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Zoom interview transcript with Tony Cruise of Electric Adventures:
Andrew Fisher: OK, so great to talk to you and obviously have an interesting story, you were programming back in the 80s, and…
Tony Cruise: Yeah, Because, you know, I lived all the way down here in Tasmania. So not even on mainland Australia. No internet back then. But basically, I started at high school with computers, I was doing advanced science. You did a specialist project over the last two years of high school. So high school for us is years nine and ten, and I was going to do rocketry, and one of my mates in the class said, why don't we ask the teacher if we could go play with the computer? And I went, oh, computer, that'd be cool. And the teacher said yes, we could go play with the school's computer, which was a dumb terminal Into what was called the Elizabeth Computing Center, which was Tasmania's mini that they had. So this dumb terminal, with a VDU and a keyboard. We started playing around, discovering it, and by the end of grade 10, I handed in a paper on how to program in BASIC on the mini.
And that sort of got me started and then I then I went to college, and I enrolled in all the computer courses I could and bought books over the school holidays. They're actually the two TRS 80 game programming books, the two black ones. I've only got a vague memory of them. I can't actually find them. Because I used to go to Tandy's and play with the computers at the Tandy store, and they used to let us play with the computers at the Tandy store because we'd help them sell computers to the people that were buying them. And I'd read all those by the time I started the first year of college. And so I just ate all that up and I once again wrote another game.
I wrote a slightly different - so inspired by the Super Star Trek game that was on the mainframe, I wrote a version of that as my project. And we're supposed to do it on the - This is actually the second year when I did this project and we had just got the BBC micros.
I got the BBC. I ran the BBC out of memory because I was only programming it in BASIC. So they let me once again program something on the mainframe. So the Super Star Trek, I had an open grid so rather than the sectors that you had, was it nine by nine? I had an open grid and your grid moved around inside that, you could navigate in that. And no, I have no idea where the source code of that thing is. And then I went to work at a local game store. It was actually called Let's Play Games. I used to sell chess computers and everything like that and the gentleman got in… During this period I bought a TI-99/4 which is the very first model of the TI-99 with the chiclet keyboard and uppercase. I was supposed to get the Advanced BASIC cartridge with it, but the person never gave it to me. So I didn't have anything else other than TI Invaders and Munch Man, so I couldn't do much with it.
So I didn't have the assembler editor or anything like that. And its tools were very primitive. So the guy was running this local store. He had the Spectravideo 318s. And he had the agency for them for Australia. Spectravideo were two Hong Kong-based Americans, who designed this machine with all these peripherals, and I absolutely loved this machine. Well, it had the same graphics chip as the TI so that was familiar. It had lots of sprites and colours and I had learned a fair bit about that. But it had a really good BASIC in it like a really good BASIC. And I've been on the Tandy's, so the BASIC of the Tandy was the previous version - especially the CoCo, which was the version directly before Spectravideo BASIC and Spectravideo BASIC is the version just before MSX BASIC.
You can quite literally see that MSX BASIC if you look at the BIOS that it is version 1.3. And I wrote some games that were released in some of the magazines, the user group magazines. And with my friend, tried to convince him to do the same. Then I decided to release some. I wrote some more games and decided to release some Program Packs. So, my first cassette was four games - one of them was a sprite editor and three games all written in BASIC on a cassette tape that I released myself. And I started thinking of adding a little bit of machine code. The second tape had a game called Hopper on it as an example, so you can guess what Hopper was based on. And I had all of the sprites that were controlling all of the elements that you jumped over all moving with machine code. So I ended up releasing about 22 of those Program Packs with a variety of anywhere between two and four games on them.
And then I had a go at doing some machine code. So my very first full machine code game was Meteor Swarm, which was an Asteroids clone And another little game called Birds Of Orion, both very small games. So I thought no, you know, they're only small so I put them on a tape together. So they've always been Meteor Swarm side A, Birds Of Orion side B. And they're only 4k each, and then I made a Pac-Man clone, which is my Munch Mania. I'd written a Munch Man in BASIC in those earlier Program Packs.
And then my biggest selling game back in the day is called Pyxidis. And I sold enough copies of that in Australia - and the Program Packs in Australia and New Zealand to buy myself a car. And the entrepreneur in myself - when the magazine… So there was the user group magazine and then there was Computer Forum magazine, which was published in newsagents. And I'd started writing a Beyond BASIC series for those where you used a bit of machine code to add on commands to BASIC to move sprites and things like that. And I'd actually written the whole thing, but only the first one in Computer Forum because the magazine folded. So I took the magazine over and relaunched it as Micro Gazette and changed it to every two months. And mainly just because to sell my software, and I did enjoy writing even back then. And all my friends were going to help me of course. But after the first issue other than my wife drawing a lot of the cover art, I wrote the whole thing and just pretended to be the different people. And that included writing the listings and everything like that. So I wrote the program that allows you to type in listings and get a checksum as you go.
So I wrote a checksum listing and then an MSX version of that, lots of people used that and I included my listings. I learnt a little bit of desktop publishing. And then I thought I'd write a technical guide. Because none of the books that came for the Spectravideo and MSX were that good. Well, it was the Spectravideo era, MSX books were a lot better. So that's where my Spectravideo and MSX complete user guide, the first version, and that was published in white plastic binders and photocopied pages inside. My first book that I released post-modern, which is that book, I added the Beyond BASIC articles from the magazine and re-edited the whole thing. And that's my book on Amazon. And then a little bit later on, there's a fair gap and then I wrote Programming Games for the ColecoVision, which sprang from – on my YouTube channel, I started a ‘Let's program a retro game’ series and I wrote a lot of things. Because I've always liked teaching other people how to do things. And that is what is missing from a lot of guides online There's information, but there's nothing that joins it together and nothing to walk people through from the start to the end. And my latest book Classic Game Programming for the NES is based on that book and that video series. With a lot of help from the manning editors, which I've appreciated, has assisted with my writing. And we've produced quite a solid book that takes people right from the beginning, teaches you 6502 as much as necessary, and then introduces one concept at a time. Taking people through step by step and they get a little mini-game at the end and then hopefully they know how to make their own games after that.
AF: That's excellent. So, I mean, what was it that got you back into programming for the old machines again, what sort of change or what happened?
TC: Yes, well it was sort of it was the Coleco scene, right? Because I mean I had Coleco back in the day - I didn't have a physical version, I sold them in that store we're talking about but I had my Spectravideo and I had the Coleco adapter, I had a controller from a broken Coleco system That's the only reason I had a Coleco because you had to use a Coleco controller with it, and I only had about eight Coleco games, but I played them to death. Later on, there was a hack - you could cut through the back of the Coleco adapter and there was an expansion board in there. Then you could put the Super Expander on the back with the Coleco adapter in the middle. And then other clever people managed to then copy those ROMs onto disk. And so you could load the whole Coleco library, as long as you had that Coleco adapter in, from disk. Because another reason the Spectravideo was so popular down here was we had most of Australia's CP/M gurus. And the machine was a very good CP/M machine when it was first released. And for disk transfers. It had like 21 different CP/M formats. You can transfer disks between so it was a very good machine just for that, and it had an 80-column card um, and a serial and a parallel printer, you know all sorts of stuff that CP/M people wanted back in the day.
