AlienBash I & II - Original Coder Contacted - Help Needed in Rescuing 68000 Source!!

[Heavy Stylus]

Hi there,

Today I contacted Glen Cumming on Facebook, and after a brief chat he sent me the full history of Alien Bash and Alien Bash 2. Have a read below, and if anyone can help in retrieving the source for him from his old disks and hard disc, let me know!

http://hol.abime.net/5405
http://hol.abime.net/5406

------------------------------------------------------------------

The Amiga was my first true love. I'd grown up with a Vic-20 and then later a BBC micro. Gaming was my foremost interest (no surprise there) and I spent many many wasted hours playing games but also typing in listings from magazines. I was alone amongst my friends on wanting to be able to
learn to program, school did not present any options in this area so despite writing a few simple basic programs I never really twigged on how to do stuff 'properly' nor could I get my head around 6502 which I tried to learn a couple of times by myself but failed.

Not being the best student I left school at 16 with just my O levels and went to college to do an OND in computing - this was a life changing event for me as I was learning about something I was interested in and because I met Stuart Law who was on the exact same wavelength on me - he too had spent years playing around on his computers trying to develop stuff. Stuart was not as lucky as me and only had a C16 - but he was a lot more tech savvy and had done all sorts of interesting things on it as well as cutting his teeth on small bits of assembler.

Everyone else on the course were useless - no real interest in computers at all - they just saw it as a means to an end and possibly a job at the end of it - but Stuart and I become firm friends because of our shared desire to be able to code and create games - I had one other thing going for me which was an Amiga A1000 I'd got a couple of months before starting college (this was 1987).

We spent hours mucking around with the Amiga - at first just playing games and watching a few demo's I had over and over (way before mega-demo's were around - simple stuff but powerful nonetheless) - we decided that demo's were what we wanted to do as they looked cool but also the whole idea of having pseudo-names and group names was just too cool.

Stuart had an advantage in that he understood assembly and so moving to 68000 was not too much of a leap - however it was a massive issue for me - but I forced myself to learn it - and gradually I manged to do little things in
it until I had a reasonable understanding - I look back at this today and wish I still had that determination and brute force willpower to do something because I wanted it badly enough.

Our first demo's were laughably affairs (as the GS-Team!) - mainly because they were written under Intuition - we had no books which described hitting the hardware - so everything was going through the operating system and as you'd imagine were simply rubbish - but we thought they were cool and spent a long time writing different ones and essentially refining our assembler skills.

The turning point was when we got our first copy of the Amiga Hardware Manual - at first I didn't really have a clue about what to do with it - but my tech savvy friend did understand it and did a few tests of setting up
registers to get a display up and running - I caught on with a bit of help and before long we were fiddling with copper lists, blits, scrolling etc - this would have been 1988 I think. At the same time we saw our first mega demo
which was TechTech by Sodan - I can remember us both watching that demo time after time jaws firmly on the ground, we simply thought it was just the most amazing thing we had ever seen - from that day I was an avid demo collector - I used to buy all the latest demo's from the PD companies in the magazines (funny to think they used to exist once).

TechTech was the inspiration to create our own homage to it - although ours did not have any music as we had no idea about sound trackers at that point - but it was a landmark in that we'd managed to do something that looked cool - this was in 1989 I think - my memory starts to fail me at this point but we'd started on an HND course after finishing the OND.

During our HND we wrote various demo's - most of which to be honest were ideas ripped from other demos - but I worked out how to do blitter line drawing and simple vector stuff, I also reverse engineered how the sound tracker worked and managed to get that working in our demos (once again simple force of will). We never released any of our demo's properly - if any of them ever got out then we were known as DarkLite - I was Equinox (homage to Jarre) I cannot remember what Stuarts alter-ego was.

We struggled to write stuff during the HND as it was harder than the OND and also it came with a job from GEC Avionics - during this time we tried writing a game with graphics by someone we met at GEC - things did not really work out, the game was rubbish and we never really got the graphics we wanted. Graphics were always our biggest downfall - neither of us were very good at drawing - I would spend hours trying to do stuff in Deluxe Paint and could do simple stuff but nothing good enough. During this time it would have been really helpful if we could have hooked up with other demo coders - its what we'd needed to really succeed - we lived in Kent I not sure if Kent was just a
black hole for other Amiga developers but we never encountered anyone else that was interested - this was years before I had a modem or email address and so just did not know any way of getting in touch with people!

