Sunday, November 29, 2009

The Prince of Persia development journal




One of my favorite Apple II games EVER was called Karateka which was single handily programmed by an 18 year old chap named Jordan Mechner. In the years following Karateka, Mechner moved out to San Franciso and spent the next 3 years working on his next master piece called Prince of Persia for the Apple II. I stumbled upon his web site recently and found that he has transcribed his early journals from that period and it is just completely fascinating. The most interesting part of this journal for me was the development of the game including actual video footage of test demos during the various phases and the original video of his younger brother doing the prince movies that he later digitizes.

And here they are!

My ramblings follow...


* He really didn't devote his 100% full time to this project until the last year. He was very interested in writing screen plays since that's what his degree was in. He wrote Karateka while he was in college as a side project.

* He makes references to lots of world events both directly and indirectly. Examples: The 1987 stock market crash, The Tiananmen Square incident, Steve Job's creation of NEXT

* You can see how the Apple II is dying around 1988 and the publisher that he works for is getting nervous that he will miss the boat by delivering the game too late.



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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

When 1993 technology goes online

It was a very exciting and frustrating night for me. I had spent a good portion of the evening trying to decipher very old information from the Internet to get my Amiga 1200 networked. (more after the click)



So I had the right hardware: A 3COM Etherlink III PCMCIA adapter card that I got off ebay for 99 cents. This is one of the older cards that has the RJ45 dongle. It supports a blazingly fast 10Mbps connection although I doubt the 68060 can push the data that fast. I also have an 802.11b wireless card but unfortunately it lacks the appropriate support for WPA encryption. So I didn't want to open my home network up to hacking just for the Amiga's sake. So it was wired we go.

So apparently TCP/IP has been part of the Amiga OS's vocabulary since around 1992 or so. Commodore actually produced their own Zorro Bus (a bus similar to PCI) ethernet card back then for the big box Amigas (2000, etc). I found reference to several TCP/IP stacks such as AmiTCP, Miami and Genesis. The problem was finding the newest, more support version. Supposedly a version of AmiTCP shipped with the last official 68k OS3.9. I pulled out my official AmigaOS3.9 CD and attempted to hunt down the install files for this. I did indeed find it on the CD but no install or documentation. So this is when I started to go down a long path of old information. I had to use the wayback machine in order to scrounge up documents. The one thing the Amiga really lacks is a up-to-date FAQ. You will find a mismatch of old information from the mid to late nineties (usually 404'd these days). It was truly frustrating and I quickly realized how the Internet is getting so big and links go bad very quickly. Now granted we are talking about 10+ years that some of these people decided to let their personal pages go bye bye. If it weren't for the wayback machine's archive, I would have never figured this out without help from others.

So yes, I started down that path of installing different versions of TCP/IP stacks and nothing worked. The Amiga OS is a little confusing. There's DEVS: and LIBS: and ENVS: and binaries (C:) and startup sequences (S:) that all need to be configured. When things go right, you simply click on an installer icon and it guides you through the setup. I went through this with several older versions of Amitcp, genesis and the miami stacks but had little luck. Finally it came down to a guy who happened to make an emergency single-disk version of a network-boot-disk. It was relatively new (within a few years) so I downloaded it, unarchived it, and wrote the ADF (Amiga Disk Format) file to a blank disk. By the way, I have hundreds of 3.5" 880kb disks and only about 10% still work. I throw away a lot of bad 3.5" disks these days. I booted up the disk and it configured itself along with asking me some basic TCP/IP questions and it worked! I was actually able to ping other machines on my network and even use a samba utility to map to a windows share! The Amiga was on the network!

Next time I will share with you how I got FTP, and a real web browser up and running! As a bonus I had a look-a-like winamp player playing MP3s that I had just downloaded from a friend's FTP site! All good stuff and very amazing for a machine from 1993!

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Thursday, November 19, 2009

My Apple //c





The Apple //c was a wonderful Christmas gift that I received as a boy in 1985. My mother worked very hard to give me that computer back then...



So waaaaaay back in 1982 I got my first computer as a birthday gift. I actually wanted one of those fancy BMX style bicycles which turned out to be more expensive than a home computer. My first computer was made by Radio Shack called the TRS-80 color computer or "coco" for short. It hooked up to a standard television and used a cassette tape to save and load programs. It was that computer that I learned how to program. Initially I learned BASIC programming and shortly after MC6809 assembly language. I used it so much that I wore the silver color off the plastic bezel and the letters from the keys.

Later that year, my best friend also got a computer for his birthday: A brand new Apple //e with 64k and a 5.25" disk drive. I spent a lot of time over his house playing Zork I, Exodus Ultima III and programming our own games. His computer was about 10x more expensive than my TRS80, so I could do nothing more than just be a little envious and spend quite a bit of time at his house.

Jump ahead a few years to 1985. I vividly remember that Christmas eve because I went to work with my Mom on the graveyard shift at her company. I caught a little sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor but mostly stayed up with her all night. By the morning I was completely exhausted but stayed up and unwrapped my most wonderful Christmas gift ever: My own Apple //c computer complete with green screen monitor and built-in 5.25" disk drive! I finally hit the computer motherlode. I distinctly remember playing games such as Aztec, Bolo, Chop Lifter, Rescue Raiders, Star Blazer, Situation Critical, Gemstone Warrior, Sword of Kadash, Conan and a million others. I cherished that Apple computer like no other computer. It was one of my most prized possessions as a child. I eventually learned to program 6502 assembler and write games and graphics hacks. It opened a world to me and I owe it all to my Mom who financed my computer love and is responsible for my success in the world today.

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