
The boy behind the biggest coin-op conversion of the 80s - mmastrac
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-10-13-the-boy-behind-the-biggest-coin-op-conversion-of-the-80s
======
henrikschroder
If you liked this story, and haven't yet checked out Jordan Mechner's journals
from the mid-80's when he developed Prince of Persia, I highly recommend that
you do:
[https://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/](https://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/)

~~~
mmastrac
I go back and read this every once in a while. It's a pretty magical story.

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djmips
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.

~~~
Flow
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?

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

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pmoriarty
I can't find it now, but there was a very impressive story posted to HN about
a kid who reverse engineered and patched an arcade game in the 80's and sent
the code in to the company that made the game, and they wound up flying him
out to meet its developers. I think the game was Robotron, but it might have
been something else.

~~~
joezydeco
It was Robotron.

Christian Gingras reverse engineered the entire game from scratch _AND_
patched a fatal crash in the game that eluded the original developers for
years.

[http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/technical/christianging...](http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/technical/christiangingras/)

~~~
zeristor
Thanks, that made me smile like an emoticon.

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twic
> When we got the first royalty check my dad gave me a grand and I part-
> exchanged my Mini Cooper for a Ford Fiesta XR2. A few months later I changed
> that for a Ford Orion 1.6i Ghia.

This is where i cracked up. I think these models are all European, so American
readers won't be familiar with them, but this article is a lovely tour of Shit
Fords of the 1980s.

~~~
reitoei
The Orion was a bit shit but the Mini Cooper and the XR2 Fiesta were great at
the time.

Hah, this brings back memories of buying weed in the 90's off a lad with a
purple Orion.

~~~
noir_lord
In a true sense the Orion 1.6i was shit but not at the time, at the time it
was high in the list of cars you'd want at 18 (I was born 80 so I remember
lusting after them) particularly since it was the same engine as the XR3i
without the utterly cripling insurance/reputation.

I still have a soft spot for that era but I'd have the even more naff (and
lethal) Capri.

~~~
reitoei
I loved that era of VW Scirocco but they were awful apparently. The Renault 5
GT was THE car to have around my parts.

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iuguy
I'd swear blind that game was cursed. Almost every 8-bit conversion (including
the C64 version), and some of the 16-bit versions were terrible.

ISTR the Sega Master System version being the most playable.

~~~
axilmar
How would it be possible for 8-bit machines to successfully emulate a game
that used twin 68000 cpus and custom sprite scaling hardware? these
conversions were just a marketing gimmick, targeting the wallets of the poor
consumers.

It was amazing back then to me how bad were home computers relative to arcade
machines back then. It was also amazing to me that no home computer
manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that
matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality.

Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun, close
to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...

~~~
vidarh
> It was amazing back then to me how bad were home computers relative to
> arcade machines back then. It was also amazing to me that no home computer
> manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that
> matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality.

The Amiga _did_ come close-ish, but despite its custom chips, the lack of a
custom sprite scaler and too low memory bandwidth would have likely made it
impossible to get all that much closer (it's mainly lacking extra details next
to the road). The dual 68k's on Outrun also ran on 12.5Mhz vs. ~8Mhz/7.16Mhz
(depending on NTSC vs. PAL) for the Amiga's single M68k.

Outrun on Amiga:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGxxYm4z5I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGxxYm4z5I)

Outrun on arcade:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7tZFW4WedI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7tZFW4WedI)

> Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun,
> close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...

In effect the Amiga was the closest the market would bear - Commodore
struggled on for years, and sold about 5m Amiga's, and the only reason they
survived as long as they did was that Commodore were masters at cost-cutting
(arguably that also sank them: they cut their R&D budgets to the bone, among
many other mistakes). People who went from working at Apple to Commodore at
the time have indicated that attempts at Apple to figure out how Commodore was
able to sell the Amiga at the price-points they did for example massively
over-estimated Commodores manufacturing costs and could not figure out how
Commodore were able to squeeze out a margin at all.

As such we can assume the Amiga price, which including a monitor, joysticks
etc. around the time of Outrun would easily ended up in the region of 1000
dollars or more, was the high point of what was commercially possible around
the thousand dollar mark at the time.

~~~
axilmar
Nah, the Amiga's Outrun was a silly Atari ST port. It didn't even come close
to what the Amiga could do (e.g. Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge).

> In effect the Amiga was the closest the market would bear

Not at all. Commodore was a very shitty company that has no business plan, was
engineer-unfriendly and by 1992 they have managed to alienate all their top
engineering talent.

Those very clever engineers (RJ Michael, Jay Miner etc) could have easily
designed chips that did sprite scaling and rotation along with blitting.

These people have developed the Amiga custom chips actually in 1982-1983. In
1989, I am sure they would be able to develop something much better.

And it could be a little pricey at first. Even at double the price or a normal
Amiga, who wouldn't want to play 100% authentic coin-op conversions?

~~~
vidarh
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge _also_ has exactly the same gap in graphics
capability vs arcade Outrun. I thought the same as you and was about to pull
it out as a better example, and while it's a clearly better game on the Amiga
more graphical detail is isn't really it - put some videos of them side by
side.

> Not at all. Commodore was a very shitty company that has no business plan,
> was engineer-unfriendly and by 1992 they have managed to alienate all their
> top engineering talent.

And yet, those things were in large part because they _spent less_ per unit
sold than pretty much _any other company_ at the time. Their R&D was
chronically underfunded, they squeezed suppliers, they squeezed distributors.
Commodore survived as long as they did because despite being dysfunctional the
one are that dysfunction _worked_ was that they were able to produce their
hardware at prices most of the competition thought was impossible.

> In 1989, I am sure they would be able to develop something much better.

Outrun came out in 1986.

> Even at double the price or a normal Amiga, who wouldn't want to play 100%
> authentic coin-op conversions?

Far fewer than bought Amiga's. It might have done OK, but not well. Others
have pointed out the X68000, which did not sell well at all.

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raphlinus
That was an interesting read, as my relationship with my dad was pretty
similar at that age. I was coding image handling systems for newspapers (in
80286 assembly) with my dad handling the business side. We had some success -
installations in a few newspapers and some banks in Iceland, but not making
real money. The parts about the tension and fights sounded almost exactly like
my story. Then I left home at 22 and came to grad school to UC Berkeley, all
the way across the country, which was one of the best decisions I ever made.

I'm still doing 2D graphics software! It flows more or less directly from the
work I did as a teenager.

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pushpop
Couldn’t read their article because I couldn’t even get passed their cookie
consent page:

> _You can choose here if you would not like this session tracking to occur._

Does this mean I’m opting in or out? To compound things the options are “yes”
and “no” rather than “opt in”, “on”, “enable” nor any other the other verbs
typically used on other sites. Which means I have to navigate their maze of
double negatives to understand what I’m electing for.

I _really_ dislike sites that employ this kind of language anti-pattern.

