Interesting Wikipedia page - Oliver Twins

[ComSoft6128]

Codemasters paid the Oliver brothers £10,000 for the Amstrad CPC release and were offered another £10,000 for a ZX Spectrum release. However, the twins did not wish to produce a port by actually coding on the Spectrum, so to save time, they hired their friend Ivan Link to build a cable that links the Spectrum and the Amstrad. After which the twins produced the only software for the Spectrum they ever wrote called SPLINK (SPectrum and LINK) that enabled the code to be altered for the Amstrad and ported to the Spectrum.

"  "This enabled us to write Spectrum games on our Amstrad, making the most of the benefits of its on-board source code and graphics, its very fast and reliable disk drive and a leading Assembler/Machine Code compiler called MAXAM. That way SPLINK gave us an enormous advantage over our competitors who were trying to write Spectrum games - using a Spectrum!"


The Wikipedia page is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Hunters_(video_game


For some reason the above link does not work properly, does anyone know why?

Cheers,

Peter

[adolfo.pa]

Very interesting piece of information. I always thought 8 bit games were cross developed from other more powerful machines.

About the link, it is missing a parenthesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Hunters_(video_game)

[ComSoft6128]

Thanks adolfo.pa 

[andycadley]

I'm not sure it's quite accurate to describe SPLINK as "the only software for the Spectrum they ever wrote", since they clearly wrote far more than that. It might be the only software the wrote on the Spectrum, but that's not quite the same thing.

[roudoudou]

Thanks adolfo.pa 

So why don't you edit your first message and fix this? 

[chinnyhill10]

Very interesting piece of information. I always thought 8 bit games were cross developed from other more powerful machines.

About the link, it is missing a parenthesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Hunters_(video_game)

No. Only in later years did it become common. The cross development system running on a PC was out of reach of the average bedroom coder.


The Oliver Twins story is pretty well known. Yes the only bit of coding they did on the Speccy itself was the software needed for the interface to be able to talk to the CPC. They used MAXAM on the CPC but in 1987 spent £4000 (about £10,000 in todays money) on two custom built PC's that ran PDS (Programmers Development System) which would allow them to develop their games for multiple formats at once.


Meanwhile companies like Binary Design were developing their Z80 code on Tatung Einstiens. While these machines had flopped in the market, development houses had snapped them up as they were ideal for Z80 development.