Keyboard Component Super Football prototype / demo gameplay

[decle]

Happy New Year!

 

Let's kick off 2021 with what I think is the first video of the Keyboard Component prototype / demo of Super Football...

 

 

This version bears little resemblance to the mock-up in the 1981 Mattel catalogue...

 

 

...whilst the isometric view is present in the prototype, Mattel's artists seem to have gotten carried away. It wouldn't be possible to draw the green / pink transition of the field / end zone, let alone the blue diamonds, as the white goal line violates the 2 colour per tile rule (it's unlikely the K/C graphics could be used for the goal line because it would appear to be in front of the players / ball).  Although the marketing blurb majors on the coaching / managerial aspects of the game, we can see the quarterback is highlighted in the catalogue image, suggesting the intention was that the player would have control of player movement, like other NFL titles.  Also notice that there are 5 players per team, rather than the 8 seen in the demo, and no use of K/C 40 column text.  We're pretty sure this version is a pre-production prototype / demo as the tape that Frank's recording was made from doesn't look like your typical production Keyboard Component stock...

 

 

The following short video shows what the end zone looks like, and what happens when you "score".  Whilst it's really hard to make progress down field, it is relatively easy to give up 3 yards as Red and hold your ground as Blue.  We had intended to work our way backwards to Red's goal line and then sneak a yard to two to score as Blue.  As you will see Mattel had other ideas...

 

 

...it seems the rules for safeties are not implemented correctly.

 

These videos are a little glimpse into work by @Lathe26, @Knarfian, @Ron The Cat, @intvnut and myself to digitize and document the Keyboard Component software.  Super Football is probably the simplest title to get working because it's small at just under 5K decles, and has no audio track or data saving features.

 

As you can see during 2020 we have made good progress with both decoding recordings of K/C tapes, and building infrastructure to enable them to be played on a K/C without a working tape drive.  We hope to share more as we go through 2021.

 

Cheers

 

decle

 

 

Edited January 1, 2021 by decle

[mr_me]

This is great; thanks goes to all involved.  Forty years after first seeing that image in a brochure I finally get to see some gameplay.

 

I notice there are nine moving objects.  I'm guessing the football is animated with KC character graphics. One of the APh programmers mentioned in an expo panel that he had implemented an instant replay feature for a football game.  So the game could have been further along than what was in this prototype tape.

[+BBWW]

So cool. This is a hole I have just stepped into! Not sure where it is going to take me. LOL

 

[Morpheus]

Really very interesting!

Congratulations and happy new year to All!

[JasonlikesINTV]

Neat! You guys are brilliant.

[intellivotion]

absolutely amazing. Congrats! If this was 1981 A.D. instead of 2021 you should deservedly be recruited by Mattel Electronics 

[+DZ-Jay]

Wow!  This is fascinating, @decle.  Thanks for sharing.

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

   -dZ.

Edited January 2, 2021 by DZ-Jay

[+cmart604]

Very cool. Thanks for posting about this, awesome to see this come to light.

[Walter Ives]

On 1/1/2021 at 12:17 AM, decle said:

Let's kick off 2021 with what I think is the first video of the Keyboard Component prototype / demo of Super Football...

 

 

This version bears little resemblance to the mock-up in the 1981 Mattel catalogue...

 

Pre-release marketing hype is purely fictitious and is the sole invention of the authors. No resemblance to actual released product is intended or should be inferred.

 

On 1/1/2021 at 12:17 AM, decle said:

We're pretty sure this version is a pre-production prototype / demo as the tape that Frank's recording was made from doesn't look like your typical production Keyboard Component stock...

You misuse the term "pre-production prototype." That term refers to a unit that is expected to be IDENTICAL to the production version, just not assembled on the actual production assembly line under normal conditions. This cassette is definitely not that. I say "expected to be" because you have to iterate if you find a problem. Starting a production line before having one or more FULLY QUALIFIED pre-production prototypes that are IDENTICAL to what you will be producing results in production nightmares. (Cough) Keyboard Component (Cough). Experienced production engineers fiercely resist management pressure to jump the gun.

The tape you have was not made using the production process. You can see that the spindle is full despite the tape containing only a relatively short program. Tapes created using the high-speed tape duplication process used tape from giant reels cut to the length actually required.

Creating the 4-track ½" production master reel for an entire program was a fairly involved process that was a little different for each program (just try to imagine what you would have to go through to create a master tape for French). On the other hand, programmers were constantly making short individual cassettes containing subsets of their programs as part of the development process. Such programs were written directly to a cassette at 1x speed and contained only those pieces of the program required for the programmer's immediate testing need. Marketing had a collection of these for its various nefarious purposes (like CES demos) and Al Secor's group had over a dozen in its testing library. It was preferable to give these groups development tapes that had served their purpose rather than create special demo tapes because every tape took resources to configure and making special versions materially impacted the development schedule. Accordingly, the particular tape you have here contains only such elements of Super Football as its purpose required (hypothese non fingo as to its purpose). For example, the tape apparently doesn't include the play editor, instant replay or player auctions, all of which were being written more-or-less independently by different programmers. Although it would have been more elegant to have a single tape that included all four elements even though they might not yet work together, it was much less disruptive to provide four separate tapes.

More often the programs were served from disk (à la Kittyfaker), with tones standing in for the audio because digitized audio files capable of being stored on disk would have been far too large to be practical.

For French cassette development there were tapes that only contained audio and a dummy data track, with the executables under development being served from disk. For other programs with large amounts of unchanging data (historical stock data, reading comprehension) there were tapes with only data.

Oh, right, and all of this cassette software development was begun many months before there was any working keyboard hardware. Keyboard Component software projects were brought forward as far as practical, then paused waiting for hardware, then moved forward a bit more, then paused again. Took a bit of coordination, it did.