turrican? What are you doing now? Have you ever played the finished product?

The producer who worked at Accolade left the company to go work for Sega then Sony so we got more work from them on Megadrive/Saturn/32x/PS1 and PS2. The company finally decided to close a few years ago after doing some stuff on PSP/PC and iPhone but by that time it wasn't fun anymore. Too many people and teams were too big. Plus some of the product the company did with the large teams was just plain shit because we couldn't get the right people.

As a day job I'm in business programming which means I earn twice as much for half the work but I do miss the gaming side. Still mess at home and will definitely be doing some indie stuff at some point whether for profit or not. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to drag out the old source code.

(7) Did you watch Blake's 7? If you did, did you think it was corny? Or did you think it was fun show. I loved it, despite the corn.[/quote]
Never got into that really. Guess I was too busy stuck in the bedroom being unsociable & programming at that age.

( what do you love? What do you enjoy?

Same as most on this bit of the forum;Programming. That's why I started and that's why I'm still doing it.

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / Re: Old Source code]

Did you guys have any C stuff to work with at the time, or no?

No there were no compilers back then. C wasn't really that big as I recall.

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / Re: Old Source code]

Does Gunboat has any sort of ending? I've unlocked all missions but no credits, no nothing. Do you remember if anything like that was programmed in the game?

Not that I remember. It was just a straight port from the PC and I'm sure that didn't either. Guess I'll see when I get the source off those old floppies.

I'm working away from home till this weekend so will try to read them in then.

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / Re: Old Source code]

You've definitely come to the right place - there's a lot of folks here who would love to check out the code and a lot of folks involved in the PCE/Turbo homebrew scene.

Would also love to hear some dev stories as well from back in the day.

I'll get the code off first and tidy it up before any posting.

As for stories; there really aren't any outstanding ones other than the usual from back then. The biggest hurdle was the pig-english of the dev manuals (literal Japanese translations) and the lack of dev equipment/tools. I remember having to go down to a music shop and get the sheet music for Ride of the Valkyries then hand typing the numbers to represent the pitch and length of each note.

Of course the other issue was the fact that we were based in the UK and Accolade were in USA so any builds had to be sent by modem and took about 45 mins just for a single build. Most of the time the transfer failed as well.

Accolade did try to get us to do the C64 version of Gunboat as well because we had converted the code to 6502-like assembler. We had to point out that a cpu running at 1Mhz couldn't quite do the same as one running at 7.62...

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / Re: Old Source code]

Gunboat source code? I'm not sure if you could upload on Archive.org seeing that the source might still be copyrighted...

Well we can but try...looks like all Accolade's assets went to Atari who have now filed for bankruptcy so I don't think anyone will really care. (Except maybe the copyright trolls...)

The code was a conversion of the original PC version written by Tom Loughry who I have tried to contact numerous time to no avail.

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / Old Source code]

Hi, I am a new member here but really joined because I did a couple of games on the pc engine for Accolade back in the mists of time.

I still have the floppies with the source code & was wondering if there might be any interest in making then available for download. Bear in mind that it was a long time ago and the source may not be best and up to modern standards (I haven't even looked at it yet...).

If there is an interest, can anyone point me to a resource that might be suitable to upload to so that it would be available to everyone. I was thinking of uploading the archive.org through Jason Scott but thought I would ask here first if there was somewhere better suited.
Thanks

PS the games in question are Gunboat and Turrican and the source is all in assembler. Not sure what the legalities are but I'm sure nobody really cares now..