And then I, you know, naturally being such into that thing. I went into the MSX afterwards and converted most of my titles. My main workhorse machine was a Spectravideo 738 Express, which is the one that looks a bit like the Apple 2c. They probably got a lot of ideas from that 2c, I reckon when they designed it. And that was a great little machine because it was an unfinished MSX2 sold as an MSX1. It has space on the PCB for a real-time clock and the extra video RAM to take it from 16 to 128K video RAM. It's a very simple mod to make them an MSX2 because that's what they were supposed to be in the first place. You can with a lot of wiring and things make them an MSX2+ as well.
The MSX did die out in Australia though. So MSX1 was reasonably popular, we had the Sony Hit Bit yes, the Sanyo one with the tape deck in the side, the Yamaha one was sold in pretty much every hi-fi audio store, and we had the Pioneer one that looked like a big stereo equipment.
There are lots of PAL Pioneers around, and the first model that I had - the Yamaha first model only came with 32k of RAM. So I made a PCB and used cassette cases as the cases because they're exactly the same size as an MSX cartridge case. And I made 32K RAM cartridges and sold them to Yamaha and Pioneer users. Those Pioneer machines are particularly decent quality and well built - like a piece of stereo gear. And they have the one feature of the TMS chip that not a lot of people use, which is the video pass-through. So you can do video overlay and of course, if you plug in a laserdisc, that's where the MSX laserdisc games come from. But most of those are Japanese and if you use a PAL Pioneer, you get black and white with the laserdisc, the rest of its colour, it can't quite get the timings right. So you need, and they're rarer, a Japanese Pioneer which is a lot rarer than a PAL Pioneer. So, back to your original question and what I got back into - I think so, I got back into the Coleco community, I suppose, and I thought well I could release a game like that.
So I took my three first machine code titles, which were Meteor Swarm, Birds Of Orion and Munch Mania. Once again, I could have released them as single titles like other people do but I go, well, they're only small games I'm not giving people enough value. So I whacked on a menu. And mate, that was my first cartridge in-box release for the Coleco. That was just fantastic to me, being able to see one of my games on a cartridge in a box. And that was my first one.
I have subsequently put out, for the Coleco, I've published. Cavern Fighter, which was an unfinished game of mine – from Scramble, last worked on in 1990, that was all working but didn't have any sound, so I put that over to the Coleco, and had to deal with memory issues.
So I also steadfastly try and support the original Coleco hardware expansions. Yes, It's just my brain I think it's lazy to give in, if you know what I mean. And I also wrote the semi-official port of Berserk Um for the ColecoVision which includes speech - which is a feat on the Coleco's extremely basic sound chip. It's quite limited its main limitation with doing speech is not enough volume steps. And the only way to do is speech on you know old computers like this is to fluctuate the volume.
AF: Yeah, I'm familiar with that from the Commodore 64 sound samples.
TC: Yeah, and the SID's able to do waveforms whereas the chip in the Coleco is completely CPU-bound with no waveforms. You can just set your frequency and your volume. That's it. Even so, it's still not that much easier to make speech on the MSX without tying up the CPU, it does have slightly more volume steps, more frequency range and it does have waveforms, but it still doesn't help you make speech. The main thing about Berserk is I do know that not everybody can understand the speech; I've come to realize that some people just can't understand the speech even though I can - whether it's on a 50-Hertz machine or 60-Hertz machine and emulators.
Yeah, it works But some people, they can't hear it. Or they can't understand the words. But the main point I like about that game is all the speech is done during the game, there's no stopping the game and playing the speech. So you can get slightly better speech if you do that. I was trying to make it as close to the arcade as possible. And that one has all of the rooms. The maze is exactly the same as the arcade, I picked apart the assembly code.
Now during this time, um, so CollectorVision were the main people who published those first original titles. And one of those gentlemen part of CollectorVision is called John Lester or Gamer81 as he is known online. And he started the Game On expo over in Arizona. And three months before the first one, he said, Tony, you know how to do these homebrew things, can you make us a Nintendo World Championship cart for the expo? And I went Okay, realize I haven't programmed anything in 6502 or used the Nintendo. And he went, here's some assets we've got from our Sydney Hunter and everything like that. So I started with that, and I made the Sydney Hunter mini-game. And then the hardest one was Pedal to the Metal, which is the racing game. Because I had to work out scrolling, and this is where I discovered the documentation for the NES was terrible.
Even on the forums, it was all over the place. They didn't agree with each other. Especially with scrolling things like that, and it has improved a lot since. But it was all over the place – wrong, inconsistent, and there was no guide on how to do things.
I just had to work them out plus learn 6502 And then I was getting down to the wire. I think I had about six days left so I just took my Meteor Swarm and quickly ported that across as the third game, added the six-minute 21-second timer and sent it over and that's what got burnt onto the gold and the grey carts that they made. So they made like replica Nintendo World Championship cartridges, they say Game On expo. And they ran their championship and I believe there are only six of the gold carts. I've got one, John's got another one, the winner got one, and they made 150 of the grey carts.
So that was my interest in NES.
Then the quick port of my Meteor Swarm game, they said, we quite like that, how about we do a separate release of that? So I enhanced it, and I made it more like Asteroids Deluxe rather than Asteroids where you've got the enemy that splits apart, the different type of UFOs that split apart, and shields. And released that on a cartridge that didn't ever get a box though. But that did spur me on, so CollectorVision went In partnership with three other homebrew publishers at the time to get the first NES cartridge mould and had a one-quarter share in it. And now that mould spread all over the place you can buy shells anyway.
Also from that time, I've been working on the down-port of Sydney Hunter in the Caverns of Death from the Super Nintendo to the NES. The game's been feature-complete and finished for a while, but with John running the expo and doing all the testing himself he's sort of like every three months, I'll get, oh I found these couple of bugs. And I'll fix those couple of bugs and then you know, that might come at an inconvenient time when I'm at work or something like that. So it took me a couple of weeks and then I'll have a session, fix all those bugs, send it back to him And then you won't hear back for a while. So it is almost ready, all 10 levels done, you can play the game from start to finish and I thought we were done. But just the other day he sent me and said he's found another couple of things he's got to be fixed, so it is almost there.
Now with all this publishing, I've always wanted to publish stuff for the original Spectravideo because that's where I started. And other than the original seven or eight cartridges that came out for it, there were never any more cartridges made for it. Many years ago I designed a schematic - and that's not really my cup of tea - made some PCBs and they didn't quite work. A gentleman in Russia, I forget his name, saw my work on that because I was asking for help, and I sent him the schematic. They fixed it and they used it - there is a Spectravideo demo that was entered into the Demo party over there. They did a very good job with this thing and the origins of the PCB came from my design that they fixed. I forgot his name, one of the YouTubers - he does quite good repair videos. Because there's a ROM like a tape out there that you can turn a Spectravideo into an MSX.
