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I only play MiZoo on my iPhone now, I'm dead sad...

Ssshh the tune wasn't Airwolf, it was something quite similar "inspired" by it.

Heheheh. Ah, the olden days, before copyright seemed to matter.

Ta for the kind words. Sad to say I had no idea about the keys for Thunderstruck. Senility beckons...

Well I was wrong there, wasn't I?

I believe there is some sarcasm there - I seem to recall that as the levels were randomly generated (from a fixed seed so always the same) SoD never ended. That's why the difficulty levels are so, er, fluctuating.

Interesting reading all this, and I have to hold my hand up and say my games didn't have the best endings ever. The trouble was always memory. Do you put aside a lot of spare memory for a great finish that not many people will see, or do you use that to make the graphics and gameplay a bit better fo...

Thanks for the replies guys - I agree that it would've been hard for anyone to turn out a reasonable Electron version of a Beeb game if they haven't seen one or used it much. My history of owning an Electron before a Beeb (so much cheaper!) probably meant I always bore the little white box in mind. ...

AJW wrote:Possibly no programmer. Gary Partis had to be persuaded to do Hostages IIRC.

Er, I did Hostages, not my chum Mr Partis!

Hi Peter Quick question - Superior had the rights to both Hostages and Simcity. Hostages was released on the Arc - do you know why Simcity wasn't? Krisalis did release it some years later (and it was a fairly shabby port, from memory), but why not Superior? I'm not sure why Sim City wasn't converte...

Aw thanks, shucks, blushes heheh. Hostages was originally on the C64 I think, but I was only ever sent the Atari ST version, so the Beeb one was based on the 16 bit version. As I think I've probably mentioned before, it was a two game deal with Infogrames - we had to do Hostages to get Sim City. I h...

Just my views, as someone who had both machines and had the task of converting from one to t'other... The BBC was a joy to program, everything simple, logical, assembler built in, fast processor for the era, and reasonable if not wonderful hardware capabilities. The 64 was a total nightmare to progr...

Yes, Mr Stairway, I remember you sent me a drive etc. and I managed to get off most of the demos etc. on here now. Sadly my Beeb died shortly afterwards, and my brother managed to chuck it out when moving. I'll try and dig out the SimCity source disc if I can find it. It could be in one of many loca...

'ello. Errr, if I had the source code I would post it. I may have a disk somewhere if anyone's interested - but I don't really have the means to get it off. That is my Beeb and drive died years ago. SC was a mix of BASIC and assembler, as the former is quite efficient at the v complex maths involved...

A sneaky way to increase the number of screens is to have another lookup table with a byte per screen, with a 0-255 number in it. You can then, say, repeat screen 5 (lunar surface) or screen 243 (corridor) as many times as you want. You might see that in my games heheh... Or if you've got 128 screen...

The Last of the Free/Quest for Freedom thing was a difficult one - I basically sold the same game idea to two companies. I'd sent a demo of LOTF off to lots of people and hadn't heard anything. So I then thought up, wrote and finished Thunderstruck completely (called Timestorm back then) and sent th...

In the deep dark realms of my memory, there lurks another reason why these mysterious Electron-only-but-not-really games exist. Legal reasons. Some authors did BBC-only deals and then flogged the 'Leccy rights separately. Or some publishers didn't do the Electron and the rights stayed with the author.

I think someone converted Thunderstruck II to the C64 but not sure if it was released...

I mainly did the games coming the other way, from every other computer to the Beeb.

Yeah I got into a bit of trouble of Last of the Free and Quest for Freedom. The details were blurry even back then, never mind now, but they had the same central character and premise, even if LOTF was redesigned from scratch.

Don't know how I got away with it really!

as usual I'm a month behind here and replying to something that's changed massively - but ta for the praise for sim city. it was my proudest programming thing and I'm dead chuffed for the praise!

Ah yes, I loved Mr Ee as well. Superb game. Chuckie Egg still just about takes the biscuit as the most playable game ever anywhere on anything. Graphics weren't too hot, animation poor, sound and music OK but the thing played like a dream. Obviously we can see the split between those using a technic...

Thanks for the compliments! I think there were less unique rooms in Orb but more repetition to make it seem bigger. The memory was used for the computer stuff as well as to make Blip squish smoothly. Last of the Free was too hard - don't blame me, the playtester at Audiogenic made me crank up the di...

Wow, nice to see this after all that time. Yes, billcarr is right - there was a lookup table that was 16 x 10 and if you went off screen the next screen would be picked from that allowing the occasional repeated room. On Omega Orb it was much bigger with lots more repetition. Sorry about the puns to...

Heheh thanks for the praise fellas. It's not like I had just seen Atic Attak and copied the visual style in a simpler game... oh no.

I think it was the scrolling that made Firetrack so jaw-dropping; it was the first Beeb arcade game to compare with the smoothness of games on the C64 or arcade machines of the time. The explosions were beautiful too, the whole thing just a tour de force... Sentinel was astonishing but, as with Elit...

Did I see myself mentioned? Heheheh. Yeh of everything I wrote Sim City was the hardest... and the thing I'm most proud of. It fitted into 20K, ran on an Electron even, and the original was 512K on the Amiga. I was sent a listing in C of the original source code with a book-like doc of algorithms an...

aw shucks, ta for the compliments... with thundserstruck II I tried to cram in too many screens and so had to take some of the detail out. with a bit more ingenuity I should've reduced it down and put more detail in each room. the slight trouble was the main character was so big he couldn't bounce a...

it would be very sensible to try and use an overarching language to do conversions in. many new games do that, written in C or proprietary languages, and compiled for different hardware. however it's very inefficient of memory use (not as much of an issue now as it was then) and much, much slower. t...

hi, mmmm a tricky one - me and superior used to spend ages playtesting stuff to make sure nothing odd could creep through. however predator went from a C64 loading screen and some maps out of c&vg to a finished game on elk and beeb in 6 weeks' flat, so things were compressed somewhat. having sai...

hi, I loved the look of exile, thought the animation was superb especially with such tiny weeny sprites. the game didn't really grab me as much as it did others but I'm sure that's just me. and barbarian II was probably technically the best 2D graphical game I did - there was a lot of spriteular dat...

Heheheh thanks for the nice mentions about Barbarian II - and yes it was Page 3 lovely Maria Whittaker and Gladiator Wolf who modelled for the cover. I got to meet 'em at some press thing in Big London but sadly put my foot in it somewhat by (a) being a bit squiffy; and (b) commenting that Wolf's bo...

yes I did spend rather more time on my electron conversions than most - I started on it too (even though we used beebs at school) although as it was my umpteenth machine (zx81, vic20, dragon32, oric1, spectrum) I wasn't exactly new... main differences AJW were the 1 channel sound plus lack of graphi...