We gave up on the game a little disheartened and did not do anything for a while. The HND was a sandwich course which meant 1990 was spent working at GEC but the next year was back at college - this was fantastic as I'd hated working there but it also gave us a lot more time for coding (we got Fridays off) - during the Easter holidays of 1991/2 (?) we decided to have a crack a writing a small game - one we could finish in the holiday period and do all the graphics ourselves.

We thought that a game where all the aliens left blood splats everywhere would be really funny and so we started writing what was to become AlienBash - it was essentially a very simple game as the screen was simply a big bitmap so it just required a really simple scrolling routine, the main character and score were sprites and everything else were blitter objects - because we used two 8-colour planes we did not have to worry about any complex blitter operations to draw the aliens. I think the hardest part was designing the levels - I knocked up a simple level editor (which I enhanced
for AlienBash2) and we just knocked out bunch of levels - there was not much thought to it really we just wanted to create a game that was complete which I think we managed - everything in it was just done for fun - like the missile that went through all the aliens - it just felt good! Even the name was something we thought was funny - neither of us had a very good imagination and so we could not think of a name - so Stuart made a joke about AlienBash and I said that'll do.

We showed AlienBash to our friends who all basically said it was shit and so we kinda joked about it and then consigned it to the disk box for over a year - quite why we put so much stock in our friends opinions I don't know given that they had never tried to do any programming outside of work - but we did think it was kinda crap - especially compared to some of the stuff that was being released into PD at that time.

Anyway HND college year came and went - in that time (1992) both me and Stuart got ourselves an Amiga 1200 - stupid Commodore would not release the hardware information for it - I remember reverse engineering all the register settings by changing the various settings on workbench and then using copper list readers to see which bits were changing - took me a whole weekend but by the end I found out how to use 256 colours, 64 pixel sprites etc - we re-tooled an old 500 demo which used these effects - we gave the disk to the shop that we bought our machines from because they had no software which showed any of the new features - obviously that just got thrown in the bin - but I do wonder if we were possibly one of the first to have actually got something working - we'll never know.

We wrote another game called 'Super Splash' which was a a super-sprint rip off - but instead of cars it had boats, we did it as a two player game and had little ramps and things in it for the boats to go over - we probably spent
more time playing it then programming it as it was just really fun - we kinda lost momentum on it as I think we did not know how to make a decent CPU opponent - I remember that we sent a level off to CU Amiga and basically said that if they would publish it on their coverdisk we would finish it off - we never heard anything back and we never finished it.

Once our HND had ended we both entered full time employment - development once again stopped. The problem both me and Stuart had with GEC was it was filled with people who did not give a stuff about what they were doing - we did not really care about what we did either as it was the games programming that we really dreamed about doing - but working at GEC was a soul-sapping experience.

After a while both of us were looking for a way out - I started to write a game on the 1200 which was a sideways scrolling platform game - at this time I was really into my super famicom (SNES) - I thought that Mario World was
the best thing ever and I really wanted to do my own version on the Amiga - I felt that the 1200 actually had enough grunt to do it justice (Stuart and I years ago had played the Great Gianna sisters for marathon sessions - man that was good).

I started off with a level just comprises of blocks with a 16x16 block for the player sprite - but I got the fundamentals of jumping onto the platforms working - I got Stuart interested in the idea and soon he came around to the idea of trying to do it. Once again the graphics issue raised its head but Stuart designed the main character himself and did a really good job - the platform graphics we stole from one of the Dizzy games - it was just a means to an end until we could get them re-done.

The game had a large scrolling level - this time it was more of a proper scrolling routine although the up and down was done just by an extended screen rather than a proper 4-way scroll. I worked on the character control and platform collision detection, background animation etc and Stuart concentrated on the object routines.

During this time we showed someone AlienBash and they thought it was quite good - for a laugh we decided to release it into the public domain just to see what would happen - a couple of months later we saw it on the One magazine
coverdisk which for us was just the most awesome thing ever - I can remember buying three copies of the Magazine and just being in a sense of elation for days!

