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Comment by djmips | Hacker News Reader

Once again you see that back then, the porting game programmer had no access to the any of the original assets, art, code or assistance. I was doing the same work back in the late eighties and it was part of the job to master the game you were porting and then reverse engineer everything.

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Back then, it didn't even help much to have the original assets. I worked in-house for a company porting some of their early EGA graphics PC games to the C64, and I just had to basically do everything from scratch. I could look at the original source code and art assets, but I was writing 6502 C64 assembly and the original was MSDOS 8088, with absolutely no commonality. Even the art-- I had to be my own artist-- was a tremendous chore. Downgrading 16px16px8 color EGA "tiles" to C64 8x16x4 color sprites when the 8 pixels were double width and one of the 4 colors was "transparent" was frequently an exercise in frustration. At one point I hollered at my boss that "I can't make a duck out of this!" (attempting to create a mallard flapping its wings) and went home early. I came back the next say and made a duck, but only barely. I eventually quit to work on my engineering degree. Never regretted it for a moment. A lot of us got really burned out back then.

I wonder how much the authors of C64/Amiga Bubble Bobble, R-Type, Paperboy, Ghost'n'Goblins, Buggy Boy, Solomon's Key, Pang, Arkanoid, Silkworm played the game? Those were actually good ports.

Do you have a list of the games you worked on?

Not sure on the C64 version, but you can read about the ZX Spectrum conversion of R-Type here: http://bizzley.com/ which I recommend if you're a fan of the spectrum, R-Type, or curious about ports.

It is simply insane to me that companies didn't provide these assets (digital assets, design docs) to the folks producing these ports.

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.

They may not have had access to them, other than what would be in the ROMs.

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.

Yes, but that's what I'm talking about. It's crazy that the developers never made some effort to preserve the source materials and get them to the porters. Even a very minimal effort would have surely yielded some large results relative to the effort expended. At the very least, you'd think they'd want to protect their company name by not having it attached to garbage ports.

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...

Games were small back then, so there was less often an ongoing relationship between a publisher and a developer, and more often just a one-time exchange: software, already finished, for a lump sum. As if the publisher had contracted out work on the game and didn't know it until the contractor showed up at their door. Basically, games as "piece work."

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.

And the ones working on the licensed ports were lucky, with their fancy arcade machines on free play in the corner of the office. Authors of, er, 'tributes' just had to wander down to the local arcade with a pocket full of coins and play until they'd remembered everything.

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