Richard Costello's Coding memories

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I'd love to see Ramrod, I remember a couple of screenshots back in the day in The One for Amiga and ST game as it was then before they separated.

Rob Northens PDOS disk codes is now all Public domain as well.

Am I right in my hazy memory that the only reason the Amiga got Mortal Kombat II was because Probe pushed Acclaim for it?

Possibly as it was a late starter, but it sold 120,000+ units according to my royalty cheque so I'm glad they did , Primal Rage sold 9000

I can't remember where the sound code came from now, probably Alistair Brimble.

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Rob northen code and tools have been made public. They are freely available

And your stripper file has very fun quoted inside, and you've done some very clean code WOW.

I was (probably still am) a bit OCD when it comes to quoting code, I always had a desire to write something on every line . Good for assembler where there is space but nowadays a line of code is soooooooooo long - I hate high level languages.

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Mortal kombat II use Rob Northen Protected DOS (RNPDOS) hehe, as does Primal Rage and Mortal Kombat I

Robs code was less about protection and more about getting the most data on the disk that could be reliably duplicated, plus very easy to use. Amiga was a bit of a nightmare for duplicators as its hardware allowed very direct control of what happened on the disc magnetically. I remember long chats with Rob about flaky sync marks etc. Would have been nice to also be able to vary the discs speed to squeeze more onto the outer tracks.

[dlfrsilver]

Rob Northen Protected Dos format is made of 12 sectors per track instead of eleven.... And this format can be written back with a normal amiga drive
But yes quite nice to hold more data per track

Also, why not implementing at that time an HD installing disk inside the package with mortal kombat II ? On mortal kombat II, back when i bought in 1994 the game on my amiga, was the slow loading The game played great, but disk swapping jesus !

Yes allister Brimble did an excellent job on sound BTW, what kind of job are you doing today since you're retired from the gamin industry ?

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Ricardo

Possibly as it was a late starter, but it sold 120,000+ units according to my royalty cheque so I'm glad they did , Primal Rage sold 9000

I can't remember where the sound code came from now, probably Alistair Brimble.

I wasn't a major fan of Brimbles work, but the music he did for Mortal Kombat was pretty spot on.

120,000+ units? Christ, Acclaim must have been quite happy with that, so late in the Amigas career, thats not bad sales at all.

9000 isn't bad for an AGA only game.... except it wasn't AGA only, was it specified as that because of the size of the frames for the players?

And who coded your external memory routines at bootup, they never worked properly!

[dlfrsilver]

galahad, that's not nice ahahaha

MK I and II sold very well, and it's justice to the very good work made behind.

also, a bit of calculate : 120.000 x 25.99£ = around 3,1£ millions pounds just for the amiga version

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by Ricardo

I was (probably still am) a bit OCD when it comes to quoting code, I always had a desire to write something on every line . Good for assembler where there is space but nowadays a line of code is soooooooooo long - I hate high level languages.

Apparently you had way too much time to code these things seeing that almost each line is commented. Nice code anyway!

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

galahad, that's not nice ahahaha

Well, it's true. Attached is the source for an MK II HD-Loader I made a while ago, you may check the comment about the memory check. :P

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by Ian

Other than trolling on Amiga forums what do you do these days?

I read that you retired from the games industry after Primal Rage (On BTTR), is that still the case?

After Primal Rage I went motor racing (single seaters), whilst doing Golden Axe I attended the Jim Russell Racing School at Donington and eventually became a motor racing instructor (I trained Jenson Button when he started car racing ) which I still do today (licensed at Silverstone but local to Donington so mainly there). In last 10 years I have fallen back into some web engineering and graphic design plus training course development, all for the automotive and motor racing industries. I am considering getting into iPhone app development at the moment but don't have the time. I lived in Nottingham originally but moved to Castle Donington around the time of Primal Rage, now finally settling down in Mansfield. In the last 3 years I've gone from a Ferrari, to M3 to A6 TDi - definitely getting old

My amazingly unimpressive website is http://www.racecom.co.uk

[dlfrsilver]

impressive !!!! you had a ferrari ? doh !

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

impressive !!!! you had a ferrari ? doh !

It's not that impressive, you can get one for £8000. Personally I had one for 3 years and it didn't cost anything in the end, but I did buy wisely...

[dlfrsilver]

Richard, could you find the golden axe code part where the dynamic palette routine is ?

Also, how do you think amiga games could have been if this machine has 4-8 mb in standard ?

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by StingRay

Apparently you had way too much time to code these things seeing that almost each line is commented. Nice code anyway! Well, it's true. Attached is the source for an MK II HD-Loader I made a while ago, you may check the comment about the memory check. :P

I created all the boot sector and loader code, the boot sector was supposed to run with a rainbow (Atari style) AMIGA which didnt work on an A1200 until Primal Rage when I noticed that I had got a bit set wrong...lol That then loaded the rest of Track 0 which formed my 4K ish loader. But I guess you already knew that lol.

Attached is the loader from MKII, I knew virtually nothing about the Amiga's operating system so my memory alloc may have been a bit ropey but it appeared to work on the machines we tested it on including my A500 with 1.5MB of RAM.

It would have taken time to get to grips with a HD and time was running out (because of all those comments lol)...Plus I have always found that as long as an OS is running inside a computer you loose LOADS of memory and loads of CPU cycles and at the time the only way to use the Amiga's HD was through the OS. At the time we were in the business of extracting the maximum performance from the hardware, but it was also the beginning of operating systems creating that layer of platform independence so important to development costs today.