Our platform game was called 'Squiz' as the controllable character was a squirrel - it was a shameless Mario rip off with blocks to hit, you could slide down the hills, had moving platforms, you jump of enemies heads, collect weapons to throw and collect lots and lots of spinning coins - we used 16 colours for the backgrounds, sprites for the main characters and
2 planes (4 colours) just for the overlaid spinning coins - all running at 50Hz - it looked bright, felt good to play and we had loads of stuff moving on the screen - we thought it was really cool - especially given that the
hardware details for the 1200 were not still available.

We decided that this could be our ticket out of GEC and into the games industry - we did one level and sent the disk off to every game developer in the country. We received an endless supply of rejection letters. This was the time when the SNES and Megadrive had become really popular and the Amiga unfortunately had started to wain.

We received a couple of interviews one from Domark and one from Electronic arts - the Domark one was interesting in that the only position that would be open would be for a trainee developer (starting on SNES) working for £8K a year - given that we had full time jobs earning more than that already (12-13k) it was not very attractive - anyway they said they would be in contact - but never were.

The Electronic Arts interview I found very uncomfortable - they were very sure of themselves and kept telling me how brilliant they were and what wonderful programmers they were - I did not really like this and downplayed my own skills as I don't really like blowing my own trumpet - they also split us up for the interview so had no idea what each were being asked.

We did not hear anything from EA for a while and had started to think that maybe we could make a go at making our games Shareware - we had convinced a friend who also worked at GEC that this might be something we could all do and so we started to plan. We knew we had to do something about the art and not knowing any better we put a advert into a local free ad's paper.

[Heavy Stylus]

Myles contacted us and came down to meet us at my home - he had played AlienBash and so was quite interested - we showed him Squiz and on the spot he re-designed our coin sprite to look much better given that it was only 4 colours. We talked about our plans to finish Squiz and also to write a game which would work on the 500 as that would be the biggest market - this was to be AlienBash2. Myles was going do the graphics for free - as we did not know if there was any money in it.

Stuart being the more technical had worked out how we could do a proper 4 way scroll where by the screen is split and updated via the copper but allows a four way scroll without needing to have a large bitmap - it did mean that
the blitter objects are a bit awkward to draw as some appear over the screen split and so have to be draw in two pieces. He tried to code it but never managed to get it to work.

A week or so later I got a rejection letter from EA - however not really bothered as we had decided to do our own thing - however Stuart had been offered a job - which he told me he was going to take. This to me was just the most gutting thing ever - I felt we were a team and should have either got a job together or not taken it at all.

Looking back I wish I'd handled it better - essentially I was so pissed that I ended the friendship - I really felt the dream of being able to write games was over for me - as I felt that I needed my friend for help and inspiration
to be able to do it. He took the job and we never spoke or saw each other again - this was pretty hard I as before we socialised together all the time - after a few years I felt bad and wanted to try and contact him again but have never been able to find his details - even today I cannot find him on Facebook, Friends Reunited or LinkedIn - he went on to be a technical designer at EA working on Megadrive titles and then after a couple of years left to form Destination Design and work on Queen the Eye - this information I got from friends of friends but beyond that I know nothing.

Although completely devastated Myles was coming over to show some initial graphics for ABII - I told him what had transpired with Stuart and told him that I was going to write the game myself - I had decided to do this almost
to spite Stuart to show him that I could write a complete game by myself.

I worked on the four way scroll routine and got it working - it was a bitch to do because debugging it was just a nightmare - having no professional tools made it really hard - also crashes would quite often destroy the disk
in the drive or corrupt my hard-disk. All development was done with Devpac assembler - I can often remember working for weeks trying to track down obscure crash bugs that Myles reported - often the only way I could follow code branches was changing the colour of the screen - I would review printed out assembler code in bed - its unbelievable to me today that I did it really.

The actual engine for the game was finished in about 1994 - the remaining time was spent trying lots of different ideas and graphic sets - Myles and I had completely different ideas about how it should look and a lot of time
was spent trying to come to a compromise on how things should work - he was a big fan of the bitmap brothers graphics which is why its so similar.

