rec.autos.simulators

I think in the end he sold a lot more copies on the C64 etc. than on the
Beeb.

Come to think of it, so did Elite - funny that!

The strange thing is that the Beeb wasn't considered to be much of a
games machine, because it was bought by parents to "educate" their kids
- but in some ways it was more powerful than the C64 (about twice the
processor speed).

The real killer was the lack of memory and hardware support for
bit-blitting - but neither of those mattered for Revs or Elite.

But another time..

Was that really the market ?  40,000 copy sold to us of the most accurate
racing simulation on the PC ever done, Im pretty happy about that.  The
target was us, and also the baby boomers who in their young age had
curiosity for Formula 1, who remembered Jim Clark as the best driver there
will ever be, and who got hooked to racing back in those days (40-55year old
people).  Who really thinks that a simple gamer would buy GPL ? I mean this
is not Star Wars : Rogue Squadron.

I think they aimed us pretty well. We are all hooked on GPL, it's almost
perfection for many of us :)

--
-- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard>
-- May the Downforce be with you...

"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise
how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

   Planetoid - wasn't that the superb, er 'homage', to Defender?  That
was definitely a great game.  The only comparable 'Defender' at the time
was the official licensed version on the Atari 8-bits.  The beeb version
was a little more true to the arcade since it had the controls on keys
rather than joystick like the Atari.

  Acornsoft had some superb arcade clones for the BBC.  I can remember
that their versions of Defender,  Pac Man,  Galaga and Asteroids were
near arcade perfect.  I think their 'Pac Man' gfx had to be changed
actually because the game was just too close!

   They had some stonking originals too of course,  Elite and 'Revs'
spring to mind.

   If anything,  Piracy was much WORSE then.  Since most games came on
cassette tape,  anyone could copy them if they had a double cassette
deck (which most people had).  Secondly,  the games tended to be quite
simple ... so no incentive to buy the game to get the big manuals and
keyboard layout sheets.  Not that the packaging was very elaborate
anyway back then.

Gavan
--
There can be only one.............

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I must have spent more time playing Defender and Asteroids in the
arcades than I have playing GPL (and that's saying something!) - to the
point where I could regularly score over 1,000,000 points in Asteroids
(that takes about 3 hours on one game!).  I was in a pub doing this once
when the landlord eventually turned the machine off while I was still
playing.

Another time a pub had an Asteroids competition with a bottle of vodka
as the prize - after I came in and scored 400,000 in the first game (not
good!) he just gave me the bottle there and then!

I think writing games was a more profitable line of business though!

I remember a journalist coming up to me at the launch of Planetoid
asking whether I felt guilty about ripping off Atari - the thought
hadn't even occurred to me - as far as I was concerned I had written the
game myself, from scratch, without copying anyone's code, so that was
that.

If it had been left to Atari to come up with a computer version of
Defender I don't think the "*** public" would have had anything like
the quality of game they ended up with: as it was the skill was to come
up with a very fast and smooth implementation of the game, rather than
handing over bucketloads of money to the company that owned the
copyright.

I guess things have changed now that the games market has become more
mature: there are plenty of companies able to put in huge amounts of
effort into writing the games, and machines that are much more capable
of running them.

Just as with other software though: the faster the machines become the
more ambitious the programmers get, so the games never seem to get any
faster!

A lot of them take longer to load from a CD than they used to from a 5"
floppy disc!

Eeh, them were the days etc.

   To be fair,  the Atari version was very good.  I can't say the same
about their licensed version of 'Asteroids' though - it was awful,
barely better than the VCS version.

   Not to mention the fact that with MAME you can actually run the
original arcade ROMs,  amazing.  Now I can actually have all the arcade
games that I used to play as a kid,  running perfectly on my PC.

  One of the things I always remember when waiting for games to load
from my PCs superfast HD is how quickly 'meteors' (a lunchtime
favourite) loaded from the old 5.25" disk drive on the BBC Model B we
had in our 'computer room' when I was at school.  My mate was a
programming whiz and figured out how to transfer just about every tape
game he had (except Elite) onto floppy.  I can remember just hitting
return after typing the command line,  and when I looked up the game
would be there on the screen!  Now I wait for minutes as a hard drive
capable of 5 megs per second transfer grinds away loading the level of a
game,  or my 32x CDROM whirrs madly.  So much for progress.

  I imagine that with one person writing the entire game it must have
been a lot easier to make some money,  as opposed to the huge teams it
now takes to make a title.  Did I hear that GPL only sold 30-40k units?
I can't see how they would break even if that was the case.

Gavan
--
There can be only one.............

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So where's my royalty cheque then?  ;-)

But think about Internet's contribution to piracy. Pirated software is
distributed faster than ever, games are cracked even before they're
officially released and after that there's nothing to stop the copying.
Afai can tell, the beast is more efficient than ever.

---
Antti Markus Peteri

       15 miles. your dim light shines from so far away

                                 - Soul Asylum, Promises Broken

: But think about Internet's contribution to piracy. Pirated software is
: distributed faster than ever, games are cracked even before they're
: officially released and after that there's nothing to stop the copying.
: Afai can tell, the beast is more efficient than ever.

  Naw...  Most people I knew in the 80s who were computer buffs had
about 10-20 pirated games for every non-pirated one.  You could fit about
20 ripped off spectrum games onto a 90 minute cassette tape.  It was
still cheap even if you never played most of them.  If you wanted to get
those 20 games you took a tape recorder round to a mates house and 90
minutes later you had 20 new games.  You would then give all 20 to your
other friends.  It simply isn't that easy cheap or quick these days.  If
you know someone with a writeable CD then OK it's as quick - but not
everyone has those and the writeable media costs more.

