The boy behind the biggest coin-op conversion of the 80s
eurogamer.net
eurogamer.net
Do you have a list of the games you worked on?
I understand that these ports were often cash grabs. The original Japanese publisher could sign away the home computer rights to one of their games and get a nice check in return.
But, still.
Surely the original owners of these properties must have realized that by providing at least some assistance to their licensees (something requiring almost no effort) they would see better results?
Surely these Japanese publishers must have understood that a bad port of Outrun or some other game would reflect badly on them and tarnish their brand even if they had no involvement in it?
I say this as a long-time fan of Sega and other Japanese game companies, which were filled with some brilliant folks. That's why these decisions have always baffled me.
There weren't standard digital art tools in the early 80's. Things may have been physically drawn on graph paper, manually converted to binary, and then the drawings disposed of or otherwise inaccessible due to things like contracting situations, etc.
A lot of those design materials were indeed saved, btw. This book and its sequel collect a lot of them:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2014/11/12/the-unto...
At that point, the developer walked off with money, and the publisher walked off with a game binary they could resell and market however they liked (including taking the IP rights and licensing them to a porter.) But the publisher didn't retain any right to the developer's time; and often, the "developer" was just some college kid who developed just the one game, moved on to other pursuits, and now can't be found.
Christian Gingras reverse engineered the entire game from scratch AND patched a fatal crash in the game that eluded the original developers for years.
http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/technical/christianging...
This is where i cracked up. I think these models are all European, so American readers won't be familiar with them, but this article is a lovely tour of Shit Fords of the 1980s.
Hah, this brings back memories of buying weed in the 90's off a lad with a purple Orion.
I still have a soft spot for that era but I'd have the even more naff (and lethal) Capri.
ISTR the Sega Master System version being the most playable.
Even on the Amiga there were few actually good racing games. Lotus Esprit Challenge and Stunt Car Racer(God bless) was among the good ones.
One of the most amusing parts of the game was the animation you got when you drove into something. The driver and passenger would 'jump' out of the car in a fairly amusing manner! (at least to primary-school age me)
Not really on par with Outrun though.
It's also a hell of a lot easier to play with a Voltmace Delta mouseport joystick (and you can say the same for ArcElite!). It may have had keyboard keys, but I'd need to look that up.
It was amazing back then to me how bad were home computers relative to arcade machines back then. It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality.
Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...
Actually the X86000 from Sharp was pretty much this. It had perfect ports of arcade games and was also used as the development system by Capcom among other arcade companies.
The Sharp X68000 was a beast of machine, but it didn't have sprite scaling.
The Amiga did come close-ish, but despite its custom chips, the lack of a custom sprite scaler and too low memory bandwidth would have likely made it impossible to get all that much closer (it's mainly lacking extra details next to the road). The dual 68k's on Outrun also ran on 12.5Mhz vs. ~8Mhz/7.16Mhz (depending on NTSC vs. PAL) for the Amiga's single M68k.
Outrun on Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGxxYm4z5I
Outrun on arcade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7tZFW4WedI
> Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...
In effect the Amiga was the closest the market would bear - Commodore struggled on for years, and sold about 5m Amiga's, and the only reason they survived as long as they did was that Commodore were masters at cost-cutting (arguably that also sank them: they cut their R&D budgets to the bone, among many other mistakes). People who went from working at Apple to Commodore at the time have indicated that attempts at Apple to figure out how Commodore was able to sell the Amiga at the price-points they did for example massively over-estimated Commodores manufacturing costs and could not figure out how Commodore were able to squeeze out a margin at all.
As such we can assume the Amiga price, which including a monitor, joysticks etc. around the time of Outrun would easily ended up in the region of 1000 dollars or more, was the high point of what was commercially possible around the thousand dollar mark at the time.
> In effect the Amiga was the closest the market would bear
Not at all. Commodore was a very shitty company that has no business plan, was engineer-unfriendly and by 1992 they have managed to alienate all their top engineering talent.
Those very clever engineers (RJ Michael, Jay Miner etc) could have easily designed chips that did sprite scaling and rotation along with blitting.
These people have developed the Amiga custom chips actually in 1982-1983. In 1989, I am sure they would be able to develop something much better.
And it could be a little pricey at first. Even at double the price or a normal Amiga, who wouldn't want to play 100% authentic coin-op conversions?
> Not at all. Commodore was a very shitty company that has no business plan, was engineer-unfriendly and by 1992 they have managed to alienate all their top engineering talent.
And yet, those things were in large part because they spent less per unit sold than pretty much any other company at the time. Their R&D was chronically underfunded, they squeezed suppliers, they squeezed distributors. Commodore survived as long as they did because despite being dysfunctional the one are that dysfunction worked was that they were able to produce their hardware at prices most of the competition thought was impossible.
> In 1989, I am sure they would be able to develop something much better.
Outrun came out in 1986.
> Even at double the price or a normal Amiga, who wouldn't want to play 100% authentic coin-op conversions?
Far fewer than bought Amiga's. It might have done OK, but not well. Others have pointed out the X68000, which did not sell well at all.
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge was a two-player Outrun clone on the Amiga that shows it could have handled an Arcade-accurate conversion.
It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer
ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that
matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality.
Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example,
Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...
Check out the arcade board for After Burner; essentially the same hardware as Outrun:
https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Arcade/PCB/big/Af...
Gobs of RAM and custom silicon. Compare with any contemporary home computer of the era. No way these massive slabs of arcade silicon could have been produced and sold profitably for less than thousands of dollars.
There were other issues as well. These arcade boards were very power hungry and therefore put out lots of heat. Home consumers willing to put up with that would be a very small niche.
But the Neo-Geo and games for it were expensive -- well outside the price range of all but the most hardcore of game consumers -- and it took until the 90s to make the economics work.
I think you misunderstand my point. I don't expect a perfect conversion of a much larger arcade game. These games sucked because they were crap games with the licence tied to them built to deadlines so US Gold could shovel them onto unsuspecting punters. Compare the unpolished turd that is the Outrun ZX Spectrum port to ZZKJ's Super Hang On port or Enduro Racer. That's what I'm talking about.
I'm still doing 2D graphics software! It flows more or less directly from the work I did as a teenager.
> You can choose here if you would not like this session tracking to occur.
Does this mean I’m opting in or out? To compound things the options are “yes” and “no” rather than “opt in”, “on”, “enable” nor any other the other verbs typically used on other sites. Which means I have to navigate their maze of double negatives to understand what I’m electing for.
I really dislike sites that employ this kind of language anti-pattern.