I'll look it up. Search Spectravideo – Noel’s Retro, Yeah, Noel’s Retro Lab.
AF: Oh, yes. Yes, I've seen some of his videos.
TC: Yes yeah, so he quite likes the Spectravideo as well and he made quite a nice simple PCB design and that's what I use to give credit where credit's due. Yeah, the latest title which I call my EA 70s Arcade Classics So that started from what are some of my BASIC games that I could rewrite in machine code and make a little better. So I started with Lunar Rescue, one of my favourite games. Back in the day, I wrote a version in BASIC that was on one of my Program Packs, I can't remember which, but I wrote a version there. It was fairly basic, I had a little bit of machine code in it, but I rewrote that from scratch, used some of the graphics from that plus enhanced some of them.
That was the first game I had. The submarine game, I think I call it something different from my one, but I took the graphics from that and wrote that in machine code. And I thought oh, well, these are both from the 70s, I'll find another game from the 70s. So I thought, well, a simple one to add would be Stunt Cycle. It was harder than I thought - to get the jump physics - and put them together on a cartridge. And then I was like, well, I'll design all the boxes myself this time because I want to release it for the MSX, Spectravideo, and Coleco. So that's my first self-published title for the Coleco. And that's been selling, that's been out for about two months now and it's been selling quite well. The other day I went to make some more cartridges and realised I only had two of the logic chips left. I've made sure I had enough EEPROMs and PCBs. I'm making the cartridge shells. I thought I had heaps of the chips, but there are two different types. There's one for the Spectravideo, one for the Coleco And I went, oh damn. So I had to do a quick order from Mouser, slightly more expensive, but yeah, they delivered those in a couple of days.
And my next title? So I went to the last Game On expo when I met John Hancock. I had been talking to him before because he nicely did a back cover quote on my latest book. And we basically talked the whole show, and he said he'd love to see his game that he designed - Block ‘Em Sock ‘Em - on the Coleco. I said, well I could do that on the Spectravideo and the MSX as well if you want. And we've also got a cunning plan because I've always wanted to make a Master System game. Because the Master System is a descendant of - if you put the TMS chip on a bit of an ancestry diagram, MSX2 goes one way, Sega master system goes this way, and NES goes that way. Yes, so the NES, the Nintendo stole the TMS design for what they used in Nintendo. It's just a different usage of the same chip, same circuitry if you know what I mean, but they cleverly added horizontal and vertical scrolling. The Sega Master System and MSX2 obviously have a lot more video RAM, a lot more resolution and colours, but they only added vertical scrolling in that generation. But with a lot more video RAM and things you can do some tricks, and MSX2+ introduces horizontal and vertical scrolling, a couple more high-resolution modes and even more colours. But they're all related, all second cousins.
And I like programming for different machines, I would like - I mean, 6502 obviously, runs on some very interesting machines. I would like to program a game for the Commodore 64 or even the Atari 8-bit at some stage. Obviously got a lot more challenging, you know, video and audio hardware to learn, but I like playing with base hardware like that.
AF: And so you mentioned, you know, you sort of made those BASIC versions of the 1970s arcade games, you know, why is that? What do you think is the challenge of rewriting them, of making new versions of them? What is the thing that made you, sort of focus on those?
TC: Well for a start they're simple, right? So they're simple, fun game mechanics. And they can be - Obviously, you have to have different aspect ratios compared to the arcade, so you do have to redesign them a little bit, especially Lunar Rescue. Lunar Rescue was a very tall vertical game, like Space Invaders - Space Invaders is quite tall - because it does run on Space Invaders hardware. Depth Charge wasn't as hard, so Lunar Rescue was the one that had to have the most changes, but I added a lot more colour and tile detail…
I just noticed there's my video frozen.
AF: Yes. Yeah, I think yours has Don't know what's happened there.
TC: I just noticed I’ve got this expression I'll just turn my video off and on again. Okay As we do Okay
TC: You can still hear me, can't you?
AF: I can still hear you, yes, I've been hearing you fine, I'm just not seeing the video.
TC: It won't let me turn the camera on, I reckon the camera stack has crashed.
I only freshly installed Skype on this machine. Okay, no worries.
AF: No worries, we can carry on with audio anyway.
So you're saying that it was the mechanics that attracted you to those games as much as anything?
TC: Yeah, yeah, and it's moving quite a few objects at once. Because I've always broken things down - my code is different from other users who attempt to write games. They sort of put in one block of code, whereas I've always been a multi-threaded sort of person if you know what I mean. So you have the things that you allocate to the non-maskable interrupt, which is when you should draw things to the screen, whereas other people put it all in one loop and have waits and things like that.
They'll wait for a frame to finish and then they draw in their main loop. Whereas I, if you wanted to change some tiles in the background, I have a buffer and fill that and then the NMI just goes around in its loop and if it sees there's something in that buffer, it goes and writes to the screen because it knows it's safe and then clears the buffer out, so you can put some more stuff in there.
So that's another thing. I noticed - the game industry as a whole suffered when multi-threading came along.
Let's say the Jaguar is one of the first of those, and people either got it straight away or it was difficult to understand. And the PC industry suffered for years with games being single-threaded and relying on the graphics card. It took ages for the game industry to finally adopt multiple threads. So I've liked multi-threaded stuff in my business career as well, I've written systems that process thousands and thousands of files that are multi-threaded. So when I was working for a bank. So I suppose it's always been an area of fascination for me. And the other thing I deal with is data. So my current position, I process and transform lots of data for people.
And I just love those early 80s games that you can just pick up and play. I mean I love the Atari 2600 as an example. I'll sit down and play some Atari 2600 games because they're just fun. The graphics might be primitive. And it's amazing what some people can do with that machine, considering how old the hardware is.
What they've been doing lately with the Atari 8-bit, because I mean on both that, like the 2600, you program the display. You write a driver that programs the display.
You have complete control over it. So the world is your oyster, depending on how good you are with timings.
AF: I was going to ask, is there any sort of recent homebrew that's particularly impressed you?
TC: Well there was the good Galagish on the Commodore 64.
And then I believe an Atari 8-bit person has gone, I can do better than that. And they have taken the concept of that one. And if you go and have a look at his work, you'll go, yep, it's going to be better. Because the Atari 8-bit is faster, and you do have that display list processor. So there is a possibility for it to be better than the C64 version. So that's quite impressive.
I've been doing, because I tend to have too many hobbies and try and do too many things. I've realized that about myself. So I've also got a YouTube channel.
