Posts made by SpindleyQ

The NABU was a Z80-based PC designed and sold in Ottawa in the early 80s. Instead of storing software on tape or floppy disk, it connected to the cable TV network in Ottawa, which was continuously broadcasting all available NABU software in a continuous loop, and was continuously being updated with the day's news, recipes, etc, as well as a bunch of games. Many were ports, but there were a number of original titles as well that never appeared for any other platform. NABU hired a bunch of local programmers to write games for it, including a teenage Leo Binkowski, who saved everything he had access to when the company went under. Last year a bunch of these machines surfaced on eBay, curious retro computer enthusiasts snapped them up, and Leo worked with a quickly growing community to bring them back online with the original software. Today you can buy an inexpensive USB serial adapter, build or buy a simple cable with a standard DIN-5 connector, plug it into your PC or a Raspberry Pi running NABU "internet adapter" software, and the machine will come to life as though it's still 1983.

Leo recently announced that he's rounded up a few more NABU alumni to do a livestream on December 16. Feels like it may be worth checking out.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QoZTBNz47co

Is there a canonical definition of what makes a game fringe for this forum's purposes

My main focus has generally been digging into the stories around games that are outside the normal scope of a "games industry" history. Freeware, homebrew, and fangame stuff most obviously, but with enough vague wiggle room to dig into basically anything that doesn't get written about enough. (For example, I have a strong desire to really dig into the guts of how the shareware industry actually worked, despite, you know, Doom being among the most well-documented games of all time. But most shareware games weren't Doom!)

Above all my interest is in the people whose stories get ignored, and the communities that supported them in their work. I wouldn't be interested in making a podcast episode that was a deep dive into the development history of UT2004, and the hype cycle surrounding it on release, but I'd definitely consider talking about the fan community that surrounds it now, keeping it alive long after the industry has moved on, well within the scope of my project.

That said, that's just how I think of it. It's not like anyone else was using this forum for anything, so if you're excited to talk about a thing with the folks here, I'm sure not gonna stop you.

I have a list of potential episodes / interviewees as long as my arm and have been consistently saying for years that I will bring it back. Just gotta... actually start reaching out to people. We'll see how life goes in the next little bit.

I think part of it is that @candle just is really into making tools, haha. They talk about their motivations for bipsi in their blog:

i'm renaming this page to "makers study" to better reflect how it has progressed from simply copying flickgame to deriving and refining a tool template by studying and copying multiple tools--flickgame, picrew, and now: bitsy

i've wanted to make my own bitsy-like for various reasons over the years, but now i'm doing it for primarily three reasons: to push the limits of the tool model/template this page is about, and to create a bitsy-like that feels streamlined and pared down in the same way bitsy once seemed compared to kooltool

I loved this video about Nocturnal Nightmares, a shareware game that this person made with a friend in QuickBasic when they were 13 years old, and how he found joy in revisiting it as an adult in a bunch of different ways.
Youtube Video

I'm surprised I haven't mentioned this book here yet! Gaming the Iron Curtain is a book which details how game development took place in Soviet Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. It's a vital history of an area of computer games which is almost entirely disconnected from the gaming industry. @coleoptera recently recorded an interview with the author, Jaroslav Švelch, about the book for the Critical Distance: Keywords in Play podcast, which I am enjoying listening to very much.

If you like, you can play an English translation of The Adventures of Indiana Jones in Wenceslas Square in Prague on January 16, 1989 where you, as Indiana Jones, kill a cop with an axe on like the fourth turn.

Just saw a Tumblr post go by talking about a bunch of weird amateur games made with BYOND (short for "Build Your Own Net Dream"), and I felt compelled to add my own account of my time with BYOND in the notes.

Now I wanna do a BYOND episode for the podcast...

Friend of the Fringe Game History Podcast Phil Salvador just posted a lovely article about Battle of the Eras, a Mortal Kombat-esque fighting game made by some teenagers in Belleville, Ontario. Worth a read, as well as this interview with its lead developer from Brandon Cobb.

Shareware Heroes is now on Kickstarter for one final big push to raise the rest of the money and get the work going in earnest. Seems to be off to a strong start already! Hopefully the funding will finally come through and Richard is finally able to really dig in - since hearing about this project, I've been listening to his podcasts Ludiphilia and The Life And Times of Videogames, and he does good work.

Just noticed that the rpg2knet.com Facebook page shared this episode and added a note or two:

Ed note: the heavily hyped game with pixel art nudity he could not recall the name of was Destiny's Call Complete. Also he thought Don Miguel was Spanish and not Russian but I'll forgive him this one time...

Just stumbled on to https://breakintochat.com/, which is a wiki & blog dedicated to preserving the history of BBS door games, via a link to an interview with Gary Martin, the creator of TradeWars 2002. Then I saw they had a whole list of interviews with door game creators, including one with Austin Seraphin, creator of BarneySplat! who has been on my list of people to interview for the podcast since the first draft. Gonna enjoy digging into these!

