
Two player Karateka using a 42 byte patch - rishabhd
http://retroconnector.com/karateka-two-player/
======
jacobkg
Jordan Mechner published his journals from the period when he made Karateka
and Prince of Persia. I found them to be very inspirational.

The Making of Karateka
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1480297232/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1480297232/)

The Making of Prince of Persia
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1468093657/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1468093657/)

I recommend reading them in order.

~~~
petermcneeley
Or just watch his GDC talk which is basically a story of becoming an adult.
[https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014634/Classic-Game-
Postmorte...](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014634/Classic-Game-Postmortem-
PRINCE-OF)

~~~
cableshaft
Just watched that. I had no idea Prince of Persia was not a hit when it was
first released. Did poorly on Apple II because the market was dying, did
poorly on PC because it was a conversion and retailers looked at the poor
Apple II sales and assumed it would have poor sales, and then finally on the
Mac it came out just as there was enough Mac sales to have customers wanting
good software.

Once again it seems that releasing on the right platform at the right time is
super important for success.

What does everyone think is the right platform right now (or emerging within
the next couple of years), especially for an Indie title? People don't seem to
play web games much anymore, Steam is flooded with junk, Mobile seems to be
totally saturated, Nintendo Switch seems promising right now but it's starting
to go down the same road as Steam. VR seems to be slow to get moving (and
looks like it might remain a niche for several more years, at least). Are
there any good options to get in at the right time like he did?

~~~
Kurtz79
As you say, the real issue is discoverability, but I don't think the problem
is the "junk", as much the large number of perfectly average and acceptably
fun games released every day.

I read Mechner's journals a few years ago, and they were illuminating in how
basically as an Indie developer at the time you needed not only the willpower
and creativeness to make a game, but also have the connections/luck of getting
it published (no Steam, no Apple Store... no Internet!) and you also had to
dominate the technical aspect and know the underlying hardware, with very
little information around (again, no Internet).

If you could manage all this (!) your game was going to be noticed, since
there were not so many "good" games being released in general, much less
masterpieces like PoP.

Nowadays, the barriers of entry are minimal, there are multi-platform engines
with highly refined tools, with plenty of tutorials about pretty much
everything, publishing is pretty much an automated process, that gives
millions of people instant access to your game.

There was little chance a few years ago of a "good" indie title going
unnoticed, nowadays it must be truly excellent to get the spotlight, and even
then... it's easy to spot junk, much less to spot a great game in the middle
of a sea of perfecty good ones.

~~~
_0ffh
> but also have the connections/luck of getting it published

That or the guts to take the risk and invest one's own (or, even worse, lent)
money.

------
mkagenius
I had a "76 in 1" cassette and my friend a "63 in 1" with exactly same games
with some repeats. One day I used a pencil (graphite) and randomly drew a
connection between some circuit line on the cassette and mine got converted in
"63 in 1".

I was 12-13 back then. It was fun.

~~~
orbital-decay
Hah, this is how it all started for me. I went a bit further and tried to
reverse engineer the purpose of different pins in a NES cartridge, by
grounding them one by one in a running system with a small incandescent lamp
from a flashlight to avoid short circuits. I've got all kinds of crashes and
artifacts which gave a hint to their purpose. Thankfully, the NES was
resilient enough for me not to kill it or burn my house down.

Still, I assumed a cartridge to be a simple ROM with a plain addressing
scheme, which it wasn't. Only a year after that I've read an EE book with
occasional NES architecture details which all made sense in the context of my
experiments.

That's why I've taught my son to program with a simple self-designed embedded
system first. You can almost physically see its parts moving, no black magic
involved.

~~~
jackweirdy
The system you designed for your son sounds really interesting and fun for a
beginner. Have you written about this anywhere? I’d love to read more.

~~~
orbital-decay
Oh I'm not a professional, so this wasn't a super serious project. It's a
1801-series CPU (an old soviet single-chip LSI-11 clone, chosen because of the
beautiful PDP-11 ISA) with 64KB of SRAM, an LCD from Aliexpress, an RS-232
controller, some LEDs in key points to illustrate the inner workings, a pulse-
modulated speaker, and some discrete logic to glue all this together. It has
no flash/ROM so you have to load the program from a PC each time. It took me
~three months to build in my spare time, including the PCB manufacturer round
trip time. The biggest issue was making a modern C compiler work for this CPU,
but in the end I've even got a legacy Forth implementation working (more or
less). Forth is great on this ISA because one word translates precisely to one
machine instruction.

We used it to drive our Christmas lights the last time, then to make some
simple platform games. I was trying to make MicroPython run on this board
without much success, so we'll probably have to drop it in favor of full-
featured Python.

There was a lot of bugs in this thing, which made it even more fun to use.

------
mcphage
Ah, I loved Karateka when I was young. That was a hard game!

~~~
sofaofthedamned
It was awesome on my Atari ST. That feeling when you got to the end, thought
you'd saved the princess and she kicked your arse because you were in a
fighting stance. Utter genius.

~~~
fatnoah
I had it for C64 and it took me quite a while to finally get to the princess.
I think I cried a little when she killed me.

~~~
sofaofthedamned
Best and worst ending to a game ever. I still remember the music...

------
PhasmaFelis
I'm curious why it uses the keyboard instead of joysticks. Did the Apple II
only have one joystick port? I don't know much about its hardware.

~~~
jasonkester
Apple joysticks were these terrible analog things that were completely useless
for anything other than flight simulator. Anything that needed gamepad-like
input just used the keyboard.

~~~
raldi
Designed by Jony Ive?

[http://appletothecore.me/files/pasted-
graphic-1232chjoy.jpg](http://appletothecore.me/files/pasted-
graphic-1232chjoy.jpg)

