It's an incredibly sparse news day (apart from that Eidos story, of course), but one press release has caught my eye. Software manual publisher, Course Technology, is set to launch a book entitled, 'Retro Game Programming: Unleashed for the Masses', which promises to teach the reader, "everything that they need to build exiting (sic) video games on vintage 8-bit machines". The book covers four ancient platforms - the Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari 400/800 and the TRS-80. Author Earl Carey says of his opus:
"My goal is to introduce the fundamentals of the Zen of programming using vintage computer systems. There are already a lot of hardcore hackers out there but there are a lot more people who's only knowledge of assembly language programming is that it is hard and they cannot do it."
Is this really the case? Are today's molly-coddled programmers relying too heavily on APIs, off-the-shelf 3D engines and libraries supplied by console manufacturers? Certainly, I've heard that PSP developers are highly restricted in terms of how they interact with the hardware and what elements they can and can't have access to (the second CPU - or media unit - is strictly out of bounds to naughty coders who want to access a bit more processing clout).
Most of the greatest advances in game design were achieved by brilliant coders who learned their trade writing directly to the CPU of eighties home computers. Are those maverick days well and truly behind us?
On a similar retro-tinged note, I've just been sent a Java version of Grid Runner++, the recently updated version of the classic Jeff Minter C64 shooter. It's demo code and running quite slowly at the moment, but it looks lovely, with a great mix of modern effects and the original gameplay. Apparently, there's little hope of an Attack of the Mutant Camels conversion, though, as no source code is available. Jeff would have to write it himself, and he's busy on a top secret project which - shock, horror - isn't anything to do with Tempest.
I've forgotten what I was originally talking about now.