  The best evidence that games aren't pirated as much is that we never
see the much feared "lenslok" device any more :-)  (anyone else remember
squinting through a cheap plastic lens trying to decipher a random
squiggle on the screen).  Not that this has much to do with racing
games....  except that one of the games I pirated was "Chequered flag" a
terrible racing game for the Spectrum - anyone remember it?  I seem to
remember it had some real courses including silverstone and brands.

  I developed my own theories of racing line in those days - being about
12 and not having read any  books on the principles of performance
driving.  Noticing that when you drive round a right hand corner your
car gradually drifts left I was convinced that, therefore, you'd be
faster round the corner if you started a right hand corner on the right
- because it would take you longer to be forced over to the left hand
side of the screen.

  Needless to say I wasn't a very good sim driver in those days either.

--
Richard G. Clegg     Only the mind is waving
Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York.

www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

I still remember well walking along the corridors of the Maths/Physics
block at Nottingham University circa 1985 and seeing *every* single Beeb in
sight with Revs on it. Yes, they were all probably pirated though....

btw - thanks for Planetoid. One of my favourite games for a long time! I
did buy my copy so don't expect another cheque ;-))

Cheers,
Richard

I still call this inefficient. It's hardly the sheer number of games that
counts. Today it takes a whole freakin hollywoodian production team
instead of possibly just a couple of guys to produce a seriously
marketable game.

If a typical 80s ratio was something like 20:1, then today it could be
around 5:1. But it really is the ratio of the pirated games and the ones
you would have bought if not getting a pirate copy, that counts, and, I
believe that it too, was much bigger in the 80's.

Those massive productions of today often being a bit on the pricey side,
one might just be tempted to get a pirate copy of the CD instead of
buying it, since a scanned copy of the manual is usually available too.
And by making this decision, you're probably doin as much damage as by
copying a cassette full of games in the 80s, 90% of which you wouldn't
have bought anyway.

The cost of a CD-R drive is comparable to 80's 5,25" disk drive, same
with the media. I don't know bout UK but here in Finland practically
everyone who's wired owns a CD-R (they're just so inexpensive there's no
excuse for not getting one) and pretty much everyone else knows at least
one who's got a burner. They even had to stop the rental of console games
because of the copying. AND... oh the glory of 90s! We've got the
Internet. You can do it all from the comfort of your own house, with just
a few movements of your fingers and wrist.

We don't see it because it was a bad idea from the 80s. Today's lenslocks
are the enormous and complex games themselves. I doubt if Baldur's Gate
(5 CD RPG), for example, was pirated much. There's lenslock fer ya.

But whatta hell, it's prolly pointless for me to ponder the effects of
piracy in the 80s/90s, since the fact still remains the effects have
always been negative...

---
Antti Markus Peteri

       15 miles. your dim light shines from so far away

                                 - Soul Asylum, Promises Broken

   errr,  to be fair I think he had the orignal for his Electron.  And
since we were using the beeb in school he couldn't be running both
copies at the same time or something.....  which made it sort of legal.

   BTW,  how did you change the games so they ran at mostly the same
speed on the electron even though the CPU was only clocked at half the
speed of the BBC?

Gavan
--
There can be only one.............

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You may not have noticed, but they all ran in mode 5 rather than mode 2
- ie. same resolution but with only 4 colours available rather than 16,
so the graphics were effectively smaller in memory terms and plottable
in half the time.

Sadly it wasn't till Elite was ported to the Electron that someone
noticed that some bozo had written the main operating system interrupt
handler in a really stupid way so that the most common interrupts were
processed last!

This is how Elite managed to run at a decent speed on the Electron -
once they'd replaced the interrupt handler with one of their own the
machine was really not so slow after all!

In the case of Electron Planetoid I rewrote the game so it didn't use
sideways hardware scrolling (not supported on the Electron anyway) and
scrolled the landscape sideways instead, using a cunning technique to
undraw the old one and redraw the new one at the same time, to reduce
flicker.

Sadly we'd been telling everyone for months that it wasn't going to be
possible to do Electron Planetoid, and the sales staff didn't realise we
were actually selling it until someone said "So what's this big pile of
boxes over here then?".

I lost a lot of money over that!

(Sorry, this is getting seriously off-topic now, but I just had to get
it off my chest!).  ;-)

   Furthermore,  games were so compact that you got many on a single
tape or disk.  And of course,  anyone could copy tapes, no technical
knowlege or special equipment required.

   And pre-release pirate copies were also available back then.  You
could get 'Behind Jaggi Lines' and 'Ballblazer' at least 1 year before
they were ever officially released.

   Nowadays the main barrier to piracy is the sheer size and complexity
of the games.  I wouldn't want a copy of something like GPL simply
because without the manual there would be no point.  And even with CD
burners,  its still quite difficult to distribute the huge games unless
you hack out lots of things like cut scenes and the like.

   Lastly,  the market for PC games is mostly among young professionals
who actually have the money and the responsibility to buy games.  I
bought about 95% of all the games I have and I still haven't got around
to fully playing all my stuff.  If I was to get into piracy I'd never
get around to playing any of the games.  If I see something I like I
just buy it.  Its not expensive and I don't have to waste time trawling
around for a copy which most likely will have been cut down,  with the
instructions on a file on the CD.  Plus theres less risk of virus
infections.

Gavan
--
There can be only one.............

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--
Wolfgang Preiss   \ E-mail copies of replies to this posting are welcome.

I have just started a 'Grand Prix' season, going back to my trusty Logic
3 PC Phantom after my previous joystick expired and still managed to set
a new PB in practice of 1:20.8x. ;-)
--
Peter Ives