The actual game itself is 16 colours with sprites for the main player, the scroll and main character run at 50Hz where as the aliens run at 25Mhz - the decision to go with 16-colour was more to do with performance and memory constraints - one area I'd never really mastered was being able to boot directly from disk and ignore the O/S entirely - if I'd been able to do that I could have squeezed more out of it - towards the later stages on the game I'd also started messing around with writing some non-speed critical parts in C and using blink to link code together - I'd wanted to make it more Zelda like game (another game I thought was awesome) - but the reality was that Myles just would not be able to do the graphics for it - he spent two years doing the graphics it ended up with (I think there were four sets)
- we would only meet up every other weekend for a Sunday afternoon - the rest of the time we would exchange disks via post - so it was a very slow procedure. Over the course of the two years he started to get more into the programming side (not on the Amiga) and gradually wanted to do other things - he was unemployed for much of the time I knew him but by the end of the game he was contracting writing scripts for a CAD package I think - he's on LinkedIn - he's now the director of his own Microsoft certified company doing .net stuff or something - I've not been in touch - not sure if he'd welcome it if I did as it was a bit strained at the end of our partnership and I did make a few snippy comments in the scroll that appeared on the front screen of the game - another poor decision!

The game engine had lots of nice touches - the map editor I had originally used for AlienBash had been beefed up and allowed for all sorts of nice features like flood fills, undo functions, overview etc - you could also set up
special blocks which linked into the code to execute internal scripting logic - I had originally wanted the game to be very bombastic with lots of scenery blowing up but Myles was not so keen on these ideas and given that he
designed most of the levels a lot of ideas got shelved - can't blame him he was doing all this for free and I was very demanding!

We only added the upgrades towards the end of the game where upon we discovered that we had not really designed it properly and had no clue what to do so it was just a case of adding more bullets - not very balanced! In all there was very little design - it was very much a technical exercise for me and I think that ultimately that shows - I was much more interested in adding lots of details such as the background animations and things were Nintendo'esk such as the bonus items bouncing and little scores appearing when collecting them - my goal was to make it as professional as possible so I could kinda say this is what you can do at home with no tools other than devpac if you put your mind to it (looking for kudos really) I don't know if anyone ever noticed but it added extra things for the 1200 such as extra
graphics and sound effects - there was also a cheat built into the game which I don't think anyone discovered - I can't remember it exactly but typing in a name of an REM song gave you infinite credits.

I think the part that I hated doing to most was the logic for the Pig creatures - i.e. how they moved around the screen - I spent a long time trying to make them walk around without getting stuck in the scenery or against each other - for a long time I tried to ensure they never overlapped but gave up - the routine's for handling their logic were awful - I had a few registers to do it in and was trying to use as little cpu as possible - it was horrid and took a long time to just get something bearable - they essentially hug the background scenery whenever they walk around unless they are near the player in which case they attack - I think that was probably the area of the game which I spent longest on trying to get work - I should have spent longer writing it properly in the first place.

My favourite parts of the game were things like the rain storm on level 2 and the lightening on level 8 - shame I put it on level 8 as I'm sure hardly anyone ever saw it - I always loved games that evoked an atmosphere - I would have done more of this if I could - I'd also spend hours recording sound effects - I got quite a kick out of creating decent sounding effects - I remember dropping stones in a bucket of water to get the fish plop sound and hitting an iron bar to get the chink noise - some were a bit cheesy though
like the 'Game Over Man' sample at the end of AlienBash which was my homage to Aliens (note a lot of homages and not a lot of new ideas).

I'd also wanted to have a proper end credit's sequence with a roll call of all the games characters but simply could not muster up the enthusiasm to do it - instead a simple picture appears at the end - I bet anyone that finished it properly was very let-down!

Before we'd finished the game I moved with my parents away from Kent - this
obviously made the whole relationship with Myles more difficult as he could not visit - thus I knew that my Zelda aspirations would never happen and so we just need to wrap the game up and be done with it - so although
it was essentially done back in the last quarter of 1995 it lingered into 1996 - I think I tidied up a few bits and it was sent along with the code and map editor to a PD house - Myles got a call from Future Publishing about it - I never even spoke to anyone about it - I just had to write a letter to say that I'd written it which I did (containing a rant a bit like this!) and that was that. The magazine came out - I was a bit gutted that they did not even print our names in the magazine.