Thats one of the reasons I got out, I wasn't interested in programming with a team of coders to produce a Playstation title written in a high(ish) level language, I was interested in programming a MIPS R3000 by hand including looking after none sequential execution and branch post processing etc but that was all old fashioned and pretty pointless I guess. To me, thats a bit like racing F1 whilst towing a caravan - but thats progress...as I said above, I'm getting old lol

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Richard, could you find the golden axe code part where the dynamic palette routine is ?

Also, how do you think amiga games could have been if this machine has 4-8 mb in standard ?

Well WhatIf's are always tricky, if it had 8MB of RAM then it would have been ££££££££. But given 512K of Chipram it would have just been a big ram disk effectively. If 8MB of ChipRam then that would have been cool as it would have meant every frame from the coin-ops could have been used, plus a proper hardware scrolled background.

It would have been nice to have 8 planes (x2 16 colour playfields), it would have been nice to have 16, 16 colour hardware sprites. But then all the memory timing issues would have meant having different memory systems for 68K and custom chips accessed through a portal much as the SEGA machines had which then turns the Amiga into a true games machine - which to be honest is what most people (kids) want.

Ultimately what was needed was a load of RAM controlled by a powerful CPU and a separate sub-system with its own memory and processing cores, much as we have today in the ubiquitous PC.

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Richard, could you find the golden axe code part where the dynamic palette routine is ?

To be honest, looking at it I dont think it uses the Copper at all (which I would have used to have a dynamic split). I fade palettes in and out for the campfire but I dont see any splits anywhere - where do you think you have noticed this effect?

Looking at the code I was starting to think I didnt even use the blitter! but I did...just...

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I wasn't a major fan of Brimbles work, but the music he did for Mortal Kombat was pretty spot on.

120,000+ units? Christ, Acclaim must have been quite happy with that, so late in the Amigas career, thats not bad sales at all.

9000 isn't bad for an AGA only game.... except it wasn't AGA only, was it specified as that because of the size of the frames for the players?

And who coded your external memory routines at bootup, they never worked properly!

Yes, it wasn't AGA it was 2MB of memory. It was supposed to be 1MB as per MKII but all along they (Probe) kept saying "we want all the frames in" and I was saying "but all the frames = 512K per player minimum, so where is the vectors, stack, program, sound, screens going to sit?" ... hence in the end it was 2MB. Memory map attached .

I remember sitting in front of my dev system showing a working copy to a reviewer for ZAP or similar with Rob (producer from Probe) sitting next to me explaining that it was all going to run in 1MB and all the frames would be there. I was thinking, "well I have 400 bytes free between the code and the stack, but I cant see the extra 1MB fitting in that and it not effecting the stack at all" LMAO.

[dlfrsilver]

So, all in all how much frames per sprite for primal rage amiga ? doh

If only Gordon Fong, the street fighter 2 amiga coder had the engine you got for MK series and primal rage, would been so good, instead of this.... no i stop that's too sad

[Photon]

I too remember drooling over the Ramrod screenshots once upon a time... and I loved reading those Diary of a Game things in magazines If you have some fun stories to tell "what making games was like" in Amiga's heyday I'd love to read them!

[Galahad/FLT]

I have to say, the job you did on Amiga Mortal Kombat restored my faith in dev teams in general. Always liked Probe as they seemed to make a bit more effort.

Supremacy for one was very nicely polished and didn't feel like an ST port, the Amiga was actually used properly, it was only presentation, but hey, it made a difference.

I was expecting Mortal Kombat to be utter shit on Amiga if i'm being brutally honest, after the utter rank that was Streetfighter 2 it appeared only Richard Aplin bothered to make that extra effort over coin-op conversions, but Mortal Kombat was nicely placed inbetween the Megadrive and SNES versions.

Graphics and background anims on the Megadrive and SNES were slightly better, but the sound in Amiga MK was better than both, and obviously having all the blood in the Amiga version whereas the SNES didn't natively have it was another advantage over the SNES version.

Seriously, if Tiertex had gotten their hands on MK, I think we'd all have been proper short changed.

So my hat is doffed to you sir for actually giving a shit about the job you had to do, and making a version for the Amiga could stand proud with the other versions released at the time.

[Galahad/FLT]

Oh yeah, i'd love to see Ramrod up and running

[Ricardo]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I have to say, the job you did on Amiga Mortal Kombat restored my faith in dev teams in general. Always liked Probe as they seemed to make a bit more effort.

Probe was really an ex-surveyor who recognized that all these young self taught programmers were being ripped off by publishers (I got £2000 for C16 Way of the Exploding Fist which took 4 months to create). So he moved in-between to rip us off instead , as a project management consultancy for all us freelance developers, taking away the production pressures from the rights holders.

I only went to the Probe offices for the last 2 weeks of a product and slept under the desk (literally). The powers that be used to be impressed by my dedication but it was more that I hated being there and figured if I didn't sleep I would be out of there sooner! The nightlife in Croydon isn't to be recommended

There were some seriously good people at Probe, but there were idiots too.

I enjoyed the engineering side rather than the game side, so I got a kick out of counting cycles and squeezing stuff in. The major benefit of a coin-op conversion was that the spec was fixed and fully documented i.e. the game already existed which makes the engineers job a lot easier, although testers always used to say things like "its OK but can we have twice as many things happening and it needs to be smoother/faster"

MKI was OK, but MKII I liked as it was a development of the first. Plus the sprite routine had been really messy in MKI as I tried too hard to use partial hardware sprites before giving up with the timing issues. Primal Rage was very long winded in every sense, fitting everything in, lack of buttons on controllers, too many disks, too much disk swapping, program was big etc etc plus all along I knew the Amiga was really a dying format.