@Shadsy has written an in-depth essay called The Mario Fangame Myth about MFGG for the Lost Histories Jam that is very worth reading.

I meant to reply to this much earlier! Sorry!

I actually had a very similar experience with Furcadia when it came out - as I recall, it came up in an IRC channel I frequented, and so I gave it a shot with a few online friends. I remember being impressed at seeing a graphical world you could inhabit with other people and build your own part of, and vaguely confused that someone somewhere could possibly be running a server that hosted everybody, for free.

I went back once or twice on my own but kind of bounced off it pretty quickly - none of my friends continued using it, and I was more interested in it as a space for doing things with people I already knew than meeting it on its own terms and meeting people there. It just seemed so big and daunting!

Very interesting to read more about it, for sure. Thanks for posting it!

So this book project was brought to my attention the other day, and I figured I'd give it a mention over here: Shareware Heroes: Independent Games at the Dawn of the Internet

I'm not in love with the industry-centric framing of the pitch video, but I'm extremely excited to see others take shareware history seriously. The author promises to conduct lots of first-hand interviews with various people involved in shareware, which, you won't be surprised to hear, I think is absurdly valuable work. I can't be the only one out there interviewing folks about this stuff, I'm far too slow!

I'd say every tool has its "grain", and Allegro's bread and butter was really "draw bitmaps on top of other bitmaps", with certain effects like scaling and rotation being very easy to add. But other things, which may have been straightforward if you had written the blitting code and were able to make tweaks to it, were much more difficult.

I remember putting together a demo game to show off my "skills" in the early TPU days, where I tried to build the most audiovisually impressive thing I could. The thing that gave me the most trouble: I wanted to reproduce the end-of-level screen-melting effect from Doom, and getting that to run fast was hard.

That game also had:

• a pretty 3D fractal landscape generated by a VistaPro demo I got from a book called Virtual Reality Madness & More
• huge 3d-rendered characters modeled in a tool called Imagine (I couldn't figure out how to texture pupils on his googly sphere eyes, so I just drew them on afterwards in NeoPaint and hoped I got them in vaguely the same place every frame (I didn't))
• a title screen that I'm pretty sure had both gratuitous scaling and rotation
• oh, and I animated some extruded text as a "company logo" in I think maybe TrueSpace 3D?
• custom fonts EVERYWHERE; I feel like I must've had a tool for Windows that would export a TTF font as a bitmap that Allegro knew how to treat as a bitmap font. But if you wanted text in your game, you were probably gonna export a bitmap font. All I used it for was, like, "press start", and displaying your score, but I'm sure I had at least two fonts.

I definitely remember having to do a lot of fiddling to mash everything from these random sources into a sensible 256-colour palette. I had specialized commandline tools for palette generation & re-importing.

In general, I had a bunch of disparate free-or-pirated tools for creating visuals, and I used them about as naively as you could possibly imagine, and I suspect that had a lot to do with how my games ended up looking. It probably was not far off from the process that people making OHRRPGCE games were going through. Even my 3D stuff was made in tools that were designed to be accessible. I had a copy of 3DS Max, but I couldn't figure out how to make it do anything - I just knew it was "professional".

Glad you enjoyed it!
Regarding making timelines clearer, that's a fine point - I tend to be pretty muddy about what things happened when until I start digging into the wayback machine. I could certainly do some homework ahead of time and anchor questions with that information in the future.

I'd say the timeline looks roughly like:

• 1994 - Shawn starts working on the original Allegro
• 1997 - Allegro 2.1, which is about when I discovered it and wrote Barney Mutilator
• 2000 - Shawn starts significantly withdrawing from active development

Episode 6 show notes are here!

At one point in the interview, I assert that the General MIDI standard was based on the instrument choice of the Roland Sound Canvas. It turns out this is half-true; I had misremembered a story from The Fat Man on Game Audio, which incidentally is probably my favourite book ever written on the subject of the video game industry. If you can track down the book, I definitely recommend doing so, but here's the timeline as he lays it out:

• General MIDI is created as a standard. It defines 128 instruments.
• The Roland Sound Canvas is released as the first General MIDI sound card.
• George "The Fat Man" Sanger decides to compose the soundtrack of The 7th Guest using General MIDI, in order to attempt to ensure the music will sound OK for future sound cards. It is the first game to have its score written in General MIDI. He uses the Sound Canvas as the baseline because there are no other General MIDI cards out there yet.
• More sound cards touting General MIDI compatibility are released. His soundtrack sounds awful. He discovers to his horror that General MIDI does not define any standard for the dynamics of an instrument - how loud it is, or even what pitch middle C should sound.
• Fat Labs is founded to basically make sure The 7th Guest doesn't sound awful on new sound cards. Google "Fat Labs General MIDI" and you'll find a number of press releases from the 90s proudly proclaiming that their sound card has earned "The Fat Seal".
• Eventually the MIDI standards committee accedes that the only sensible solution is to take whatever dynamics Roland used for their Sound Canvas samples and use them as the standard for all cards going forward.

