Blog

A small collection of my thoughts that I copied from my old blog, centered around game design.

Game Development Thoughts

C64 Assembly

When I visited Germany this year, I found that my mom had dug up a few of my really old computer books. I only have marginal interest in the original Amiga manuals that she found, but there was one book that stirred some seriously cool memories: “Commodore 64&128 – Maschinensprache für Einsteiger”. It’s a book about programming the C64 In 6502 assembly, and as luck would have it, that’s how I spent most of 1988!

Even though I never turned into a professional programmer, my first real contact with the computer (other playing than games, of course) was programming the C64. My dad had bought the system under the usual pretense: we were going to use it for bookkeeping and other useful tasks, and he even took a BASIC programming course. c64assemblyBut in the end, it was I who got the most use out of the machine, and I used my dad’s coursework to learn how to program various simple games in BASIC. The programs were simple because all this happened when I was only 9 or 10 years old. But the first English words that I ever learned were “if”, “then” and “print”.

A couple of years later, I had met an older neighbor kid who had a few connections to the local cracker scene. That’s how I learned about this newly released book, “Maschinensprache für Einsteiger”, advertised as the ultimate way of learning how to program the C64 at its core level, Assembly. Since my friend was all over it I saved my allowance, bought the book, and found myself programming C64 assembly when I was about 12 years old.

Game Development Thoughts

Always Remember The Passion

ultima_v_diskAs I was driving home the other day, The Almighty iPod Shuffle decided to take me on a serious nostalgia trip. After serenading me with a megamix of terrible songs from the early 90s, the “Travel Theme” from Ultima V: Lazarus came on. The Travel Theme, for those who don’t know, was specifically written for the Amiga port of Ultima V, and it was the only piece of music included with that version of the game. So the music looped when playing the game – over and over and over again.

Ultima V for the Commodore Amiga wasn’t a great conversion. It was over two years late (part VI had already been released for the PC, significantly advancing the state of the art); its primitive EGA tile graphics looked positively outdated at this point; and it lacked all musical variation found on the other computer systems, featuring that one single song instead. Oh, and it was copy protected! Ultima V on the Amiga came on two nastily protected 3 ½ inch disks, and it saved the only possible savegame on that very same, non-backupable disk! I’ve never been so afraid for my game progress in my life.

But it was a great game. And it was the first game I ever bought! Rather blindly, actually, on recommendation of a tiny article in ASM. And even though this event occurred over 20 years ago (I was only 14 years old) I still remember that day clearly: