Paradroid PCE - Devs inside info!

_Paul · 11/02/2015, 01:31 PM

Steve Turner (formerly of Graftgold) has given me some information on a PC Engine version of Paradroid that was completed, but never released:

QuoteWe finished the project. Gary J Foreman programmed it in house and it was easily the best Paradroid version as it had the fastest frame rate. We did it for Sunsoft I think via Hewson Consultants. Unfortunately Hewson Consultants went into insolvency before it was published. Sunsoft supplied all the kit and when they heard Hewson Consulatnts had gone insolvent demanded all the kit back. They were unaware that Graftgold had been contracted to develop the game or that we had developed the original version. We sent them a final version but they said unless we could prove we had undisputed rights for the game they were not interested. The Receiver said any rights Hewson may have had in the game were sold to Andrew Hewson's new company but he could not specify what those rights were. So unless I could get Hewsons successor company to confirm they held no rights to the game it was dead. After much pleading I did get a confirmation but it was too late Sunsoft declined the product even though we offered to master it for nothing and just get royalties over any existing advances.

QuoteThe graphics were all based on the original but reworked for the PC Engine. The gameplay was identical to the C64 version but it ran at the frame rate of the PC Engine so the scroll was ultra smooth and it played like a dream.

Unfortunately he has no images, I've contacted Andrew Hewson and he has little memory of the project.

Dicer · 11/02/2015, 02:00 PM

Would love to have this surface one day, it's one of my very favorite C=64 games...

elmer · 11/02/2015, 02:21 PM

Quote from: guest on 11/02/2015, 01:31 PMUnfortunately he has no images, I've contacted Andrew Hewson and he has little memory of the project

Cool, it would be great to see this surface!

IMHO, your best bet is going to be Gary Foreman, if you can locate him.

Programmers were often the guys to keep hold of their own personal "backup" copies of source & finished games long after Management had lost everything.

Nazi NecroPhile · 11/02/2015, 03:26 PM

I too hope it surfaces. It'd be a shame for all their hard work to be for naught, never to see the light of day.

CrackTiger · 11/02/2015, 03:28 PM

I hope that it doesn't surface just to get snatched up by a prototype hoarder.

Psycho Punch · 11/02/2015, 03:35 PM

I think there's a good chance of Foreman having a personal copy forgotten somewhere in his garage or something. You can clearly see they cared about that version, it wasn't just a simple cash grab port, so a "personal backup" is likely.

Samuray · 11/02/2015, 03:42 PM

Oh wow, "Paradroid"?!? I would love to have that on PCE since I don't have a C64.
Now that there are blank HuCards available, even a physicsal copy would be in the realm of possibility if someone can locate the code.
That would be sooo awesome!

_Paul · 11/02/2015, 03:46 PM

I'm prepping to contact the lead programmer, graphic artist and music guy....any questions, now's the time.

Nazi NecroPhile · 11/02/2015, 03:52 PM

Ask 'em what else OBEY they worked on, if anything.

ccovell · 11/02/2015, 07:38 PM

Wasn't it just a conversion of Paradroid '90 that came out on the Amiga, etc?

ParanoiaDragon · 11/03/2015, 03:14 AM

Wow, so they actually finished the game! I remember as a kid seeing it listed in EGM as an upcoming game, but then.....nothing. It was listed in EGM as Paradroid '90 IIRC.

Vimtoman · 11/03/2015, 01:24 PM

There was a guy on Assemblergames that had a copy of Marble madness but did not share a copy.
I guess if you spend a load of money buying it you could feel that releasing a copy would devalue the original one.

In this case I guess it's just getting the Ok from Andrew Hewson/original producer.

_Paul · 11/03/2015, 02:33 PM

Yes, it was a conversion of the Amiga/ST Paradroid 90, although the title screen I've been sent states it as Paradroid '91.

It seems the game was pretty much finished although there's not a complete 'finished' rom.

xcrement5x · 11/03/2015, 04:15 PM

Quote from: Vimtoman on 11/03/2015, 01:24 PMThere was a guy on Assemblergames that had a copy of Marble madness but did not share a copy.
I guess if you spend a load of money buying it you could feel that releasing a copy would devalue the original one.

In this case I guess it's just getting the Ok from Andrew Hewson/original producer.

Yeah, that guy was looking for a way to do a monetized release like he has with other protos I believe. New chips are around from before when he was messing with it so I suppose it's more likely to happen now.

_Paul · 11/04/2015, 01:28 PM

Here's some more info from Steve:

QuoteCome to think of it, it was a conversion of the Amiga version of Paradroid 90 but with the all directional scroll of the C64 original. Micheal Field did the graphics. @fearmyjargon was the lead developer and has the title screen. The in game graphics would have been the same as the Amiga but with different ship layouts to make use of the multi way scrolling. The music was by Jason Page.

Note here that I contacted Jason Page who said he thought the project didn't advance far enough for him to have gotten involved:

QuoteThis is a bit of a shame, as the PCEngine is one of the few consoles that I've never had the pleasure of working on.

This seems to contradict the state of the game given by Steve and Gary (the lead programmer) so it may just be he has forgotten the details over time.

Jason has recently started getting back into C64 music composition. He's done some great tracks, well worth a listed on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/noothermedicine

Steve continues:

QuoteWe were developing Paradroid90 for Hewson as he was the only pubisher who would touch it as he had published the 8 bit versions. It ended up being published by Activision as Hewson left the market. We were pretty shocked by this at the time. Andrew Braybrook has never forgiven Andrew Hewson over this. We ended up with little royalties for the Amiga/st and losing the pc engine version entirely. It was shortly after this Gary left Graftgold, it is really hard when your work just gets thrown away.

Gary was the only programmer on the game but Jason Page might have written the sound routine converting from the Amiga code. We only had one development system. Michael Field did the graphics using dpaint on the Amiga. We had a map editor we used for all the game maps on all systems.

We had never worked on the machine before. Gary was impressed by its capabilities and can tell you more. We had a good game system at the time which separated game code from system code such as graphics so we could port to different platforms rapidly. The droids were controlled by the A.M.P. (Alien Manouevre Procedures). This was a form of scripting rather than writing machine dependent code. It called primitive routines written in specific machine code for a platform which were easy to convert.

Vimtoman · 11/04/2015, 01:54 PM

Quote from: guest on 11/03/2015, 04:15 PM
Quote from: Vimtoman on 11/03/2015, 01:24 PMThere was a guy on Assemblergames that had a copy of Marble madness but did not share a copy.
I guess if you spend a load of money buying it you could feel that releasing a copy would devalue the original one.

In this case I guess it's just getting the Ok from Andrew Hewson/original producer.
Yeah, that guy was looking for a way to do a monetized release like he has with other protos I believe. New chips are around from before when he was messing with it so I suppose it's more likely to happen now.

Sounds good . I defiantly would sponsor a release.

_Paul · 11/04/2015, 05:21 PM

Here is some information from the programmer, Gary Foreman (@fearmyjargon on Twitter)

QuoteGraftgold were developing a port of the Amiga/ST version (with some platform specific changes) and I was the main developer with feedback/advice from Andrew (Braybrook) and audio support from Jason (Page).

...I've attached the title screen which is the only 'screenshot' that I have - the game was never totally completed - in terms of being a final rom, but everything was there and tested.

One day I might find time to rebuild it (seems like the main tools are out there) for emulation, rather than try to port it to modern devices.

I got back to Gary with some questions which revealed the following:

QuoteWe had an official devkit which consisted of the custom hardware - a big(ish) grey box with various input/outputs for the controllers, power, video, etc. and DIP switches for setting various modes. I've not seen any pictures online, but i'm sure they exist.

On the software side, there were various PC utilities for assembling, linking, etc.

Everything was done in assembler. This was fairly straightforward since it's a variation of 6502 which I know VERY well - I'd written quite a lot of 6502 code during the previous decade or so, so adapting to this variants wasn't difficult. There were some custom instructions for handling the bank switching and various other hardware registers, but the instriuctions are almost identical.

The project was initiated by Hewson, who'd published many other Graftgold games. the exact details and why it never saw the light of day should probably come from them, but I can tell you that the game was almost 100% complete and just needed the final logos and other certification/testing required before publishing would have been possible.

The TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine version had 2 layer, multi-directional scrolling (although play was only on one layer) with enhancements for graphics and sound, otherwise it was a faithful conversion from Amiga/ST version.

Looking at the tools available online (assembler, emulators, etc.), it's probably possible to rebuild it although they all look to be Windows based (my daily drive is a Macbook Pro these days)... and it could turn out to be a can of worms too!

never say never though... ;)

I asked about the parallax (whether it was sprites or tile based) and kept gently pushing about seeing it rebuilt.

QuoteIIRC the parallax used another tile map, but just for effect...nothing animated (again, iirc). a look at the code would confirm - perhaps later or in the morning.

Ownership of the code is unknown since Graftgold doesn't exists these days, but I remember talking to somebody last year about who might own the IP/assets.

When I look at the code, I might see how feasible it would be to rebuild the levels, etc. - the data format won't be hard to work out...

Don't want to get too excited but it would be great to see this unreleased title finally finished up and propery released after all these years. It could happen.

Arkhan Asylum · 11/04/2015, 09:16 PM

and then we can show him Squirrel, and hopefully make better music than what happened when they ported shit-ass Turrican to PCE and the music sounded all retarded!

wooowoooooo.

It would be interesting if this game were to come out on PCE. It's one of the few C64 games that weren't a trainwreck and a half, and it would probably play better on PCE than C64.

Paradroid 90 was pretty decent, too, so if it's just a straight port of that, also good.

Dicer · 11/04/2015, 11:11 PM

Quote from: guest on 11/04/2015, 09:16 PMand then we can show him Squirrel, and hopefully make better music than what happened when they ported shit-ass Turrican to PCE and the music sounded all retarded!

wooowoooooo.

It would be interesting if this game were to come out on PCE. It's one of the few C64 games that weren't a trainwreck and a half, and it would probably play better on PCE than C64.

Paradroid 90 was pretty decent, too, so if it's just a straight port of that, also good.

Whoa whoa whoa....hold up.

C=64 had plenty of competent games, yes many were shoddy sloppy port shit fest and other just sucked ass, but there are plenty great ones as well....

Psycho Punch · 11/05/2015, 12:20 AM

Quote from: Dicer on 11/04/2015, 11:11 PM
Quote from: Psycho Arkhan on 11/04/2015, 09:16 PMand then we can show him Squirrel, and hopefully make better music than what happened when they ported shit-ass Turrican to PCE and the music sounded all retarded!

wooowoooooo.

It would be interesting if this game were to come out on PCE. It's one of the few C64 games that weren't a trainwreck and a half, and it would probably play better on PCE than C64.

Paradroid 90 was pretty decent, too, so if it's just a straight port of that, also good.
Whoa whoa whoa....hold up.

C=64 had plenty of competent games, yes many were shoddy sloppy port shit fest and other just sucked ass, but there are plenty great ones as well....

Answer: is Turrican good or bad? This is important

ParanoiaDragon · 11/05/2015, 01:45 AM

Good grief, could this be the Second Coming of Paradroid 90?? I await impatiently for more news on this!

_Paul · 11/06/2015, 12:41 PM

Gary (the progrmamer) seems very keep on rebuilding this now.

QuoteI really do want/need to build it now!

He thinks that his mention of parallax before may have been memories of some other version as he couldn't see anything in the code that suggests it.

Quoteso... i looked at the code and couldn't see anything about setting up a parallax layer, so i'm a little confused .. this was from 24 years ago so maybe i was mistaking it with another project although this was the only tg16 game that i worked on... the confusion may be from some genesis (megadrive) work... who knows ;)

He's asked me for links to original dev tools, the best I could give him was a link to PCEAS. Let's see how this progresses, it quite exciting!

elmer · 11/06/2015, 01:14 PM

Quote from: guest on 11/06/2015, 12:41 PMHe's asked me for links to original dev tools, the best I could give him was a link to PCEAS. Let's see how this progresses, it quite exciting!

Unfortunately, I don't have Hudson's assembler but please consider sending him a link to CC65 as well ... he may find that some of CA65's features map better to the "pro" assemblers of that time.

If he can't find a copy of the original assembler, and so has to convert his source to a different assembler, then he may find it more "comfortable", because IMHO it's much closer to the SN Systems assembler that he will probably have used on various systems.

_Paul · 11/06/2015, 01:33 PM

Thanks, I've let him know.

InfraMan · 11/06/2015, 01:51 PM

This is exciting news, Paradriod was a fantastic game!

ccovell · 11/06/2015, 07:15 PM

And a few of us here still have Hu6280 assembler fresh in our minds (hint hint) so we can offer technical assistance if there are problems or things that need hacking together. (Like the recent NES Dizzy re-compilation, for example.)

Psycho Punch · 11/06/2015, 08:01 PM

I hope this doesn't end like Gunboat.

SignOfZeta · 11/06/2015, 10:43 PM

This is really cool. I'm not sure never ever played a Euro shooter on PCE. Are there any?

elmer · 11/06/2015, 10:58 PM

Quote from: ccovell on 11/06/2015, 07:15 PMAnd a few of us here still have Hu6280 assembler fresh in our minds (hint hint) so we can offer technical assistance if there are problems or things that need hacking together.

Hahaha ... subtle. Cool!

TurboXray · 11/06/2015, 11:00 PM

Quote from: elmer on 11/06/2015, 01:14 PMIf he can't find a copy of the original assembler, and so has to convert his source to a different assembler, then he may find it more "comfortable", because IMHO it's much closer to the SN Systems assembler that he will probably have used on various systems.

I've used snasm68k.. did they make a 65c02 version?

elmer · 11/06/2015, 11:44 PM

Quote from: TurboXray on 11/06/2015, 11:00 PMI've used snasm68k.. did they make a 65c02 version?

Sorry, I don't remember. I don't remember a C64 version (AFAIK the last commercial 6502 target), but I do know that they did 68000 and Z80 versions ... and a 65C816 SNES version that could (obviously) handle 6502 opcodes.

That was before they went really commercial and did Saturn and PlayStation versions ... before Sony eventually bought them.

ParanoiaDragon · 11/07/2015, 12:32 AM

Quote from: SignOfZeta on 11/06/2015, 10:43 PMThis is really cool. I'm not sure never ever played a Euro shooter on PCE. Are there any?

Closest thing I can think of is Ballistix...

_Paul · 11/07/2015, 06:05 AM

Quote from: ParanoiaDragon on 11/07/2015, 12:32 AM
Quote from: SignOfZeta on 11/06/2015, 10:43 PMThis is really cool. I'm not sure never ever played a Euro shooter on PCE. Are there any?
Closest thing I can think of is Ballistix...

Eww. Luckily Paradroid isn't anything like Ballistix.

_Paul · 11/07/2015, 09:27 AM

Quote from: Nulltard on 11/07/2015, 09:01 AM
Quote from: guest on 11/03/2015, 02:33 PMYes, it was a conversion of the Amiga/ST Paradroid 90, although the title screen I've been sent states it as Paradroid '91.
Title screen? For... PCE? Did I overlook something or was there no other mention of this before or after the quote?

I'll post it up when I make a page for it on my site. It's pretty much the same as the Amiga one with a few colour differences (I note the palette is not adhering to the exact PCE values and the resolution is 320x200)

garyjforeman · 11/17/2015, 10:47 AM

hi guys. it was called "paradroid '91" but we often referred to it as '90 since it's based heavily on the amiga/st version.

anyone have tools for converting the official linker 'bx' format to a rom? i'd rather not have to reverse engineer, and as i explained to sunteam_paul, not convert it to some other assembler syntax which could open a can of worms...