And although I enjoy it, keeping up even a weekly schedule I was trying to do, it's just too much. So I have forced myself to go back to fortnightly. And once a month I now do a homebrew video where I go and scour the Internet and find all the Kickstarters and games in development and ones you can buy now. And just do a video where I talk to the camera, and I put screenshots up. I enjoy doing it because I'm looking for those games myself.
I like supporting other homebrewers and seeing what they're making and seeing what they're doing with machines. I just like seeing these old machines do things that you didn't think they could do.
AF: Yes, I agree with you.
TC: And the NES community is, like, when I published my first game for the Coleco as a homebrew, the NES homebrew scene was dead. Dead as a doornail.
And it wasn't. That was when the first shell came into being. But still, nobody was publishing homebrew games for the NES. But now they're everywhere. We've had NESmaker, which helped a lot. And my book will hopefully spur a few people on as well. Yeah, it's going to explode.
But you can also see a lot of 16-bit ones now.
AF: Yeah, I've been following the Scorpion engine on Amiga, which is doing some interesting work at the moment. So that's a big development at the moment.
TC: I have a strange story. So after the MSX, I researched my next machine carefully. So there was the Atari ST and the Amiga. I wanted to get a machine that was going to live and be supported. And I chose the Amiga. I saved up, I sold all sorts of things, lots of original computers that I still had. And I went in, and I plonked my money down for an Amiga 500. I could never afford an Amiga 1000.
My friend had an Amiga 1000. Went down, plonked my money down, and took it home. I bought it with a copy of Garrison, which is like the Gauntlet. I love Gauntlet, by the way. And another game, which was in a plastic case like Interceptor or something like that. It was a shooter. I've always been a shooter fan in my opinion.
Took that home, and started playing with it. The mouse died. Within two days.
Which was a very common thing when they first came out. Went back, and got another mouse.
Went home. Another four days went by, and the drive died. Went back to the store.
And by that stage, they'd had so many returns. They did not have any replacement drives. And I was beside myself.
So I got a refund. My actual boss in the store that I worked in, I still worked in that store. sold Atari STs. Because he had a long association with Atari. And so I saved money. I got it for quite a bit cheaper than the Amiga. I got an Atari 520 ST to start with, with the inbuilt drive. A monochrome monitor. Hacked a cable so I could have both a monochrome monitor and play games on the TV.
And that was my gaming machine and my word processor. And I bought the C. Now for the Amiga, I bought all the C compilers and everything like that. I still have those. So I didn't get my money back on those. And I never really used them to start with. Because I didn't have a machine for ages. Because at my work, I was one of the first people to start using C. And we got Windows 2, which was basically like an application that you run on the DOS. Windows 2, it gave you Windows and allowed you to run, I think it was PageMaker. It was the very first thing. And desktop publishing there too.
And I wrote a time-shedding application in C for Windows. And Windows 3 came along. And that worked on that. So I knew C very well during that era. So I learned C and used it on the Atari ST and started writing business applications. And started writing a game with a friend which was to be Exodus 2. But it never got finished. I have rescued the graphics that my friend made, which were very biological sort of ships and everything. He did a very good job of those. I've made sure I've kept them aside and perhaps resurrect it one day.
And my friend who had the Amiga 1000 showed up at my house one day with the Amiga 1000 and said, Tony, I know you always wanted one of these, here you go. And that was the first of many. That was in the era before I started formally collecting again. It was the other friend, the one I talked about earlier that I said programmed on the Spectravideo. When he left the state of Tasmania, he showed up at my doorstep and he gave me his Spectravideo 738. That's why I've got two. And his Atari 2600 and all its games. And said, you and I used to have so much fun of this playing. Because I used to ride my bike around to his place to play his Atari 2600. About five kilometres after school.
And he said, you and I had so much fun, you might as well enjoy it. And I don't want to take it to the mainland with me.
And that got me started collecting. I bought, I think, an Atari XEGS with a whole heap of games, I think it was an ad in the newspaper or something. And then I just started collecting.
And I started YouTube as well. So that's about 13 years ago.
And my collection has grown just a little bit. Some would say to the extent of madness. Now, my original MSX stuff I did keep but I never had any cartridges other than Bank Street Writer, which was a word processor. I only had tape games. So my first cartridge games for the MSX was a lot of four very rough-looking cartridges that included Nemesis, which is the first Gradius game. And a couple of others.
I now have over 650 games for the MSX, most of them on cartridge. Some of those I bought before they got insanely expensive. Some of them were expensive, but I got them before they were insanely expensive. I wouldn't like to buy them again.
AF: Just a last question then. What other projects are you working on at the moment? What sort of games are in progress?
TC: So the next one is Block ‘Em Sock ‘Em, John Hancock's game.
I also have my Pixydis game, which is my biggest selling one, which is a vertical scrolling shooter. I was limited to 12.5K for the game and usable RAM because it needed to run on the Spectravideo 318 and load from cassette. So I've written a Pixydis EX. I've improved the semi-parallax scrolling. It's got a starfield that scrolls at a different speed to the big ship you're flying over. Runs on the Coleco, and I've added a challenge stage. I'm adding different bosses, better sound and things like your ship has a shadow. The bullets that get fired at you, they cycle through colours so they're easier to see. And obviously, my sprite anti-flicker routine is in there, whereas I didn't understand that concept back in the day. So the TMS chip has the four sprites in a line. But with alternating frames, so 25 frames a second, you get eight per line. No worries at all. So a little enhancement. So Pixydis EX will be another one. Probably follows about two months after the Block ‘Em Sock ‘Em.
So Block ‘Em Sock ‘Em’s working. I've got the original gameplay. I'm going to enhance it a little bit. And just add sound and music. And it's just about done.
Plus, of course, Sydney Hunter and the Caverns of Death for the NES will be released. John has promised to put some other testers on it.
And on my website, you'll see I've put together the graphics and some things for Kangaroo. I've always loved platform games and I haven't written one. Other than my original basic ones. There were good ports on the 2600, although very basic. And the Atari 8-bit was the best one. But not many other things. I have to see how I go with the rights on that one. So I will write the game and then at least the new Atari is open to discussing things. I just need to do a rights thing and see who owns that now.
I've been a developer all my life and I truly believe in developers' work. I'm not fond of a lot of the Coleco community's quick and nasty ports of MSX games that they don't own. They've done that a lot.
And sadly, the toolset that a lot of them use, doesn't take a long time. They can convert an MSX game in a couple of days. And slap it in a box and sell it for the same price as somebody who spent six months to a year writing an original title.
And it's never gelled well with me. And those tools were written by people who had Spectravideos and wanted to run MSX games on their Spectravideo. So the people using these tools didn't even make the tools. But some of them spread it around as if they were the ones that created these tools. But history gets diluted. So Kangaroo.
I also like twin-stick shooters. So Space Dungeon. I haven't quite worked out the control scheme for the different systems yet, but I'll include a few options.
And there is one more. I'm jogging my own memory with my website. That's sad, isn't it? I know I've forgotten something.
