Could R-Type be done on the 7800???

[Lostdragon]

31 minutes ago, Mayhem said:

Well the C64 version was rushed and completed in six weeks. Imagine what that could have been like with 3-4 months minimum.

And the C64 had 2 different coding teams given the task of doing the conversion, the whole episode seems like an absolute mess:

 

"Bob Pape has kindly allowed us to put a large extract regarding the C64 version from his fantastic book, which you can checkout here: http://bizzley.com/

“Dave and the C64 seemed to be cracking on, all the background graphics for Level One were in place and he had a ship flying around the screen with some aliens but he did have a major obstacle to overcome, the sprite multiplexer routine he was using just wasn’t capable of handling the large amount of sprites necessary for the game.

The C64 can only display eight hardware sprites a frame unless you implement a sprite multiplexer to ‘recycle’ those sprites again that frame but it’s a very intricate and time-critical thing to code, all the more so if you want a lot more than eight sprites on screen in any one display frame. Get it wrong and sprites don’t just flicker they vanish altogether. So before he could do anything else Dave had to completely rewrite his multiplexer, and more importantly show Activision that the new sprite engine he had was capable of handling everything in the game.

We knew Activision were prepared to accept some differences between the arcade and home computer versions (it was made clear they’d accept ANYTHING halfway decent bearing the name R-Type that appeared on the Spectrum) but more was expected from the C64 version. The question then became just how many sprites could Dave implement per frame to get away with a game that would satisfy Activision? ‘review’ of it all the more suspect. If I was having it easy for a while then it was Dave’s turn to struggle.

The C64 version was inching along slowly but he was still having problems with his sprite multiplexer and unfortunately I didn’t know enough about the machine to make any kind of helpful contribution. While the hardware seemed to offer everything a game coder could want – more RAM, smooth hardware scrolling, raster line interrupts, eight hardware sprites – it was those sprites that were causing the problem. Multiplexing is easy in theory, you tell the processor to put down the eight sprites in the top part of the screen, do an interrupt on the display line immediately below the last one, quickly set up the sprite hardware with another eight sprite positions and data and fool the machine into putting down a second set on the same screen in the same frame.

If you were really good at it you could even fit in a third set of eight before you ran out of time though it was pushing it to put down more than that. The difficult part comes when sprites start to overlap, or one that was at the top of the screen moves down to the bottom, then you’ve got to start sorting Y position values and coming up with all sorts of ways to cut down on the processor time required. It also means that if you want more than sixteen or twenty four sprites on screen then you have to start changing the way the game plays, which isn’t too difficult on a simple single-screen game like Pacman but on R-Type was turning into a bit of a nightmare.

It didn’t help that my version was being used by Activision as a stick to beat Dave with, the argument being that if the Spectrum version did what it did purely through software then the hardware enhanced C64 version should at least be up to equaling if not surpassing it. What Dave was aiming for was an all-in-one routine where you set up the sprites you wanted, where you wanted, and the multiplexer took care of it all for you but every time he thought he had it sorted something would come along and mess it up.

If I was succeeding because I was too inexperienced to realize that what I wanted to do was too much then Dave had the misfortune to keep running head-first into the brick wall of hardware that offered to do it all for you – as long as you did exactly what you were told that is! So a return to Southampton was planned, and while I was there I’d find out what was happening with Dave and Jim and the C64 version of R-Type. I’d had a call from Karl that Activision had got fed up with their lack of progress, which wasn’t at all helped by me saying I’d finished the game, and had ordered the pair to work in-house at the office in Southampton.

This didn’t sound too bad as we’d all had to do it some time but Karl went on to say that they were being held there virtually incommunicado and the pressure was beginning to show, which sounded really worrying. What Karl had said turned out to be true as Dave and Jim were there in one of the glass fronted conference rooms all by themselves.

They weren’t allowed to leave it and no one was allowed to enter or talk to them without clearing it with a manager first. The phone in their room had also been removed so as not to provide any distractions. At this point it looked like they had solved the sprite multiplexer problem bar a few glitches now and again and were trying to play catch up with the game itself.

I was only allowed to see them for ten minutes and it was obvious that they were both highly stressed and close to the edge and if there was anything guaranteed to fuel this it was the work conditions they had to endure. It’s well known that this particular Commodore 64 version of R -Type was never released, instead another version coded by Manfred Trenz at Rainbow Arts who stepped in at short notice was, and I have to say that I doubted this story at the time and I don’t believe it to this day.

