1373: Steem-Powered

Although I grew up with the Atari 8-bit range of computers, some of my fondest early memories of using computers and playing games relate to that range’s successor: the Atari ST. Unlike the 8-bit range, the ST was a 16-bit machine with an 8MHz processor, either 512K or 1MB of memory, support for MIDI, hard drives and floppy disks that held up to 720K of information. It was a huge leap over the 8-bit systems in many ways — though it did suffer from an appalling soundchip that actually sounded worse than the 8-bit range’s POKEY chip in the hands of anyone other than the most skilled chiptune musicians.

I had a sudden urge to revisit some old ST memories the other day, prompted partly by a discussion with Andie on the subject of chemistry, of all things. (Andie’s in hospital right now, if you didn’t know, so discussions naturally turn to vaguely medicine- and science-related things on occasion.) Our discussion caused me to randomly remember an old Atari ST puzzle game from Psygnosis and Blue Byte called Atomino in which you had to create molecules by attaching atoms to one another and not leaving any… err… connecty bits (I’m not a chemist!) dangling loose. Remembering turned into downloading the Steem emulator and a copy of the game just to see if it held up. And it does!

I played Atomino for a bit until the emulation crashed (I think it was more a problem with the dodgy pirate disk image rather than the emulator itself) and then suddenly remembered a few other things — specifically, a few entries from the demoscene that I used to enjoy indulging in on occasion.

The demoscene is an odd old beast when you think about it, but it was a popular movement that, I believe, is still going on today. For the uninitiated, a demo disk was exactly what it sounds like: it was something you booted up when you wanted to demonstrate what your computer was capable of. More often than not, said demos were technically impressive in some way — they might use graphical trickery to get more than the normal 16 colours on screen, for example, or they might show off by putting graphics in places where it was normally “impossible” for the ST to render graphics. They’d often have good music, demonstrating skilled chiptune artists’ mastery of the ST’s crappy three-channel sound chip, and they were also often notable for quite how much stuff they fit onto a single disk.

One demo I remember particularly fondly — and which I successfully found a disk image of, so am enjoying while I type this out — was called The B.I.G. Demo. I can’t remember why we had a copy with our original computer — chances are it was one of the disks acquired via my dad and brother’s attendance at the local “computer club” (actually more of a local piracy swap meet — everyone was at it in the ’80s and early ’90s) that adorned the several big boxes of 3.5-inch floppy disks we had for the ST.

Anyway, The B.I.G. Demo was pretty neat. It wasn’t the absolute flashiest demo I’ve ever seen, but it was cool. It had graphics in the borders, it had 256-colour visuals, and it had renditions of a wide variety of music from the 8-bit era. In fact, the main point of the demo was to act as a jukebox, providing access to a huge number of C64 classics in glorious ST-o-phonics. There was also a “Digital Department” menu that loaded separately and included digitised (more than likely MOD file-based) renditions of a number of the same tracks. Aside from this, though, everything in The B.I.G. Demo was loaded into the ST’s memory, meaning no loading breaks whatsoever — not bad for a 512K machine.

One of the most interesting things about many of these demos was the scrolling text that inevitably adorned them. In many cases, the length of the scrolling message in the demo was the source of considerable bragging rights for the developers — not an unreasonable boast, given that when you only have 720KB tops to play with on a double-sided ST disk, even a short bit of text can and will eat into that space significantly.

The B.I.G. Demo had a whole bunch of scrolling messages, including one on the main screen that bragged about its lower border artwork, and the demo’s crowning glory, the B.I.G. Scroller. This was quite simply a scrolling message that whizzed past in large print and would make you quite dizzy if you watched it for more than a few minutes at a time, but reading the whole thing would take you a significant amount of time. I can’t remember a lot of the content from the B.I.G. Scroller (and haven’t tried to read it since re-downloading the demo), but more often than not these “scrolltexts” took the form of stream-of-consciousness ramblings from one of the demo’s creators, and were often quite interesting to read. In many ways, I guess they were a precursor to stream-of-consciousness blogging, and they’re certainly an artifact that is very distinctive to the late ’80s and early ’90s.

I haven’t kept up on the demoscene since I was a daily user of the Atari ST but I’m sure this sort of thing is still going on. I wonder how long the longest scrolltext is today?

#oneaday Day 892: In Memory of Floppy Drives

I was struggling to think of something to write about until an offhand comment on Twitter got me thinking about, of all things, floppy disk drives.

I miss floppy disk drives.

No, wait. Bear with me. Not in practical terms — I’m sure no-one misses the days when games had a whole disk just for their intro sequence, or the era when Microsoft Office came in a box roughly the size of a Borg Cube — but in terms of… of… you know what? It’s hard to describe exactly, so let me just wax nostalgic about a few things.

I used to find something oddly comforting in the sound of floppy drives whirring away doing their thing. Every floppy drive sounded different, too — the ridiculously huge 810 drive for the Atari 8-bit computers snarked and farted; the later 1050 was a little quieter (though had squeaky mechanical parts sometimes); the external floppy drives for the Atari ST made a pleasant frog-like croaking noise; the internal Atari ST drive was subtler, giving the occasional chug; and the drives in our first PCs were pretty quiet, putt-putt-putting away, usually installing something.

Their uses varied over the years, too. Up until DOS and Windows-based PCs started to take off as a serious gaming platform and required you to install everything, pretty much all software ran directly from floppies, making it necessary to have lots of those big plastic disk boxes (inevitably full of pirated software) — organised alphabetically if you wanted to remain sane. In practical terms, this meant things often took quite a long time to load, which brings us to something that is all but forgotten these days except in the most inefficiently-programmed and/or massive video games: the loading screen.

