Ever found an old game of yours on you-tube that you'd lost years ago?

[Xerra]

Way back in 1994, at a grand old age of 25 I was learning how to program with Amos on my good old Amiga 1200 and spent a few months writing my own Pacman game. I submitted it to a PD library (as was the norm for putting software out there back then because the Internet was only just coming in for the mainstream public) and mostly forgot all about it.

A few years later I moved away having left my Amiga and all the old disks in my mothers shed because I'd forgotten they were in there and I'd had a PC for a few months by then. Naturally everything got destroyed by the damp in there and mostly lost when she moved house a few years later and I had nothing left of this game or any of the other work I'd done over those Amiga years. So I just forgot all about it and assumed I'd never see anything of them again.

Randomly, while bored at work, I googled my name and Amiga as I've done a few times over the last few years just to see if any traces of some of my later Amiga stuff was still around on Aminet archives and the like, or if there were still archives of old CU Amiga magazines articles which I did for them while freelancing for a while.

I got a hit on my old game called "Pacman Returns" after all these years as well as a hit on a demo of another game I'd been working on at the time and obviously submitted to the library as well. Someone on YouTube has taken to scanning old Aminet cd's and doing video's of all the obscure stuff that's on them for some kind of preservation project. I watched the video with great interest as the poor bloke had to deal with my terrible coding that meant the game would only really run from a floppy disk unless you messed around creating a volume assign so it could load all it's external data files. But he does eventually get there - around the 17 min mark and has my game up and running - no idea if it's emulated or on a real Amiga but it was fascinating to actually see it again after all these years.

Have a look yourself and see what I was obviously happy with at the time but would not be anywhere near acceptable now.

I hadn't thought of trawling Aminet archives for old stuff so I dug around and managed to get the disk image and get all the game files from it to keep my own copy now. Sadly, on the disk, while having included a huge text file of a diary documenting the development of the game - and weeks of problems getting a decent AI coded in - I never included the source code so that's lost forever. At least I can dig up an emulator and at least have a go at the game again after all these years. Pity the guy recorded it with no sound - although maybe just as well, as I blatantly used a music track I probably shouldn't have for the title screen. I'd get crucified for that these days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFaUvT237co - just skip to around 17 mins in to see the game as he messes around a lot trying to get it working and also scrolls through pages and pages of me waffling in the development diary.

Nowdays I could rewrite this game in probably a week or so and obviously do a much better job. I'd certainly not have the problem with using hard coded file paths as that was unforgivable really. The editor didn't even seem to work when he tried to use it - despite fixing the assign. Also I know that the version of the game I submitted into the PD library also screwed up the saved map data if you did do any levels of your own and saved them on the disk because a young lad wrote to me and sent me the disk back because of it. I did a bug fix just for him but never updated the original disk with the PD library. Probably nobody else ever bought it from them :-)

Looking at the game itself the AI did actually work ok in the end but there were several notable flaws. We had no internet in those days so I couldn't look up how the original game was done - which I'd certainly do now with just a quick google search. I worked on that more than anything else back then yet some obvious mistakes show up straight away, like the monsters not even leaving their little start zone until pacman starts moving because I coded them to react to what he does in different ways but not to do much else unless he is actually doing something.

There's no animation on Pacman or the monsters which is shocking. I was an even worse graphics person back then than I am now and it probably never even occurred to me. Amos had a tile system back then and I was almost content with actually having a block movement system similar to how the old computer games which didn't use sprites mostly did it because it was easy. I remember willing myself to at least make them move by pixel because it was lazy but never went any further than making sure it did that. I'm imaging the code - if I ever could see it again - would be absolutely terrible. No OOP in those days, chaps.

As I said, it was something to help me learn Amos and all its quirks at the time and it's really a naff game that wouldn't have interested anyone except me back then but I'm still glad I've seen it again and have at least the game and diary itself preserved now. It does make me really sentimental for all the games I wrote that can never be recovered even in some form now because the internet came a little too late for my generation.

[Matty]

Yes....and someone told me my old game was better by a mile than anything I've ever produced since (sad face)

[GrindalfGames]

Not long ago I did a search for my old retro remakes entry Super Mario Kart and found this guy

He has quite a few videos of my game. I cant understand what he says but its nice to see someone plays my game

[Matty]

Interesting....I had two games that were quite important to me several years ago (2008) and when I search for them on google I get results but the youtube links go somewhere else....

Type in 'youtube spacecombatsim MattLloyd77' or 'youtube ultimatedungeonhacl MattLloyd77' and you get results pointing somewhere in the right vicinity but they show other games than mine....so mine seem to be lost but they're still coming up in links just not pointing in the right spot.

[Xerra]

I did another google this afternoon and found

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/6809382/cu-amiga-commodore-is-awesome/60

that's from my time during the 90's freelancing for CU Amiga.

Also found another game demo I'd submitted to a PD library:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX07XZCQl0g

That one was never finished, however. I always did mean to go back to that one ....

As far as I recall those two were the only games that ever actually escaped my computer back then so everything else I ever did - apart from a few Amiga Blitz applications I wrote that I still have the old source code for - is gone forever.