There are also a lot of DOS games that come out around this time that credit The Fat Man for their General MIDI FM patches for Adlib cards - this is because he bundled it with the popular MIDAS Sound System library, that allowed DOS games to support the vast numbers of incompatible sound cards that were being
released at that point.

Knowing this story is what made me wonder, wait, where did Allegro get its General MIDI instrument patches from? And I got sufficiently curious about this that I dug into the source code, and found the following comment:

/*  These instrument definitions are taken from the MID-KIT library by
 *  John Pollard. Many thanks to him for letting me use his patches: I
 *  wouldn't have enjoyed the task of coming up with a set of my own.
 */

Further digging reveals that MID-KIT was a shareware library that provided sound and music routines for DOS for the Watcom C compiler. Registration was $50 for a "link the binary with your software" license, and you could get the source code for $600. The author, John Pollard, credits Jean-Paul Mikkers, original creator of the Mikmod library, for assistance and some code. (One thing I had forgotten was that mikmod was also once shareware, though the $25 registration fee was only required for those using it commercially.)

Shawn doesn't remember any details about this; he assumes he must've went looking for existing software that had already solved this problem, and then simply asked the author for help.

Why is this important or even interesting to anyone? Part of what I'm interested in uncovering as part of this podcast is the invisible support networks and ecosystems that made games possible. It's too easy to imagine Shawn toiling away in isolation to produce the first draft of Allegro, and then support and code contributions just spontaneously flowing in his direction. But when you dig into questions like this, you quickly discover a bunch of people sharing knowledge, asking questions, and helping each other out.

Thanks for sticking with me during this extremely dorky and overly technical aside about MIDI. Now: If you had any personal experience using Allegro, or playing games that came out of the loose Allegro community, this would be a good thread in which to talk about it!

So I went to Babycastles and spoke with Mattie Brice about Glorious Trainwrecks and its history! It was a really good time, and I suspect the following hour-and-a-half-long video may be interesting to people who enjoy listening to the podcast.
Youtube Video

Gosh, yeah, the Minecraft project is SO huge. Like, it's not just terabytes of random zip files, he took the time to build tools to analyze and make it digestable. So if you want to explore a representative sampling of random Minecraft maps from the archive, there's The Reef maps. If you want a bunch of data to build Mastodon bots with, there's The Minecraft Geologic Survey. It must have been an enormous amount of effort to put all that stuff together. And pretty much once a year he takes another huge sample.

He also has the Ephemeral Software Collection which, among other things, scrapes jam games from Github. Important work!

Episode 5 show notes are here!

In the interview, Leonard was a little uncertain about the exact chronology of the contest that led to the robotfindskitten game; after we spoke, he was kind enough to pass on an email from Pete Peterson II, definitively nailing down the story:

Jake Berendes had a "contest" with his friends -- I think while in
high school -- called "robotfindskitten". In his words (as I recall
them), both submissions involved a kitten suffering at the hands of a
robot. There is a picture I saved from his website, but I can't
remember the source of it (e.g., I don't know if he drew it, or if a
friend drew it for him). I've attached the image I have.
 
I loved the idea of the super broad and intriguingly named "contest"
"robotfindskitten", so I thought I would use Nerth Pork as a venue to
have the robotfindskitten contest. As you know, you're the only person
who submitted something. I was expecting poems, or pictures, or
stories, so I was absolutely delighted when the submission was a video
game.

I didn't realize Leonard had written a fan song for a Klik & Play game until after the interview was recorded, or I would have pestered him about that. So I pestered him via email instead! He sent me his copy of the game that he had archived from his BBS, along with the description that he'd written at the time:

CHOP.ZIP Size: 414,647 | A very dumb Windoze game called Choppy the
Date: 01/11/96 DL's: 0 | Pork Chop.

Extended description:
You're a pork chop (surprise) and you shoot various weapons at non
sequiter baddies like hamburgers and mops. The final boss guy is a big
head who throws his eyeballs at you. It's bizarre, but that's good. It's
one of the best attempts at an action game for Windoze that I've ever
seen. I even went so far as to write a song called "Choppy The Pork
Chop" which is officially endorsed by the game's creator even. Here it
goes:
 
Presumably I had the lyrics in the extended description but they didn't get picked up when I dumped the file. I had never heard of Klik & Play, didn't know it was a tool, and remember being pretty impressed that someone had put in all this effort to program a pointless game.
 
Jeremy: I'm sure the story of how the creator gave your song an official endorsement amounts to "I emailed him and he responded positively" but I am absolutely delighted by that detail.
 
Leonard: I did email the author and he responded positively, that's the story, but the secret part of the story is that this was probably the first Internet email I ever sent. Certainly the first one I sent that got a response.

Choppy the Pork Chop, hooray!