C64 Blood Money
lemmings.info
lemmings.info
There were stories of Sinclair game devs using CPCs in a similar way simply because they couldn't stand the Sinclair keyboards.
Especially since the release of Turbo Assembler in 1985, serious development on the C64 was quite comfortable.
Years later in the 90ies, Fairlight enhanced Turbo Assembler with REU support, which made development on the machine itself ridiculously comfortable. Basically the only thing missing I can recall was there was no concept of version management back then.
Of course, this came too late for professional development but it's basically what the demo scene ran on till cross assembling from PCs came in vogue.
I seem to recall an interview with Paul Urbanus in which he noted that the graphics for Parsec on the TI-99/4A were designed on the TI-99/4A, which to him proved the machine as a tool for serious creative work.
The HN comment:
It was far more productive to just write/run code on a dedicated Atari/C64 or whatever the target system was.
By that point, more powerful development machines and tools will have become much more affordable/available than in the early 80s.
IIRC he says they used UNIX workstations to develop Maniac Mansion/SCUMM for the C64. Complete with hot loading of levels, presumably they had a similar hardware interface to what's shown in TFA for manipulating C64 memory contents from the UNIX box.
"Parts 2 and 3 will be released over time.... prob one a week or something - if I remember :)
Patreons get access to all locked articles."
Amiga example with intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxciUa4YmeY
It was actually this code that really kick started my own Amiga game programming of demos and games and lead to a two decade stint in the game industry, so I am forever grateful.
I find it even better in some ways (atmosphere, dark humor, gameplay). Highly recommended.
Edit: it has also an editor and community made levels.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/416680/Zombie_Night_Terro...
Companys remake every game that has some nostalgia but not Lemmings.
Fancy devboxes with custom console builds, like the PS2 TOOL, would come later (probably necessary when cartridges were phased out).
TRSE should also work on Linux: https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu...
And you'd quickly figure out a fairly optimal upgrade sequence and stick to it.
Still, I enjoyed them back then too. X-Out was another one, with a particularly interesting shop/ship configuration system for its time.
Interesting choice of words.
Was super-impressed by the visuals of the Amiga version at the time, those jellyfish animations and huge claws on the 2nd stage.
(Never played the C64 version back in the day, but it does look surprisingly impressive, quite faithful to the Amiga version, a whole lot of stuff moving around at a good speed)
The games were already “NES hard” add a couple frames of latency, and you may have halved the time to react to an in game event since you’re going from 1-2frames of lag to 4+. That really effects reaction time. And even for games like Super Mario Bros that are largely muscle memory since all the stages are largely deterministic, the added input lag just makes the game harder than you remember since you may already be used to the lower latency. Oh, and I haven’t even touched on jitter. You might be able to deal with exactly 3frames worse input and screen lag, but if there is ever any deviance from that, the game just got exponentially harder. You could expect almost no jitter on a NES (aside from slow downs from too many sprites), and brains are really bad at compensating for random jitter. I’ve seen demos of marquees played on monitors both with 8fps, one looked jerky, the other looked completely smooth, and the only difference was the smooth one had near zero variance in the framerate.