Old Source code

[esteban]

WESTWOOD68!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Punch]

Boss!! Whear's that source code you promised?!

[TheClash603]

I never saw this thread until now.  I don't know anything about programing, but I do hope the source code gets uploaded for you programing types.

What is incredibly interesting is the fact that it took 2 guys 20 weeks to program the conversions.  That is really impressive.

[NightWolve]

Yeah, same here, didn't notice this thread till now. Guess there's no point since that code never made it anywhere though. Still interesting to have heard some of his programming history at least.

[elmer]

There are a lot of us old folks from the early days still out there ... still with archives gathering dust ... still interested in programming, but with no desire to get that exciting "cease-and-desist" letter that the big guys send out.

It's great to see that some of the old programmer's that actually retained the rights to their code are releasing stuff ... but for the rest of us ... work-for-hire means that we don't have the rights to just upload it, however old it is. :-(

[Sadler]

Wow. I can't believe I missed this, amazing stuff here.

(5) do you remember any particularly challenging/annoying/duh! Moments.....

Late nights fixing bugs and getting the character based screen of the PC to do 3D was a challenge; mainly because of lack of knowledge and experience. There is so much 3D around these days it would be much easier. And lack of video ram for the graphics of course. That was always an issue

I realize there's a 0.no % chance of this getting answered, but I'd love to hear more about this. By "character based screen" I'm guessing you are referring to sprite/tile based hardware. How did you overcome this? My vague recollection from the era DOS side to draw filled polygons basically boiled down to fmemset or 32-bit equivalents and sequentially drawing horizontal lines of the polygon. How were you pulling this off on the PC Engine? How did you handle a depth buffer? Painter's algorithm? God, so many questions. How did you sort? Radix? How were you approximating floating point? Real ignorance of the era: were trig functions all LUTs or were there maclaurin approximates possible?

( what do you love? What do you enjoy?

Same as most on this bit of the forum;Programming. That's why I started and that's why I'm still doing it.

EDIT and damn, I can't shake the feeling I've asked about this before, have had the answers laid out to me in detail and have simply forgotten. I have a lot of respect for the guys doing dev on this forum, I apologize if we've covered this before. Please forgive me.

[elmer]

I command thee. Upload thine code.

Sorry. I'm thinking of putting some of my 8-bit source together, but you probably wouldn't be interested in the platforms ... old 80's home computers, and this isn't the right place for those.

For anything more modern, there are still legal successors, or active NDAs with existing companies that are still in place.

Just like westwood68 ... when you've been in the industry for a while (and it sounds like he only left a few years ago), there are a lot of goodies to share someday, but you don't want to piss off Nintendo, Sony,  Microsoft or any of the big publishers with bored on-staff lawyers.

That's one of the nice things about the PCE ... it's manufacturer isn't in the game business anymore!

Lots of developer's old source code will eventually get out there ... and there will be a record of the early days for historians, but it's just going to take time (years).

Something that may happen sooner is old folks retiring and writing new stuff for the old platforms ... for fun.

[Necromancer]

Something that may happen sooner is old folks retiring and writing new stuff for the old platforms ... for fun.

That's even better. 

[esteban]

Just curious is westwood68 if still thinking about sharing any other memories/anecdotes with us!