Rockman - September to October Maze game competition entry

[northernlites]

Hindsight is a great thing. At least you can wear the badge of honour labeled "I coded a Mastertronic game in the 80's". A title many of us old farts would love to wave

I bought myself a Pandora 6s clone for XMAS so I could play some arcade games from the 80's   , my 30 year old stepson was laughing at the graphics, I said they are good, if you want to see crap graphics , go to youtube and type in 'rockman vic 20' his jaw dropped he had no idea about my past 

I love VR and it's an area this year to make a game in. I was planning on doing it with the Oculus Go but I think I'll wait for the Oculus Quest. Cool to see such a classic still being enjoyed today.

VR blew my mind, it last like I was woken up from a 30 year sleep, like the first time I saw Space Invaders in an arcade in 1977.

With advanced mathematical algorithms applied, I'm guessing you're early 50's?. So still a big kid then, welcome - Perhaps you should enter one of our comps and do it in assembler on a vic-20 emulator just for laughs.

your right there, yes bigger kid than my kids, so embarrassing they don't want to be seen with me.

[Xerra]

2 years  you must have turned the sound down , i think most people did, but that annoying noise didn't take many bytes up.

Yep, good point. That Popcorn, cough, remix was a bit of an assault on the ear drums. Guess I just got used to it. In the days when I was playing Rockman in my bedroom, I was working four part time jobs after school and weekends just to finance my Vic 20 habbit. Having a single parent with two siblings made me get a decent work ethic because nobody else would have bought me my equipment if I couldn't do it. I wasn't able to stretch to a colour tv as well back then so I was used to playing on an old dodgy portable which had such a poor picture that the sound didn't really seem that much of an issue

they paid an advance, I think from £1,000+ which they took out of your royalties

I don't know why I stopped. the Vic-20 was in decline, I could have upgraded to the C64, but heck I cant design decent graphics never-mind a simple tune 

I think one reason was, I was offered a good job at a computer brokers and worked my way to be engineering manager.

I'm assuming it made its £1000 advance in those days - even if it was just 10p to you for each copy. Mastertronic games were everywhere. Newsagents, 7-11 shops and even petrol stations.

how long did it take you to program your game ?

All three games that I did last year were done for competition entries on these forums. Rockman was a 6 week job but I had the benefit of hiring someone else to do the graphics for me. I'm terrible at that side of making games.

I've seen a good Vic 20 emulator where some one ripped alot of Vic20 games including Rockman

That's probably Vice. You can get almost every Vic 20 game that ever got released on the internet now as a data file. They play exactly the same as on the original machine on your own PC/Mac. You really should get the emulator - it's free - and have a look at some of your old stuff.

If you ever get the chance and can scan some of your old notes that you mention from your programming days then I'm sure the guys here would love to see some of that. I certainly would.

I'm glad you liked the game, I remember I use to calculate how many clock cycles  a routine would take , yes with routines that scroll the screen 1Mhz doesn't go far 

Those days are long gone now. It's all about FPS - frames per second.

do you work as a Programmer ?

Haha, no. I'm a data analyst, I.T guy for a local authority. Most of my work is done in stuff like Crystal reports and Excel. Game coding is strictly a hobby for me because I've never been good enough although, ironically, around the early 80's I probably would have been had I had access to actually work at it. By the time I was allowed to have a computer in my own room and not share the family telly then I'd already left school and was breaking out into work/alcohol/girls so left programming behind for years. I wasn't quite at the level where I could have done something 100% in 6502 and took it to get released like you did but I often feel I let an opportunity pass me by.

As much as I love doing it now - if I did it for a living then I probably wouldn't enjoy it anywhere near as much.