So I also made an MSX Coleco sprite and tileset editor that's used by quite a few of the homebrew developers. And they keep on asking me to add a sound editor to it. I might one day.
That's the other one. Seaquest. So Seaquest only came out for the Atari 2600. So Activision used to port their games to everything. And Seaquest is one of those Atari 2600 games that didn't come out for anything else. And it was one of my favourite shoot-em-up titles for the 2600. And I held the world record for quite some time. 229,000. And I have a mostly working version of that that I haven't got back to for a while that I'd like to finish.
AF: That's cool. You've got quite a few projects in line then.
TC: And there is one more… So Jim from Jim’s Bitesize Games has a design for a game called Asteroid Rescue. So he's designed the pictures you can see there. And I've got it running on the… I started with the Spectravideo for this one, not the Coleco. But I haven't released it yet because it's a bit… The concept is a little bit like Lunar Rescue for the top part. And yes, I haven't abandoned that, and I'll bring that out at some stage. I needed to rip the band-aid off about publishing my own titles.
And I believe relying on others to publish it was… I can't show you a video. I was going to say I was going to hold up a box. I'm very proud of the box that I'm holding up at the moment because it's the Spectravideo version. And the fact that I have released the first cartridge for the Spectravideo in 40 years. And it's outsold the MSX version, which I'm most proud of.
AF: Really? That's impressive.
TC: I didn't expect the MSX version to sell that well because it's not the MSX community's cup of tea. They've gone well past arcade ports. The original stuff that comes out every year for the MSX dev competition is amazing.
AF: Yes, it's fantastic, isn't it? It's amazing. I was just playing some of the new ones for this year's yesterday.
TC: And as I said, most of them are original game concepts. That's the thing I like the most about it.
They are truly coming up with… And they're getting together in teams and they're making graphics and they're making amazing sound. I could never do sound and music to the level those guys can do. But no, I used to publish games in the 80s. There's no reason why I couldn't do it. And I've done it now. And it's all set up. So the next title is going to be that much easier. And when I start selling the second title, people who haven't bought the first one will grab a copy of that. So with each title, it'll get easier.
And the one thing that does annoy me about CollectorVision is they do a print run of a certain number of boxes and that's it. And they don't make the titles again and they don't keep things in stock. Whereas it's cheaper with the boxes to just buy a whole heap of boxes. You've got to store them somewhere, of course. And have all the other bits on hand and manufacture as you go and manage your stock levels.
I've got a proper web store. Everybody gets tracking when I send them stuff. The Australian exchange rate is a benefit at the moment because the Americans get a 40% discount. And even the UK, you get a fair discount when you buy. Because of the exchange rate.
So I am thoroughly enjoying – and I suppose I'm a little older. My youngest child is 18 now so I do get a little bit more, shall we say, me time. And I quite enjoy the actual assembling of the cartridges. And I am 3D printing the shells. I bought a decent 3D printer. I would like after a couple of Coleco releases to buy my own injection mould for that one. Spectravideo will always be print-on-demand because the numbers aren't there. And I can buy MSX injection moulded shelves, of course, because they're widespread. It’s just that you need to order like 200 of them. And I knew I wasn't going to sell 200 of this. I did have 100 MSX shells, but they're for a Konami PCB, which I didn't realise. I've had them for years. Because I've been going to get around to publishing for the MSX myself for ages. But I couldn't find a decent PCB that has the mounting holes for Konami. They're all different. It's called the non-Konami layout that I discovered. So I've been 3D printing those. Luckily, the numbers aren't large because it takes a lot of filament. They're a big print.
And 3D printed cartridges are a lot heavier than injection moulded ones physically. I noticed somebody who reviewed my game said, Oh yeah, these are quite weighty cartridges. I've been enjoying that. And I do all the soldering myself and all the electronics. I enjoy that. But I didn't design any of the PCBs other than having that original design that didn't quite work for the Spectravideo. But that at least got other people who knew a bit more started. And they got it over the line.
AF: That is brilliant. Fantastic to talk to you. And I've probably got plenty enough here for the article. So that's great. Really fascinating story. Great to talk to you. Enjoy the rest of your day.
TC: I'll settle in, and I'll probably do some more programming.
AF: I'll look forward to seeing more of your games in the future. All right.
TC: Thank you. Very nice to meet you, Andrew. Take care.
NEWS BYTES
AMIGA: The latest release from Amiten Games is Holy Warrior, the digital download costing €2.95. https://bit.ly/holywarrior-amiga
AMSTRAD CPC: Dave Moore converted early Spectrum classic Transversion, adding gameplay updates from sequels Sector and Sector: Invasion. https://bit.ly/transversion-cpc
ATARI STE: Puzzle game Chroma Grid from T.O.Y.S won the Wild competition at the Sommarhack 2024 demoparty in Sweden and comes with a level editor. https://bit.ly/chromagrid
ATARI XL/XE: Check out the excellent conversion of Mikie by Krzysztof Gora, Michal Szpilowski, and Krzysztof Ziembik. https://bit.ly/mikie-atarixl
COLECOVISION: Oscar Toledo Gutierrez, creator of CVBasic, has converted GORILLA.BAS (pictured) to the console. https://bit.ly/gorilla-coleco
GAME BOY COLOR: Fans of Nintendo’s F-Zero should check out G-Zero World GP by User0x7f immediately. https://bit.ly/gzero-gb
PICO-8: Shmup fans should check out bullet hell game Ghost Wave by monoRAIL, and you can play in the browser. https://bit.ly/ghostwave-pico8
SNES: Goomba Breakout by BriG78cx has a free demo with 5 levels, or pay $5 for the full game with 20 levels of Goomba-bashing action. https://bit.ly/goomba-breakout
VIC-20: You’re going to dig (for treasure in) Misfit’s latest game Panty Man for the unexpanded VIC. https://bit.ly/pantyman-vic20
ZX SPECTRUM: Yandex has opened the 4th Yandex RGB competition for Spectrum programmers. Judges include Ocean’s Simon Butler and Mark R Jones, with the deadline on the 28th of July 2025. https://en.yrgb.ru/
VARIOUS: The latest multiformat game from Inufuto is platformer Osotos. https://bit.ly/osotos-inufuto
CHAMPION CODER - SHANE MCAFFERTY
Zoom interview with Shane - 7pm UK time, 10am Canadian time:
Andrew Fisher: Okay, I'm gonna take a backup audio recording on my phone as well.
Can you just say something for level check on that?
Shane McAfferty: Um! Hello! It's nice to meet you, Andrew, from Canada.
AF: Great. Okay, thank you very much. Right, so. What got you into Game Boy programming?
SM; Okay, uh, well. Like, how long have you got?
I've been. I've. Let me see that I woke up with the Game Boy specifically.
I released a big old video game for PC and Switch about two years ago.
And mobile, all of the things. And it was the biggest video game I ever made on my own.