TurboXray · 11/17/2015, 11:37 AM

The mention of the BX format reminded me that I have some old official devkits for the PCE/TG16 (hucard only, IIRC). It comes with two example games and source code (and the support tools/EXEs).

I'll upload them and PM you a link. I never used them, but I'm assuming they're either ms-dos or Japanese ms-dos.

garyjforeman · 11/17/2015, 11:45 AM

cheers; that'd be awesome - much appreciated for anything that moves me closer to getting it running again.

i have the original assembler & linker, but not any converter since we just uploaded to the devkit.

_Paul · 11/17/2015, 01:24 PM

Welcome to the forums Gary

Nazi NecroPhile · 11/17/2015, 01:28 PM

Welcome aboard, Gary. I know fuck all about programming, but I'm sure you can get 'er running.

Vimtoman · 11/17/2015, 02:22 PM

Welcome Gary and good luck mate.

elmer · 11/17/2015, 03:09 PM

Quote from: garyjforeman on 11/17/2015, 11:45 AMi have the original assembler & linker, but not any converter since we just uploaded to the devkit.

PM sent.

Quote from: TurboXray on 11/17/2015, 11:37 AMThe mention of the BX format reminded me that I have some old official devkits for the PCE/TG16 (hucard only, IIRC). It comes with two example games and source code (and the support tools/EXEs).

I'll upload them and PM you a link. I never used them, but I'm assuming they're either ms-dos or Japanese ms-dos.

The early tools were for IBM PC/AT with MS-DOS 3.0 or 4.0 ... i.e. prehistoric 16-bit DOS.

xcrement5x · 11/17/2015, 04:46 PM

Yay! Welcome to the forums Gary! It's super cool to see an original developer for PCE/TG16 on here

ccovell · 11/17/2015, 06:10 PM

Very much welcome to the forums, Gary!

Maybe you can contribute some details (from the Western side) to this page about PCE dev: https://www.chrismcovell.com/secret/PCE_1989Q4.html#pcedev :-D

Dicer · 11/17/2015, 06:15 PM

Welcome to the fold, god speed and good luck getting this going, I think the community would go gaga over it.

SamIAm · 11/17/2015, 09:29 PM

Welcome Gary! We're happy to have you!

ParanoiaDragon · 11/18/2015, 03:59 AM

Quote from: Dicer on 11/17/2015, 06:15 PMWelcome to the fold, god speed and good luck getting this going, I think the community would go gaga over it.

What is this "think" we'll go gaga over it?? We will definitely go gaga over it, THIS...I COMMAND!

garyjforeman · 11/18/2015, 05:21 PM

hey guys, thanks for the welcomes. very much appreciated.

the s-record output from the hudson linker was enough - converting it to binary created something which runs on turboengine. which is the good news.

the not so good is that the source is not the final version - which, iirc, was pretty much complete. some quite noticeable bugs, most of the audio is switched off, there's no attract sequence, the transfer game wasn't enabled, etc. but I have played it a little ;)

there's work to do, but a bigger problem, and one which needs addressing before i can share anything but screenshots, is who owns the ip. i've got some leads, which i'll be following. it's important that I respect the ownership, so hang tight for a bit while i investigate.

until then, here's those screenshots... or I would if the upload folder wasn't full

garyjforeman · 11/18/2015, 05:26 PM

try this : https://www.dropbox.com/s/jxaeden22fxbc93/Screenshots.zip

CrackTiger · 11/18/2015, 05:40 PM

Quote from: garyjforeman on 11/18/2015, 05:26 PMtry this : https://www.dropbox.com/s/jxaeden22fxbc93/Screenshots.zip

Very cool, looks like a nicely polished port.

Nazi NecroPhile · 11/18/2015, 06:23 PM

Thanks for sharing the neato screenies. It kinda reminds me of Titan.