

It's Behind You: The making of the game R-Type on the ZX Spectrum - ilitirit
http://bizzley.com/

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Jare
This book is awesome for anyone who lived those days.

"the PDS assembler could only handle source files up to a certain size so the
more you commented your work the less room you had for the actual game code
itself"

~~~
Sodaware
Reminds me of trick from the Commodore BASIC days, where you could use "?" as
a replacement for "PRINT" to save a whopping 4 bytes. Seems silly now, but
back then it made all the difference.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Don't know about Commodore BASIC, but in Locomotive BASIC on the Amstrad CPC,
"?" was just a text-entry convenience rather than a memory-saver. BASIC was
stored tokenised, so "?" was one byte same as "PRINT" (in fact, I think it was
the same byte).

~~~
vidarh
Yes, it's that way on C64 too - it didn't save any space.

People certainly did do a lot to save space through omitting spaces, using ";"
to separate statements instead of new lines etc.

~~~
ssdsa
In Commodore BASIC you use ":" to separate statements. ";" is used at the end
of a PRINT statement to keep it from appending a newline.

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breckinloggins
I just read the whole thing and it was definitely worth it! If you like these
kind of coder memoirs (especially if you like _Masters of Doom_ ) then this
will be right up your alley. Plus I'm an R-Type fan so that's an added bonus.

As I was reading it I couldn't help but feel a bit of regret. It was in 1991
on a visit with my dad to LA that I got my first computer (a TRS-80 Model III)
along with a book on programming in BASIC. I didn't know what I was doing, but
I wanted the computer to do the stuff I saw on _War Games_ and _Explorers_. I
got pretty far but it wasn't until 1996 or so that I really got into the swing
of "serious" programming in C and C++. Growing up in Dallas, TX I didn't have
the first clue where I might find people interested in this stuff. Until
sophomore year in college it was really just me. I find that I regret not
having lived in a place where I could have "gotten into the scene" early. This
is even more ironic considering that my idol at the time (and arguably today
as well), John Carmack, worked less than 5 miles from my house!

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Groxx
Downloading the PDF takes quite a while D: Maybe they're being overloaded a
bit? Anyway, here's a mirror of the book's PDF (14MB):
[http://f.cl.ly/items/1C1J1c3W0V2e1903453r/It%27s%20Behind%20...](http://f.cl.ly/items/1C1J1c3W0V2e1903453r/It%27s%20Behind%20You-%20the%20making%20of%20a%20computer%20game%20by%20Bob%20Pape.pdf)

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feintruled
From reading this, it appears the only reason we had any decent 8-bit games at
all was due to professional pride and heroic effort on the part of the bedroom
programmers employed! He was largely left to his own devices (but given a
tight deadline).

Bittersweet moment in the book - the photo of some suit accepting the "best
game" award for his game. They never even bothered to tell him he had won...

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mpermar
"My original plan was to self-publish this book and put it up for sale - at a
purely nominal price of course (ahem) - and maybe make a few pounds from the
thing but there's a part of me that finds this idea just wrong"

There is nothing wrong with making a few pounds from such an interesting
story. I'm sure there is more people around like me who actually find a pity
not being able to easily purchase a physical copy of this book. I actually
find quite convenient to pay for not having to print it ( I mean book printing
) myself. And I actually love to have physical books too, specially this sort
of books :)

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n-gauge
This is a fantastic read, brings back many memorys of my youth. One thing I
was thinking about was the undisclosed multiface backup hack that was
mentioned. I believe this could have been done using the Z80 shadow registers,
which was a copy of all the Z80 registers in a seperate bank and had to be
switched to in by code. If these were used instead via in game switching the
multiface 1 would not be able to switch to the shadow registers, it would just
copy the main registers, so storing a key in the shawdow register would defeat
the multiface 1.

...and thanks again to the op for this ebook.

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zaf
Can't wait to read the PDF! Thank you Bob.

One of the best games ever and an unbelievable ZX Spectrum port.

I still remember holding and reading the box cover from the shops to my home.

And, shameless plug, this is what I did for my summer vacation project:
"R-Type Real Time Memory Visualisation" ZX Spectrum
[http://zaf.io/page-3o.html#p139](http://zaf.io/page-3o.html#p139)

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mzs
Neat, check-out the sprites for Lizzy and George from Rampage, they are often
the same when not in profile! They're under the Extras button.

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bond
One of my favorite games I played on my Spectrum and on a friend's Amiga.

~~~
Ecio78
I played it on my MSX-2 just checked on youtube to remember how it was:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkBL8KjAyDs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkBL8KjAyDs)

the scrolling was choppy but the action was.. action!

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coffeemug
I learned to program on the ZX Spectrum. Ahhh, memories...

~~~
naich
Spectrum? You youngsters had it easy. I cut my teeth on a ZX81.

~~~
robin2
I had a ZX81... nearly put me off for life [http://rdn32.com/2013/07/28/how-i-
got-into-programming/](http://rdn32.com/2013/07/28/how-i-got-into-
programming/)

When I visited the Centre for Computing History
([http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/)) I
noticed that as well as having games for their collection of 1980s home
computers, they also had developer tools. Having read about Ian Bogost's "A
Slow Year" (for the Atari 2600) it occurred to me that making new games for
old machines using "period instruments" might be an interesting exercise. What
I had in mind was games that would never have been written at the time, but
that would have been technically feasible.

That's as far as the idea got because, er, I'm not a games programmer. As
close as I got to an actual idea was that perhaps it would be possible to
write a Tetris clone for the ZX Spectrum. Can anybody think of something
better?

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Gazk
This looks like a great read. It must have been challenging to do a decent
arcade conversion for the 8 bit home computers. The spectrum was probably
slower than the z80 sound cpu in the arcade board.

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opminion
Note that the book is freely available, but the game unfortunately is not (or
at least [1] says "distribution denied").

[http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004256](http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004256)

I remember that the Spectrum version of the game was very good, with full
colours (perhaps thanks to very fast 8-pixel jumps), as well as the arcade
machine it was based on.

~~~
bhrgunatha
Some nostalgia, then -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56IFFd43acU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56IFFd43acU)

That includes the full experience of loading the game from tape. I guess on
those who had a ZX-Spectrum will bother watching.

For actual game-play footage , jump to 5:38 -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56IFFd43acU#t=5m38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56IFFd43acU#t=5m38)

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muyuu
The tune is blasting in my head now. Title tune by Huelsbeck and level 1 by
Whittaker... these two wrote so many great game tunes.

~~~
incision
Great composer, no doubt, but slow (Estimated delivery: Dec 2012) going with
the Turrican Soundtrack Kickstarter [0].

0: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chris-
huelsbeck/turrican...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chris-
huelsbeck/turrican-soundtrack-anthology-by-chris-huelsbeck)

~~~
muyuu
Thanks for the heads up!

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thibaud
I play that game on my nexus 7
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotemu.rty...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotemu.rtype))

love it :)

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blackdivine
Does anyone else see the logo image moving in a weird way? like when you are
not exactly looking at it, it feels like animating, like those fancy optical
illusions. (sorry for being off-topic but this is bothering me)

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AlexeyBrin
This is a great little book.

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abdulhaq
I've got to say that for anyone who owned a micro in this period, you should
spend an evening reading this book. I loved it, fascinating stuff!

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tolitius
it's so rings a bell: [http://www.dotkam.com/2008/11/19/zx-spectrum-
child/](http://www.dotkam.com/2008/11/19/zx-spectrum-child/)

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harel
This made my day!

