Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze

There was one earlier example of deathmatch as we know it, and I played it... after a fashion.

> MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze introduced the concept of deathmatch combat.[1]

[snip]

> Up to 16 computers can be networked in a "MIDI Ring" by connecting one computer's MIDI-OUT port to the next computer's MIDI-IN port.

Hence the name. What a weird and wonderful hack.

On a personal note, I played a port of this... to the original Game Boy:

> A Game Boy version was developed by the original developers, Xanth Software F/X, and published in 1991 by Bulletproof Software (now Blue Planet Software), under the title Faceball 2000.[5] James Yee, owner of Xanth, had a vision to port the 520ST application to the Game Boy. George Miller was hired to re-write the AI-based drone logic, giving each drone a unique personality trait.[citation needed] It is notable for being the only Game Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It did so by connecting multiple copies of the Four Player Adapter to one another so that each additional adapter added another two players up to the maximum - seven such adapters were needed for a full 16 player experience.[citation needed]

Game Boy deathmatch. Never got to experience it myself, as my family only had the one Game Boy and we didn't know anyone else who had the game.

Hi, Xanth programmer from the 8/16-bit era here. Can confirm the MIDI Maze FPS ancestry and MIDI-based deathmatch "LAN parties" (that predated LANs).

Can also confirm that we were (and are) in awe and big fans of ID, Romero, Carmack, etc. (We prototyped but never released a PC FPS.)

Playing an FPS deathmatch head-to-head on Game Boys was as giddy and intense as you'd expect in 1992-3. Literally, it was head-to-head ... those cables weren't very long.

Before anyone runs off to buy an old cart or run an image on an emulator, set your expectations of FPS framerates realistically for a Z80 (or 65816) console in the early 1990s. CPUs were slow for matrix (or any) math, memory access was slow, buses were narrow, "graphics hardware" was optimal for side scrollers and tile-mapped character graphics with a few sprites. All of this worked against quickly rendering frames of 3D. We certainly couldn't use any textbook 3D graphics algorithms. It was all trickery and shortcuts but it worked. (The SNES was a bit better though we predated the FX chip which I think would have helped more.) The Game Boy version was amazing for its portability. I personally enjoyed our SNES version the most but it was back to single-screen two-player. Both were written single-handedly by a genius engineer named Robert Champagne who later went on to be Chief of Technology at Nintendo Software.

I'm utterly amazed by the fact I can communicate with one of the authors of one of the games that defined my childhood.

Faceball 2000 is, to me, a hidden gem of the Game Boy, a platform with many well-known gems already, and it helped me pass many pleasurable hours.

(Seriously. The Game Boy had amazing battery life, as long as you were playing it in a well-lit environment.)

Even playing it alone was fun, and I still remember the music as some of the best of that era of console gaming.

(And, yes, I sank many hours into DOOM and DOOM II as well.)

That's awesome. It makes me happy that you enjoyed and remember the game. Robert Champagne, the real genius, coded the Game Boy and I rode his coattails. I was responsible for the Game Gear version, a PC prototype, and other things. My code ran a lot slower than Rob's and I was never happy with the final frame rate. :-( The GG had a nice colour screen but horrible battery life and poor market share compared to the GB. [Aside: the Atari Lynx was a slightly earlier platform and technically interesting but its market share was zilch.]

We were pretty proud of Faceball 2000. James Yee, the non-technical founder behind MIDI Maze and Faceball 2000, was a visionary guy. Keeping the aesthetic abstract (smiley faces, minimal texturing or "realism", etc.) was way easier to code but it also won us some parental advisory awards in the industry because we avoided gratuitous violence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm glad you remember the music. The GB and GG music were composed by David Whittaker. Very talented. When you unavoidably listen to your game's music over and over and over and over, it's nice when it's actually well composed and sonically interesting. The SNES music is also great, composed by George Sanger, and the SNES had better audio hardware by a long shot but I actually prefer the tunes and instrumentation of the GB/GG intros, outros, level music, etc.

Nice chat. And as the game says, when you get whacked by a smiley face, "HAVE A NICE DAY."

David Whittaker was my favorite back in the day. Sometimes I fired up "Feud" simply to listen to the music. It was funny to hear his "Lazy Jones" track later in the clubs, albeit covered by Zombie Nation.

I really like the idea of a network of computers daisy chained via MIDI.

That's amazing!

Thanks for sharing.

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