For a couple of months I spent time writing some code on the PC - using my Amiga knowledge I wrote a demo game which ran on a 486 PC but had smooth scrolling, huge aliens, mixed sound, loads of bullets on screen all running at
60Hz (all in assembler of course - madness) - Myles did the graphics for it but it was very tough getting anything out of him as he was losing interest and
so was I - I started looking for jobs around this time - I had two regular job interviews and one off the back of this PC game at a games startup - I got offered the job from the two regular ones and the other one kept messing me around (it was for a company which produced a Mafia type game - can't remember) - in the end I took a regular job as it was the best paying and that was that - the new job was so pressured and difficult (Telecoms industry) that I basically worked 16 hour days 7 days a week for the next two years and had no time to even think about the Amiga or games programming (I still
work for the same people now - although not as hard anymore!). I forgot all about the Amiga and AlienBash - I got a bit nostalgic a few years ago when I saw it had been added to BTTR (back to the roots) and emailed them about it
I was surprised to learn that someone in Germany had boxed it up and had been trying to sell it! They were nice enough to send me a scan of a review from Amiga Joker (only 77% - grr not enough variety in the graphics!!) - which I was kinda surprised by - I have no idea to this day if anyone made any money out of it.

My general feelings of AlienBashII to this day are that it never played like I wanted it to - it was kinda sterile - the joy I used to have working on the previous games had completely gone during development - I think to a certain
degree this had a lot due to the advancement of newer consoles and the death of Commodore (have you read 'On The Edge' book about the rise and fall of commodore - fab book) - I knew I was not good enough to work on 3D games as my maths and physics skills are non-existent so I was always going to struggle to do stuff on my own.

It is gratifying that there is still an Amiga scene out there - I loved those simpler years - I've never ever been able to re-create the excitement I felt since - I look back with many regrets, mainly that I screwed up a friendship but also that we'd not collaborated with anyone else - also at work I've since done a bit of embedded programming and wish I could have applied what I know now back then - all our games were very synchronous - the only interrupt routines were for the soundtracker - knowing what I do today I could have easy pushed setting up the next blitter operation via interrupt and also got all the sound handling interrupt based (rather than using loops to stop the sound playing) - I had tried all these things back in the day but I had so many guru's and disk corruptions that I gave up trying - I also wish I'd not been such a puritan about writing everything in 68000 - I should have written all my tools and utilities in C using Intuition - I was quite arrogant in that respect back then - hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I gradually lost my interest in computer games - yes I still buy consoles - I have a PS3 which I never play on - I joke with people that its like people who lose an arm but still think they can feel it - in 2000 I got into pinball - I now have a collection of 5 machines which I enjoy tinkering with.

I know this is a massive rant - in many ways its quite cathartic as this has been a lingering sore for many years - I would also be very interested to know what your recollections are or what you are up -to today in the scene?

I did drag out my A500 but it refuses to do anything - the hard-disk spins up but I have no idea what is on it - I have two big boxes of disks (half code, half utilities) - everything we'd/I'd written is in there - there are labelled source code disks for everything I think including ABII and the map editor - I don't know if they were the latest source or not however - if you are interested in any of it you can have it all including the hard disk - you are welcome to do whatever you want with them if they work at all - I don't know how else I can read them myself - I had an external Amiga disk drive but
no idea how I could interface that with a PC - if the Amiga had booted I could have done a serial transfer I guess.

Anyway if you are interested in my collected coding history - most of it quite embarrassing (especially the GS team stuff - oh we where young and knew no better) you are welcome to it - send me an address and I'll pack it up and post it to you - the only payment I'd want is a copy of the source code
for AlienBashII if you managed to extract it (even though god knows what use it is)!?

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyone want to help Glen with this? Let me know

[prowler]

Sure!

Where is this stuff now, other than "away from Kent"?

[Heavy Stylus]

Bristol.

Note that the disks have been (in an attic, boxed) for 10 years...

[Heavy Stylus]

BTW,

"A500 hard-disk is a scsi drive which fits onto the left side of the machine."

Don't know if that helps.

[prowler]

Hmm... Nearer to you than me.

However, I could arrange to be in the Bristol area on Wednesday evening...

Originally Posted by Heavy Stylus

BTW,

"A500 hard-disk is a scsi drive which fits onto the left side of the machine."

Don't know if that helps.

Yes, that helps very much. For I have an A590 attachment for my A500 which would accept just such a SCSI hard drive!