Um, and I gosh! After that, I got. What is it called?
Where I just lost all my inspiration?
I got burnout. Not the good kind of burnout, not the Criterion Burnout.
The bad burnout.
So, lost, like I couldn't do anything creative at all. Couldn't even think about anything creative. It was too big a project.
And the dude who runs the company that we make video games. He's the other half. He's like the business, he bought me an Analogue Pocket. Which was an extravagant purchase.
Well, then, I knew. And he kind of knew that I would get to it eventually. And he was right.
I did get to it eventually, about a year later. I started to make tiny little Game Boy games.
And that kind of made me better. Those 2 things, kind of combined.
Over the last year I've started to make video games again. So I'm recovering. Ah, whatever the name is. I got into because they were simple. You know, wasn't a big project.
And you can actually do quite a lot with the GB Studio and other kind of helper things with Game Boy. And the scene’s amazing. They're so helpful too.
The Discord, the GB Studio Discord is great and it reminds me of when I was young, programming and making video games and chasing scanlines and stuff. And you know, raster effects. That's a whole layer.
So that's why it is.
AF: That's cool.
SM: I'm a big fan of the PICO 8, as well, you know. I love it.
AF: Covered quite a few, quite a few in the magazine. And so, yeah.
Interesting, seeing that.
SM: I love it. Um, it's so. Um, it's so nice just doing things with extreme limitations.
And they do it so well. They have a sprite editor, and the map editor. Everything's in there that you could want to, you know.
AF: Yeah.
SM: Reminds me. You're old like me, so sorry. Maybe you remember ATOS, and Amos, and stuff.
AF: Yes, yes.
SM: I remember they all had the exploit editors and things. You see, you could get going.
This would be great, reminds you of these days.
AF: Yeah, so um, you, you mentioned GB Studio. Obviously, what is your development environment? And the tools you use.
SM: Oh, yeah. GB Studio I use for most of it. Um, it's Absolutely fantastic. Um, piece of software.
Over the years I've used everything. I've used all the engines and all the um, all the applications to make things over the years. And it's my favourite.
It's absolutely wonderful that there's nothing, it never gets in your way. And you can eject the engine if you want to. If there's something that you think you might, could do a bit better, or you wanted to do a little bit different that isn't the GB Studio way of doing it.
That's totally absolutely fine. There's a button there to be eject the engine.
And just do it.
And the engine code is lovely. It's all friendly and written nice, and the community is great.
It's just a very friendly and good application, and it spits out.
It easily spits out a Game Boy game. For, a GBC or a GB Cart.
And also spits Analogue files.
So It's wonderful.
The only other tool that I really use is Visual Studio Code to edit any C files if I'm if I'm editing the engine in any way. And I do my art in Pixelmator on a Mac. There's not much heavy lifting, which is kind of why I like it.
AF: Great. That's interesting. So what inspired the Starseed games?
SM: Oh yes!
Starseed. Came out first on iPhone. I was an iPhone developer for a decade.
I was a little kid on Atari ST. And Spectrum. And then I stopped when I got old enough to like travel and stuff. And the iPhone got me back into making video games.
I guess 15 years ago, whenever it 1st came out.
And I kind of became the go-to games industry iPhone app guy by accident.
Like I made the Eurogamer application. And then all of a sudden, like. I was making the videogame.com, and like, vg24-7. I mean I did all their like iPhone apps.
And then that kind of got me a window into making iPhone games.
And I always wanted to make a shmup.
Always.
It's easy to make a shmup, but it's really hard to make, you know, what people will consider a decent shmup. And they are a very picky community, let me tell you.
I made Starseed on iPhone. And I was very pleased with this.
And then it came 10 years later, came time to make a Game Boy game.
And I wanted to port Starseed. That's you know, a first project to try.
And Starseed 1 on the Game Boy is very different to Starseed. 2.
Starseed 1 is like a big screen, vertical kind of thing. It's really old-school, and I think I might like it better. It's really just very simple old-school shooter.
And Starseed 2 is a horizontal, more complicated kind of a shooter, which is good as well.
I like them. I'm happy with them. I went back to them. I did the old 'go back 6 months later and see if they're still okay'. Sometimes that doesn't go well.
But it went okay with the Starseed games.
So I made it because I always wanted to make it. And a pixel mode, you know, one with nice pretty pixels. I think it has. I'm happy.
AF: Yes, yes, I've enjoyed playing them myself. So yeah. And then you did. Block Droppin’?
What's the influences on that?
SM: I love puzzle games mostly. If you look at any games, my back catalogue are mostly kind of puzzle games. Either word or puzzle games. I really love Match 3 puzzle games. The matching is fun to do it, and Block Droppin’ started as a challenge to make a match 3 game in GB Studio. Because it doesn't have fancy, mathematics for match 3, you know, predicting matches and whatnot and dropping things and clearing them and dropping more things and clearing them.
So that was kind of a challenge to do that quick.
So it runs quick. I got there eventually.
It's just a nice kind of fun, who doesn't like a match three game.
Well, maybe. Might be a lot of people don't, but I like a match 3 game, and I think that the Game Boy is a good platform for a good match 3 game. You know, it fits.
I'm gonna make a word game next for Game Boy. That's my next thing. That's another platform that super fits the genre. I guess that fits the Game boy.
So I made it because it fits. Figured like a nice change after the shooting game Starseeds it'd be nice to make a puzzle game.
NOTE: Shane released his Word Forward title for Game Boy after this interview was published, based on his earlier Switch and mobile game. Play it here:
AF: It's interesting. So your current project is Hoonigans. So you could tell us a bit more about that. And what sort of where the biggest challenges with it so far?
SM: Hoonigans - I also wanted to make a racing game as that's my favourite genre of video game in general on other platforms. And I never did make one, because it's awful hard for one person to make a decent one. Impossible, almost, for one person to make one.
So excited to give it to go. Given the limitations of Game Boy, it might be possible for one person to make one. And I knew that I couldn't do AI. Because - Game Boy. That's not to say you can't do AI on Game Boy, but I don't know how.
And I love the Project Gotham Racing games. So I figured I'd do like a time-base and skill-based game for the Game Boy. And then I managed to do some limited AI. So there is one-v-one race races in there.
And I love also love the uh the Genesis - oh Jesus, I said, Genesis, I'm here too long!
Mega Drive. Ah! I love the Mega Drive Micro Machines games.
And so the art, you can totally tell, the art is inspired by those games.
And it was hard. The hardest thing was the camera.
The hardest thing was getting - ‘cause you can make an overhead racer and lock the camera to the car in the middle. And it's fine, but really won't feel great, you know. You have to move the camera dynamically so you can see the road ahead, as best you can. And that's tricky on a Game Boy. Um, because it hasn't got much to keep me ahead of the scrolling happening, and the cones and everything. I got there eventually.
