Kevin Edwards ( Retro Videogame development )

'It works on my machine' was uttered many times at companies I've worked for over the years.

This is so true of many technology companies. The planets seem to align and a group of clever people create something very special.

Here's a brilliant book for anyone who has an interest in Acorn Computers, The BBC Micro, ARM or technology in the UK around that time. A collection of stories by the people who made it all happen. Whilst I have only quickly skimmed the contents since it arrived today, I know it's a 10 out of 10!

Search for the Lost Orb Hi, Whilst sorting through a load of disks I found a disk based adventure called 'Search for the Lost Orb' Has anyone heard of it before? I've no idea who did

I did indeed share it after posting about it on stardot. No one had ever heard of it before so it was a genuine 'lost game'. I can only assume an admin on the Game Archive added it for completeness.

stardot.org.uk/forums/viewt...

Sadly not. It has been digitally analysed by several people at a binary level and there's no 'plain text' info in there. Adventure fans have also played the game to completion and say it's quite unique in its style. Other technical analysis shows it uses a new 'engine' not seen before on other games

It probably was the last BBC Micro prototype I worked on. I did have plans to do something for the Archimedes but the market was so tiny I couldn't see it being financially viable.

'Search for the Lost Orb' is a text-based adventure game for the BBC Micro that I found whilst going through my disk collection. So far I have been unable to find out who actually wrote it. I asked the people on stardot, but had no luck. I think it could be Andy Bray (RIP) who I knew well BITD.

Thanks. When I get time I shall share all the source code for the game. It's very incomplete, but may be useful to someone interested in how 6502 games are written.

The 'sprites' are drawn using the 6502 CPU - no hardware sprites on the BBC Micro unfortunately! You can find the routines in my GitHub repository - Sprtites.asm and Sprites2.asm. Collision detection was done using a simple 2D box to box check.
github.com/KevEdwards/G...

It would have been visually identical. However, a lot slower due to the hardware compromises Acorn made with memory access on the Electron.

Thank you. I used double buffering to eliminate the flicker. However, that comes at a cost in terms of memory and performance. This was a late game, 1988, in the Beebs life-cycle. I wouldn't have made much money. I then decided to develop NES games instead.

The BBC Micro only had a palette of 8 unique colours - the primary and secondary colours. However, you could choose any combination you wanted in the 2 and 4 colour screen modes.

Thanks. The plan was to have a smooth, flicker free game. It fitted that brief, but I really wanted more speed as the performance on an Electron would have been quite a lot less.

This is Amnesia, a game I developed for the BBC Micro that was never published/released officially. As you can see it's a work in progress tech demo with programmer graphics ( my own ). I think I worked on this for about 5 or 6 weeks and decided to devote my time to other projects.

Morning Live was pure filth today! Here's Esther Rantzen's daughter being rather rude. I nearly spat my tea out. We didn't have this kind of crudity in the 1970s when That's Life was broadcast, just vegetables that looked like body parts. LOL.

It appears to be just the .pvr texture assets.

Indeed, you have been super lucky! Almost everyone I've talked with has had major problems reading old Zip disks. The Jaz drive *should* be OK from what others have said.

Awesome. Drop me a message and I’ll do some analysis of the contents and see if I can get anything running. Some artwork or code would be great to see too. Thanks.

Interesting!

They are truly dire! Not sure if the Jazz drives were any better.

ZIP disks are the worst of the worst. The click of death was a common sounds even back in the day, never mind 30 years later! I'm sure there must be a way to help them 'recover'.

I'm sure they would!

Browsing the Texture assets from the development disk for Dreamcast Wetrix+. They are stored in Dreamcast PowerVR Texture format ( various compressed format variations ).

I shall see what I can find out.

*whose

I don't know if the authors have any plans to share. As you say, it's quite often a no go as ownership is usually with big corporations who's general policy is NOPE, NOT ALLOWED!

I've not seen anything related to ET. Who were you in touch with?

I've not had time to go through the contents fully and talk with the authors about what it contains. Many thanks to Bone and Amir for saving this stuff. I hope they have some more goodies hidden away!

I have just received a very interesting find from @bone6502.bsky.social who worked at ZED TWO. It's a disk containing the source code for PS2 Aqua Aqua and data for Wetrix+ ( Dreamcast ). It's great to see this being preserved, especially as it came of a ZIP 100 disk which don't survive very well!