Even Activision were convinced that the C64 version would be finished on time as a press release they released at the PCW Show trumpeting the game included the line: “Programmers Bob Pape (Spectrum), Karl Jeffrey (Atari ST) and Dave Jolliff (C64) came together to work as a team on the project.” With the game planned for a November release Activision were publicly announcing that everything was OK with the game as late as mid- September and you do have to wonder just when exactly it was that they started talking to Trenz and Rainbow Arts.

It has been reported since that Trenz and his team put together their version of R-Type in only seven weeks, which means they were either coding their version while Dave and Jim were still working on the original or work started on it immediately after the original was canned. You do have to question Activision’s behaviour in the first case and their loyalty to Dave and Jim in the second. Now that the original version of the game has been posted online you can see for yourself how close Dave and Jim were from finishing the game.

I really believe that if they had been given that seven weeks instead of Trenz their version of R-Type would have turned out just as good, if not better, than the version that finally went on sale. Although I spoke to Dave Jolliff many times after this I never asked him about his time in-house, why they cancelled his version or if he knew why Rainbow Arts – who Activision just months earlier were prepared to sue – were suddenly now their new best friends.

The state Dave was in in that conference room was not something I wanted to remind him of but the game was progressing, slowly yes, but it would have come together. If Dave and Jim’s version didn’t make it it was because Activision pushed them toward a nervous breakdown getting them to finish the game, and the fact that they must have been in talks with Rainbow Arts while doing so makes everything about it just that bit more distasteful.

To rub salt into the wounds Dave and Jim were effectively barred from leaving the building so wouldn’t be going to the PCW Show even though their game would be on display and was being promoted by Activision. Dave had worked the PCW Show the previous year as part of the Activision stand team and now he was being treated like some kind of leper. It was just all wrong. After talking to Dave and Jim, Mike and I picked up our show invitations, left the office and headed off for a bite to eat.

As I’ve mentioned, the original Commodore 64 version was canned by Activision and eventually brought to market by Katakis developers Rainbow Arts. While this version was released on time it doesn’t stand up well against Dave and Jim’s original with several iconic sections of the game being lazily rewritten to accommodate the limitations of the hardware and programming. The rotating Alien Wheel of Level One doesn’t rotate, the Level Three Big Ship is missing 90% of its guns, there’s no Boss Alien at the end of Level Five, the Pistons that move around Level Six look more like 125 cabbages and so on.

Manfred Trenz of Rainbow Arts has said that they only had seven weeks to do the job and it’s by no means a bad conversion, it looks more colourful and plays a bit faster compared to the unreleased version, but at times you can see the limitations imposed on it by the short deadline. With Dave and Jim’s original version now available to download and play for yourself you can do your own comparison review and what is immediately obvious is just how much of the game had actually been completed.

I said this before and I think it’s worth repeating that you do have to wonder if they were given those seven weeks and told they too could bypass some of the trickier parts of the game whether they could have finished it in time. From seeing the state of the game when I left Fareham compared to when I visited Activision just a few weeks later I honestly think they could have done it.

At the time R-Type was released the sixteen bit computer wars were in full swing, software houses supported either the Atari ST or the Commodore Amiga but seldom both and Activision were firmly in the ST camp, which is why the release of an Amiga version of R-Type shortly afterwards came a bit out of left field, However a quick scan of the game credits soon made everything clear….. “a Factor 5 release via Rainbow Arts with thanks to Rob Hylands and Karl Jeffrey.” Activision had decided to do another port and handed over the ST code to Rainbow Arts, again making you wonder just what kind of deal had been done (and when) in negotiating the Commodore 64 version.”

 

 

And.. 

 

David Jolliff talks about work on R-Type V1:

When asked about when things hit problems…

“It was about halfway into getting the sprite multiplexer working. The problem was that an awful lot of the things moving around on screen were AI controlled and would change position according to you ships position.

This often caused more than 8 sprites to be in a line or overlap. (Ouch!). Activision insisted that the game should be as close to the original as possible and were under the illusion that the c64 was as capable as the arcade machine (not!). This meant that I was under constant pressure to make it do things that were not possible.

The ship on level 3 was started by me without James’ knowledge. I can’t quite remember how far I got with it. I’m reasonable sure that i have the source code in a box tucked away somewhere with my old c128/64. I do remember that I had 7 disks ( a level per disk) on the go.”

James Smart talks about work on R-Type V1:

“Yeah, Bob’s book sheds some light on what happened “” it’s not too far from the truth.

Dave was behind schedule, so I was put onto the project “” both to help fix-up what he had, and to do some of the bits he hadn’t yet done. I recall coding the various pick-up weapons (circle lasers, bouncing lasers and flame weapon), the high-score table, maybe also some game completion stuff? (I don’t recall which of those things got integrated into Dave’s codebase though)

But really it was a case of: too little, too late.