Loading screens used to be the place where the graphic artist for the game could really let rip and show off what they could do with the limited colour palette and resolution of the hardware they were working on. My most fondly-remembered loading screens were the work of Herman Serrano, a dude who could really make the Atari ST sing. (Visually. Whatever the visual equivalent of singing is. Oh, be quiet.) He did good loading screens for companies such as Argonaut and Psygnosis, and always signed his name prominently on them, which is something you don’t see these days, either. Often they were just pixel-by-pixel recreations of the box art, but sometimes there were variations, and it was fun to look carefully at them, pick out the details and spot the occasional Easter eggs. You didn’t have much choice, really, since there was nothing else you could do while it was loading.

While games still ran from floppies, loading breaks — now considered to be a thing of great evil that should be avoided at all cost — were considered something of a perk, as they generally indicated that you had done something good. This was true whether you were playing an Infocom text adventure on the Atari 8-bit or a LucasArts adventure on the Amiga. If the disk started chugging immediately after you did something, you were usually on to a winner. (Unless you were playing a Sierra game, of course, in which case it was entirely possible it was simply loading one of its many elaborate death scenes for your long-suffering character.) Some emulators of old systems even allow for the simulation of these loading breaks for the fully-authentic experience — though without the sound of a disk drive chugging away it loses something.

So yes. I miss floppy drives. I don’t begrudge the 21st century’s massive storage capacities and lightning-fast access, of course, but I do miss that comforting feel of sliding a disk into a slot with a satisfying “clunk”, turning the computer on (yes! Remember having to turn the computer off every time you wanted to run something else?) and then sitting listening to the distinctive mechanical whirrs, groans and farts of the disk drive as it loaded whatever it was you wanted to play or use.

Rest in peace, floppy drives. You’re missed!

Ode to Game Music, Part I

This is one of those posts I’ve wanted to write for a long time, and I have a sneaking suspicion it will be a topic that I will return to regularly – covering, as it does, one of my favourite things about video games: the music. You might think it ironic that I am so interested in one of the more non-interactive elements of interactive entertainment, but the effect of some quality music on the experience of a video game is not to be underestimated.

My first exposure to video game music came very early on with enjoying the title-screen music compositions of artists such as Rob Hubbard on the Atari 8-bit series of computers. These songs formed a big part of the “identity” of a game, and many of these composers became micro-celebrities in their own right. In many cases it could be argued that the quality of the music was actually higher than the quality of the game itself – particularly as many of these early computers didn’t really have the processing power to play complex (for the time) four-channel music as well as having a smooth gameplay experience and thus forced you to listen to not-very-interesting sound effects during gameplay.

Here’s a couple of fine examples from “back in the day” that stick in my mind:

Zybex (Adam Gilmore)

Warhawk (Rob Hubbard)

Going back to these games now, they’re somewhat primitive in every way imaginable, but I have to say, my fond memories of them can almost 100% be attributed to the music that played on the title screens. Both games are now relatively forgettable shooters, but Gilmore and Hubbard’s music meant that I’m not about to forget them.

My next generation of computers was the Atari ST which, despite being very good at MIDI, had a shitty three-channel internal soundchip that was 1) considerably worse than the four-channel POKEY chip in the Atari 8-bit range and 2) constantly trumped by Commodore’s rival machine the Amiga which had then-revolutionary stereo digital sound. However, a number of developers got around this fact and produced some excellent pieces of music. It has to be said, however, that these pieces of music were still largely confined to the title screens of games. Here’s a few more that stick in my mind:

Obliterator (David Whittaker, Psygnosis)

This one sticks in my mind not because it’s a particularly interesting piece of music (which, after listening to it again, it clearly isn’t – and look how long it took to load the damn game) nor because it’s a good example of the ST’s capabilities (see what I mean about the horrible soundchip?) but because it evoked the atmosphere of the game nicely. Obliterator involved running around a space station shooting robots and solving puzzles – yes, the same shit we’re still doing nearly 20 years later. It was quite a “solitary” game – you spent the majority of your time alone and attempting to navigate the environment using Psygnosis’ incredibly weird icon-driven movement and action system that thankfully they abandoned after two games.

Obliterator also sticks in my mind for a second reason – the fact that the music adapted as it went through. The moody piece of music you hear in the video above eventually gives way to a more, for want of a better word, “cheerful” piece as you make progress. This is something that, to this day, I absolutely love. While Obliterator may not necessarily have had the technology to make truly dynamic music, I remember feeling the whole mood of the game shift when the music changed. Suddenly you weren’t up against the wall in the dark surrounded by robots, you were a hero.

Gods (Nation XII/Bitmap Brothers)

The Bitmap Brothers were one of the earliest “celebrity developers” of the gaming world – developers who were held in the same regard as today’s well-known designers and teams. In the earlier days of gaming, teams were much smaller and budgets were much lower so it was rather more unusual for a development team to come to the forefront in such a way.

One of the ways that the Bitmap Brothers brought themselves into the public eye was through their use of excellent music in their games – the music for Gods which you can hear above being one such example. This piece of music was played on the Atari ST version during the introduction sequence and is, I’m sure you’ll agree, poles apart from Obliterator’s chiptuniness – which brings us to another point – the Brothers’ games also made far better use of the ST’s hardware than almost any other developer out there, including taking advantage of the STE’s enhancements, such as the ability to display a mighty 512 colours on screen at once (seen to lovely effect in Gods with a nice gradient sky background).

Okay, Amiga owners were laughing at the shoddy ST ports of many games, but the Bitmap Brothers’ games made some of the pain go away. 🙂

I hope you’ve enjoyed some of these tracks. There will be more to come in the following entries!