Paradroid PCE - Devs inside info!

[Vimtoman]

There was a guy on Assemblergames that had a copy of Marble madness but did not share a copy.
I guess if you spend a load of money buying it you could feel that releasing a copy would devalue the original one.

In this case I guess it's just getting the Ok from Andrew Hewson/original producer.

Yeah, that guy was looking for a way to do a monetized release like he has with other protos I believe.  New chips are around from before when he was messing with it so I suppose it's more likely to happen now.

Sounds good . I defiantly would sponsor a release.

[sunteam_paul]

Here is some information from the programmer, Gary Foreman (@fearmyjargon on Twitter)

Graftgold were developing a port of the Amiga/ST version (with some platform specific changes) and I was the main developer with feedback/advice from Andrew (Braybrook) and audio support from Jason (Page).

...I've attached the title screen which is the only 'screenshot' that I have - the game was never totally completed - in terms of being a final rom, but everything was there and tested. 

One day I might find time to rebuild it (seems like the main tools are out there) for emulation, rather than try to port it to modern devices.

I got back to Gary with some questions which revealed the following:

We had an official devkit which consisted of the custom hardware - a big(ish) grey box with various input/outputs for the controllers, power, video, etc. and  DIP switches for setting various modes.  I've not seen any pictures online, but i'm sure they exist.
 
On the software side, there were various PC utilities for assembling, linking, etc. 
 
Everything was done in assembler.  This was fairly straightforward since it's a variation of 6502 which I know VERY well - I'd written quite a lot of 6502 code during the previous decade or so, so adapting to this variants wasn't difficult.  There were some custom instructions for handling the bank switching and various other hardware registers, but the instriuctions are almost identical.
 
The project was initiated by Hewson, who'd published many other Graftgold games.  the exact details and why it never saw the light of day should probably come from them, but I can tell you that the game was almost 100% complete and just needed the final logos and other certification/testing required before publishing would have been possible.

The TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine version had 2 layer, multi-directional scrolling (although play was only on one layer) with enhancements for graphics and sound, otherwise it was a faithful conversion from Amiga/ST version.
 
Looking at the tools available online (assembler, emulators, etc.), it's probably possible to rebuild it although they all look to be Windows based (my daily drive is a Macbook Pro these days)... and it could turn out to be a can of worms too!
 
never say never though...

I asked about the parallax (whether it was sprites or tile based) and kept gently pushing about seeing it rebuilt.

IIRC the parallax used another tile map, but just for effect...nothing animated (again, iirc). a look at the code would confirm - perhaps later or in the morning.

Ownership of the code is unknown since Graftgold doesn't exists these days, but I remember talking to somebody last year about who might own the IP/assets.

When I look at the code, I might see how feasible it would be to rebuild the levels, etc. - the data format won't be hard to work out...

Don't want to get too excited but it would be great to see this unreleased title finally finished up and propery released after all these years. It could happen.

[Arkhan]

and then we can show him Squirrel, and hopefully make better music than what happened when they ported shit-ass Turrican to PCE and the music sounded all retarded!

wooowoooooo.


It would be interesting if this game were to come out on PCE.   It's one of the few C64 games that weren't a trainwreck and a half, and it would probably play better on PCE than C64.

Paradroid 90 was pretty decent, too, so if it's just a straight port of that, also good.

[Dicer]

and then we can show him Squirrel, and hopefully make better music than what happened when they ported shit-ass Turrican to PCE and the music sounded all retarded!

wooowoooooo.


It would be interesting if this game were to come out on PCE.   It's one of the few C64 games that weren't a trainwreck and a half, and it would probably play better on PCE than C64.

Paradroid 90 was pretty decent, too, so if it's just a straight port of that, also good.

Whoa whoa whoa....hold up.

C=64 had plenty of competent games, yes many were shoddy sloppy port shit fest and other just sucked ass, but there are plenty great ones as well....

[Punch]

and then we can show him Squirrel, and hopefully make better music than what happened when they ported shit-ass Turrican to PCE and the music sounded all retarded!

wooowoooooo.


It would be interesting if this game were to come out on PCE.   It's one of the few C64 games that weren't a trainwreck and a half, and it would probably play better on PCE than C64.

Paradroid 90 was pretty decent, too, so if it's just a straight port of that, also good.

Whoa whoa whoa....hold up.

C=64 had plenty of competent games, yes many were shoddy sloppy port shit fest and other just sucked ass, but there are plenty great ones as well....

Answer: is Turrican good or bad? This is important

[ParanoiaDragon]

Good grief, could this be the Second Coming of Paradroid 90??  I await impatiently for more news on this! 

[sunteam_paul]

Gary (the progrmamer) seems very keep on rebuilding this now.

I really do want/need to build it now!

He thinks that his mention of parallax before may have been memories of some other version as he couldn't see anything in the code that suggests it.

so... i looked at the code and couldn't see anything about setting up a parallax layer, so i'm a little confused .. this was from 24 years ago so maybe i was mistaking it with another project although this was the only tg16 game that i worked on... the confusion may be from some genesis (megadrive) work... who knows

He's asked me for links to original dev tools, the best I could give him was a link to PCEAS. Let's see how this progresses, it quite exciting!

[elmer]

He's asked me for links to original dev tools, the best I could give him was a link to PCEAS. Let's see how this progresses, it quite exciting!

Unfortunately, I don't have Hudson's assembler but please consider sending him a link to CC65 as well ... he may find that some of CA65's features map better to the "pro" assemblers of that time.

If he can't find a copy of the original assembler, and so has to convert his source to a different assembler, then he may find it more "comfortable",  because IMHO it's much closer to the SN Systems assembler that he will probably have used on various systems.

[sunteam_paul]

Thanks, I've let him know.

[InfraMan]

This is exciting news, Paradriod was a fantastic game!

[ccovell]

And a few of us here still have Hu6280 assembler fresh in our minds (hint hint) so we can offer technical assistance if there are problems or things that need hacking together.  (Like the recent NES Dizzy re-compilation, for example.)

[Punch]

I hope this doesn't end like Gunboat.

[SignOfZeta]

This is really cool. I'm not sure never ever played a Euro shooter on PCE. Are there any?

[elmer]

And a few of us here still have Hu6280 assembler fresh in our minds (hint hint) so we can offer technical assistance if there are problems or things that need hacking together.

Hahaha ... subtle. Cool! 

[Bonknuts]

If he can't find a copy of the original assembler, and so has to convert his source to a different assembler, then he may find it more "comfortable",  because IMHO it's much closer to the SN Systems assembler that he will probably have used on various systems.

I've used snasm68k.. did they make a 65c02 version?