His scroll routines weren’t overly fast, and his multiplexer was glitchy (and its y-sort could seriously be measured in inches!). Oft-times these would combine, and the effect would be that all the sprites would de-sync from the background, and drift more slowly than the scenery.

“” To be fair, I hadn’t really learnt enough to fix those particular things at that point in time, although I did help him make some optimisations to his code that improved things somewhat.

Yes, many of the levels were playable “” No, I don’t believe we had started anything for level 3 (the big ship).

As your above-linked article points out: some of the colours were lacking “” part of the reason for that was because the graphic artist (Mark Jones) was colour-blind! Plus, on reflection, I think choosing two shades of grey for the sprite multicolours wasn’t very bright.

We were originally working on the project in Dave’s flat, but later we were called in-house, to Electric Dreams (a.k.a. Software Studios).

Activision were in the process of suing the makers of Katakis, meanwhile Dave and I were running late “” and he was pretty much melting down “” and it looked like we weren’t going to hit the release date.

In your article you suggest that we may have completed the game if we’d’ve had those extra seven weeks, but, truth be told: my recollection was that we did have most of those extra 7 weeks anyhow, because (unbeknown to Dave) they’d already got those guys working on re-skinning / tweaking Katakis, in parallel, while we were still working away on our now never-destined-to-be-released version.

Underhanded and dirty, really.”

 

https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/rtype-v1/

 

Edited September 9 by Lostdragon

[kimchipenguin]

Well, as a fan of the C64 Katakis, I wouldn't mind if the engine would be used to port Katakis to the 7800 instead of R-Type

[Mayhem]

Oh, well aware considering I contribute to GTW64   was merely commenting on the actual version that came out. Considering they blocked Rainbow Arts from selling Katakis in the UK because it was too similar in their eyes to R-Type, it's an Alanis Morrissette irony that Mandred was then asked to do the official conversion as fast as he could.

[Jinks]

The question I have is why? Is it a gun game to play. My vote is no it is not. Are there already lots of ways to play this game yes. Other than a proof of concept I would not buy a r type 7800 clone to enjoy. As that is what games are for is to have fun not just look at. 

R type is beyond difficult to play and after 5 minutes the game is changed out for something fun. 

I would hate to think of a developer spending longer than 2 hours of his life for the very little return this project would receive. 

 

Maybe I am on crack and there is a shit ton of r type nerds that enjoy the game? If not don't bother. 

 

[+DrVenkman]

“R-Type” itself has a ton of adherents but to reiterate my earlier point, echoed by others, horizontal shooters are fun. Sprite design, sound, music and difficulty can all be tweaked to fit whatever story you might want to create for a finished game.

But the concept of a horizontal shooters is one many of us enjoy. It’s fine for you to NOT enjoy it. But don’t poo-poo an entire game concept because you don’t like one particular example.

[Jinks]

Many side scrolling shooters are fun. To me R type is not one of those games. Probably the least fun of all side scrolling games. Vanguard to me is 1000% more fun. Maybe not as technically interesting for those that care about specs. Of course R type could be done if a  person wanted a concept game to prove something. 

If you think I am poo pooing on the project of r type I do not think so. I guess kinda crapping on the game itself. I did not know the author was here to take offense. Games are a matter of taste. If someone made a clone of R type for the 7800 and it made 1 person happy than why not. 

 

Thought about this some more.. r type is too hard of a game and I suck.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 20 by Jinks

[+Sauron]

1 hour ago, Jinks said:

Many side scrolling shooters are fun. To me R type is not one of those games. Probably the least fun of all side scrolling games. Vanguard to me is 1000% more fun. Maybe not as technically interesting for those that care about specs. Of course R type could be done if a  person wanted a concept game to prove something. 

If you think I am poo pooing on the project of r type I do not think so. I guess kinda crapping on the game itself. I did not know the author was here to take offense. Games are a matter of taste. If someone made a clone of R type for the 7800 and it made 1 person happy than why not. 

 

R-Type is one of the progenitors of the side scrolling shooter genre. It didn't get that label by not being fun. And I can honestly say that a well-done port of R-Type to the 7800 would make ME happy, and I highly doubt I'd be the only one.

 

1 hour ago, Jinks said:

Thought about this some more.. r type is too hard of a game and I suck.

Have you really ever given it a chance? It's a challenging game, but not one I'd describe as "too hard", and believe me, I'm far from being a gaming prodigy.