I think it runs pretty okay on the Game Boy Color. That was the hardest thing to do, speed, and keeping it running at a decent pace was the hardest thing.
The biggest thing I'm worried about now is that it got very viral.
They've been popular on Twitter or whatnot. I'm kind of afraid people think it's a Micro Machines or something, cause it's like a 2-month little project with 16 tracks.
So let's see how it goes. I’ve finished now. I think it's good to go.
I'll send it to Andy at Thalamus, and I'm sure Andy will publish it. And he's been good to me, through the years. He's very nice. He's very good to me through the years. He's great to deal with. I mean, you've probably met or spoken Andy, at some point over your years.
AF: I have actually met Andy once in real life, and that was in 2005. Just before he went out to Canada. So yeah, I was lucky enough to meet him once. I knew him through Commodore Format because. I was writing for the mag at the end of the time it was around.
SM: I met him once, too, in Toronto, 8 years ago or so. I moved to Canada, too. So we kinda had the same. I sold all my stuff. I had a skip full of stuff. I wish I didn't get rid of or sell.
I had 3 guitar plastic peripherals. DJ Hero stuff. All of that stuff is gone.
I'll collect them again slowly.
Andy. He's very good. I’ve dealt with all sorts of publishers over the years, good and bad.
And Andy's been good.
AF: So, yeah, so would you like to see physical cartridges of your releases?
SM: Of course! I have made my own. I have a burner, you know, and I bought the cartridges, and I made my own just for the shelf. I missed out, all the years I never had a game I made in a store. Or in a box. They were always digital downloads. And Switch and stuff, you know.
So Steam, but never actually a box.
So yeah, I'd love that eventually.
But also, it's difficult. I mean, Andy's got to take a chance. It's that expensive to put games on cartridges, you know.
AF: Mm-hmm.
SM: But I think he might. I think he might do it eventually. For maybe some of the Starseeds or Block Droppin’. I don't know. I can't afford to take a chance, so let's see if anybody wants to give it a go soon. I'd love to put it on a shelf, it would be brilliant.
AF: So are you working on anything new at the moment? Got any projects planned?
Well, I just finished Hoonigans, so I am going to make a word game for Game Boy (see above note on Word Forward). But also, first I want to go back and improve Block Droppin’ on the DMG a little bit. Because. I locked down on Game Boy Colour, and the DMG.
But the DMG version, the graphics are quite dark.
I don't know if you remember R-Type. On the DMG.
AF: Yes.
SM: Instinctively you would have put it on the starfield background, black, but he didn't. Everything in the background is white, and it's like inverted to how it is on every other platform, like, say, the Spectrum. That looks better.
So I should have done that for Block Droppin’ on the DMG.
But I didn't get my DMG until after I released it. So I didn't actually get to test it on the real screen until after I released it. So I'm gonna go fix that.
My mother sent me my DMG, she reluctantly sent me her OG DMG from Ireland.
Can always play Tetris on it, and it still works.
And so I have that here now.
I had to fix a few lines on the screen.
So I have that here now, and I'll fix Block, and then I think I'm going to release a word game for Game Boy, something more sedate than cars zipping around the place.
Before you go any further.
You worked on the magazines.
Because they take me back.
[Transmission breaks up - I had started talking about my time on Commodore Force/Commodore Format]
SM: I know what happened. You mentioned Commodore 64, and you broke it.
And that's what happened.
AF: Sorry.
SM: [Laughs] Okay. It's age-old.
AF: So it was Commodore Force, that was the sort of start of my writing career.
Professor Brian Strain. The technical expert. In the pages of Commodore Force.
And then I was involved in the last few issues of Commodore Format. I did some freelance for them.
And during the Nineties, I was then just writing for small club magazines and disk magazines and things like that. I stuck with the Commodore 64, basically.
And then the early 2000s I started writing for Retro Gamer.
SM: I've been reading Retro Gamer for decades, now. All my children have grown up with Retro Gamer. And we're bathroom readers and Canadians don't like that.
They've grown up reading Retro Gamer in the bathroom, and they’re, you know, the youngest's 17.
AF: I've been writing for Retro Gamer since issue 7.
And this interview will be going in Issue 264.
SM: Yeah, you can even get it in Canada. It's still, one of the few magazines still left on the shelf. But it's very expensive. So I just get the subscriptions, much better.
AF: Going back to the interview. So have there been any recent Game Boy homebrew titles that interested you, or you've enjoyed playing?
SM: Oh, yeah. My favourite Game Boy game of all time is Black Castle… is it called Black Castle? The Homebrew game. It's a platformer.
One second, I'll make sure that I'm giving you the right name.
So I just play it a lot.
It's by a dude called User0x7f.
AF: I talked to him on Twitter, too. Interviewing him for the magazine.
SM: And that's probably my favourite Game Boy game of all time. Slowly or closely followed by Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.
And I was a big fan of David O’Leary Soccer, when I was a kid, on Game Boy Color.
Because I'm a soccer fan...
oh God. I said Soccer again. Apology.
I'm a big football fan.
My mother sent me that cart. With the Game Boy, the DMG.
And I stuck the cart into my Game Boy Color, and I still had my save.
That's incredible, was 20 years, almost absolutely bananas and all that stuff that works.
Yes, those would be my top 3 on Game Boy I'd say.
AF: Is there a dream project you want to do, or someone you want to work with?
SM: I don't think so. I never wanted to work in a studio. I always wanted to make my own way.
It speaks to my personality defects, I've only ever worked with one or two people in the past, on smaller projects. Which is great, but I don't see myself wanting to be a small cog in a big machine. That's why.
Game Boy is fantastic and PICO-8 is fantastic.
That's where the iPhone was fantastic for me. I could make games, and people could buy them all over the world.
A dream project?
If all of that was put aside, I would like to work on the next Burnout game.
Yes, drop everything in the morning to make a Burnout. Or Daytona.
One of those 2.
AF: I'm a big Burnout fan, so I appreciate that one.
SM: Alright!
Yeah, we haven't heard anything from the, what are they called, Three Fields Studio, or something. Um, the Dangerous…
AF: Oh, Three Fields Entertainment. Yeah.
SM: Yes. It's been a while since we had an update on a new Dangerous Driving or something. So I wonder. I hope they're okay.
AF: Yeah. I enjoyed Dangerous Golf, too. That was good fun, because that was it. You just...
SM: Yeah, it was a clever way to build up everything slowly, you know, because you could tell they were working away towards an arcade racer, and they were kind of just putting the engine together. It was clever.
I mean, they got history. Those games are pretty good, those Burnout games.
AF: The one that really gets me, though, is the original Burnout 3: Takedown isn't on the backwards compatible list.
SM: I know.
It's such a shame, such a shame! I don't know why.
Do you have any time? There's a whole podcast of me talking to Johnny Colin, he used to write for Video Game 24-7.
And it's about how I think that Burnout 2 is actually better than Burnout 3.
And I'll die on that hill.
AF: They're both good.