[Heavy Stylus]

I've noticed a few peeps are now viewing this. Truth is I'd rather someone with a technical background to help with this rather than an EAB member (like me) who would basically have to learn all this data transfer stuff from the ground up...

If anyone has experience of doing this sort of thing, then hit me with a pm.

[prowler]

Well, I'm not going to plead that you let me become involved, but the offer is there nonetheless.

I would not offer if I had no experience of data transfer/recovery.

[Heavy Stylus]

Hi Prowler - I really didn't mean to cause any offence at all!

Of course, I appreciate the offer. I just happen to know that Phil (Galahad) lives close, and he eats asm for breakfast, so that's why this offer was primarily directed to him. Sorry if I made anyone feel pissed by that last comment - I don't know that many people here after all!

[StingRay]

Now this sounds interesting. Question is, would he ship to Germany? I'd happily try to rescue any of his sources and would send them back to him of course.

[Heavy Stylus]

Sorry guys, but Galahad has confirmed that he'll do the collection.

I will ensure that you all get access to the data (and any unreleased/unfinished stuff mentioned above) when released.

Thanks for the interest, Glen will be really pleased when he sees how much interest his games have generated within 5 minutes of posting here!

[Peter]

What a great thread - well done HS - thanks for sharing this great story!

Thanks of course go to Glen for letting us know the real deal on this legendary little Amiga game - I still play ABII - I love it.

[CodyJarrett]

Phill! You've lost floppies with irreplaceable Amiga material on them in the past (http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=209845). If you are unable to recover the contents can you please let us know now!

[Graham Humphrey]

Hello Mr Stylus, I just got your message via MSN - looks like it's all sorted now but thanks anyway - not that I could have been much help!

Thanks for your efforts and thanks for sharing Glen's story - it was a very interesting read. And I look forward to seeing what Galahad can retrieve

[Hungry Horace]

but if galahad is quitting:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=52787

are EAB members not going to see the result of the recovery? :/


i'm not interested in the back-story, or any right/wrong doing or past mistakes. i think we'd all just like to be sure we all get to enjoy this find

i myself would love to have a look at the Alien Bash II source.

[dirkies]

interesting read indeed, and I second his memory of the TechTech demo, I was also flabbergasted when I saw and never again a demo could do me the same effect as TechTech did, sure many technically superior demos came out later, but the difference between what I was used to in these days (1987!) and then see that demo just blew me away.
Thanks for the post, was nice to read some nostalgic behind the screens story.

[dlfrsilver]

I already transfered Delphine software A590 development hard drive content to PC for Thierry Levastre.

Done it once, i can then do it again.

I'm only 400km from center of England

[Heavy Stylus]

OK. First of all I'd like to say how sorry I am that this innocent thread has caused one of EAB's longest standing members to quit.

The request to find someone to help with this is now open again, but with the following added criteria (as suggested by Galahad).

(1) Due to their fragile nature, the disks should ideally be collected in person from Glen in Bristol rather than posted to prevent any further damage.
(2) A A500 will be required to access the A500 SCSI HD ("A500 hard-disk is a scsi drive which fits onto the left side of the machine.")
(3) Any rescued data must be burnt onto a CDR and returned to Glen first (for him to verify there is nothing personal there), before it is released to the community.
(4) There are a lot of disks ("two big boxes") to go through, of questionable condition ("stored in the attic for 10 years"). Please be warned that this may result in your drive being damaged, and Glen or I cannot be held responsible for that. Ideally, the person who does this will have a spare drive just in case - BTW, I assume 90% of the disks, if not all, will be Amiga Dos format, as Glen states that he didn't learn how to bypass the OS whilst coding AB2.

Sound reasonable, or indeed feasible? Drop me a line.

[Heavy Stylus]

Originally Posted by Hungry Horace

i myself would love to have a look at the Alien Bash II source.

I would like to get the two-button joystick routine fixed so that the game can be played with a CD32 pad (at the moment firing with the red button causes grenades to fire as well :P). And have a look at the editors

[Hungry Horace]

Originally Posted by Heavy Stylus

I would like to get the two-button joystick routine fixed so that the game can be played with a CD32 pad (at the moment firing with the red button causes grenades to fire as well :P). And have a look at the editors

even i could do that with the code :P