SM: And now I've done that. I love doing that, two great games. Yeah. But.
Oh, wonderful!
AF: Yeah.
SM: Two’s a better arcade racer, I think just purely. You could imagine that in an arcade it's just a better, quick fix I mean.
AF: For me, the reason I love Burnout 3 so much. That was the 1st game I played on when I got an original generation Xbox. I literally had that one game for about a month. And that was all I played. I completed 100 percent. Got all the all the takedowns too, all the hidden signature moves, everything.
SM: That wasn't an easy game. Now I completed the 1st Burnout on PlayStation 2 which is bloody hard too. I lost my save one day, and it broke me.
AF: No. Oh, heartbreaking.
SM: That was a hard game. That was a really hard, unfair game.
Those white Transit vans, right?
AF: Yes.
SM: And directly into your face.
AF: Yeah.
SM: Sorry sidetracked again there.
AF: No worries, I'm pretty much through my questions now. Anything else, particularly you wanted to mention?
SM: Just like it's really cool to have the homebrew stuff in the magazine. It's so awesome to still have that stuff there somewhere.
It's the community.
People always say this, but the Game Boy community is really great.
That GB Studio Discord, there's never a bad word or a stern word spoken, and everybody is, you know, very helpful. From the super smart people who will help you with scanline stuff.
To like, somebody will post like a little pixel or man running across the screen, and they'll be helpful to them and tell them stuff. It's a great place.
Thanks for asking me.
It's nice.
AF: That's great.
SM: My mother still deals in paper. So if there's anything in a magazine, it's always sent into her. Doesn't matter what else you do. But if you're in the paper she considers that, Whoa.
That's cool.
AF: Was great to talk to you.
SM: I'll send you Hoonigans
Just before you go, but it's just a little game. I know, like some people might not like it too much, because it's got like, just 16 total levels. You could probably finish it in 40 minutes if you know what you're doing. It's just a little thing, but I'll send it to you.
AF: Sure.
SM: Yeah, thank you very much for thinking about me.
Good luck!
AF: That's okay. That's cool.
SM: See you, have a good day. Alright!
DATABURST - GAME REVIEWS
Head Over Heels
Format: Sinclair Next
Credits: Rusty Pixels (Michael Ware, Simon Butler, Space Fractal)
Price: digital £12 / physical £22 plus postage
"The gorgeous, upgraded graphics have so many great touches, including animated background features, and the superb Space Fractal soundtrack is filled with great tunes. It’s still a challenging game with clever puzzles and over 500 locations to discover, including new areas, and the addition of Golden Chickens to track down. This is a lavish tribute to a classic Spectrum game."
[Score] 90% - RETRO GAMER SIZZLER
Knightmare
Format: ZX Spectrum (48K and 128K versions)
Credits: Sausageware Games for Bitmap Soft
Price: digital and physical TBC
"Lives up to the hopes of Knightmare fans - cleverly mixing arcade segments and more thoughtful rooms, it very much feels like the TV show. For 128K users, there’s a superb rendition of the Knightmare theme by Joe Olney and excellent in-game tunes."
[Score] 86%
Dark Knight: Shadow of Madness
[Info]
Format: Amstrad CPC
Credits: Mananuk (physical edition to be published by PlayOnRetro)
Price: Free digital download / pay $2.00 or more for ZX Spectrum reward version (with extra character & vehicle) / physical edition TBC
"The variety in the later levels and the challenge will keep you playing this great MPAGD game."
[Score] 81%
PROCESSING - JURL (MULTIFORMAT)
JOHNNY BLANCHARD of Tonsomo Entertainment:
When did you start developing the game, and what inspired it?
That’s going to take a bit of history. The original version of Jurl was actually being written for an odd mobile phone gaming SDK which never took off, I think it was sometime around 2004ish. I can’t remember where the name came from at all, I think I was just riffing on J words, which is something I do sometimes when I’m thinking of script ideas. But the actual gameplay came from playing a lot of emulated Pacman and Asteroids, two of my favourite games, and I just decided to mash the two together.
When the mobile SDK fell down, I ported the whole thing to the GP2X open-source handheld, sometime in 2006.
In more recent times the PC version came about because I wanted a project to make whilst I was learning Godot and Jurl seemed an obvious one to pick up again, this is also where I added the backstory of a diamond miner ignoring government warnings to stay out of a neutral zone, because going in there might start an interstellar war.
And now, of course, we have the Atari 2600 and GameBoy versions which, again, was because I wanted to do some Atari 2600 and Gameboy development and needed a project.
What made you decide to make it a multi-format game?
Really, it kind of always was a multi-format game. But the more recent ‘retro’ versions are because I got so excited seeing it running on an actual Gameboy that I just wanted to get the same nostalgia hit from seeing it on more, plus it’s fun as a developer to wrestle with all these different formats.
What development environments are you using, and any major tools?
For the Gameboy I’m using GBDK, I originally looked at GB Studio but it was too limiting, and I considered going straight to Assembler, because of my speccy background I have a fair grounding in Z80 assembler, but I kind of love C. I suspect there are better examples for assembler, plus it would almost certainly run faster and be slightly more efficient in terms of memory use, but GBDK does a pretty good job.
Obviously, the venerable Aseprite is my main tool for graphics.
I’m still struggling to get sound in a good shape, I’m looking at hUGETracker for that.
What formats are you planning to release it on?
Outside of GameBoy I’m about 80% through an Atari Lynx version and about 10% in to a PC Engine version. I’m also considering Game Gear. That would cover the main handhelds for me (if you assume TurboExpress for PC Engine). But I did start on a PSP version a little while ago, so I might go back to that and I did, recently, start reading up on the Virtual Boy and PC-FX SDKs. I also wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up releasing NES, Master System and Megadrive versions too.
Had you thought about a physical release alongside the digital donwloads?
I definitely considered this, I’ve got some PCBs coming for the GameBoy and I’ve looked at sticker / box art. Plus it’s pretty easy to 3D print a cartridge case now. I’ll have to see, it won’t happen until the Gameboy version hits 1.0, which won’t happen until I have Music / Sound done - by which time the cartridge will probably push out of a standard Gameboy cart and into a multi-bank one, which makes some stuff trickier.
The Atari Lynx is also a possibility.
What other features and ideas are you planning to add to the game?
The Gameboy has two areas that need improving before it can be considered ‘finished,’ Sound and improved collision detection. I’d also like to think about some kind of intro, but that would require finding someone better at art than me.
Are you working on anything else?
I’m throwing a few ideas around at the moment, although the main one is for the PC. As well as Tonsomo Entertainment and RE:Enthused I’ve also got Roguegunners Productions at my disposal. Roguegunners is a film/theatre company and I’ve always considered making a Wing Commander like game. So I’m thinking about that at the moment.
In terms of retro (although talking about Wing Commander is probably already there) I’m considering a small RPG game, although probably closer to something like Pokémon.
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