chatting with Jim Bagley.....

[cpc4eva]

So, i have recently been chatting with Jim Bagley, its the first time i ever did chat with a real coder and i must say he is quite a decent down to earth type of person.

For those who don't know, back in the day Jim worked on CPC titles such as Batman Caped Crusaders, Red Heat, Cabal, Midnight Resistance, Hudson Hawk.

As he himself pointed out he worked on CPC games that were albeit speccy styled monochrome ports of his speccy games.

Now i am the first to dis, slate, destroy anything to do with the speccy and as a CPC lover that's pretty damn understandable.

However as i chatted with Jim i learned and understood the why's and how's etc etc of how some of this came to be.

This is some of what Jim Bagley told me in our conversation -

Jim Bagley

yeah, I wrote them on Speccy, then quickly ported them to CPC as I didn't have access to an artist, as they were onto getting the graphics for the next game done, whilst I converted it to CPC.

Jim Bagley

It would have been too much messing around using C64 graphics, because they'd have to be redrawn into CPC palettes, plus the animation frames and sizes were different to speccy ones hence the easy option.

then after reading through his interview on FB i get a much better picture of why there were so many speccy ports to the CPC  link is here

On the face of it coders were just employees being told what to do by their employers, the software house or project team. 

From the sounds of it the job as an 8bit / 16bit coder was a hard slog and not that glamorous at all.  Tight deadlines, working understaffed, not having access to artists or programmers and the like to make games on the CPC.

I am as unhappy as anyone who loves the CPC being served up speccy ports back in the day but now i have more knowledge about why and how the process worked.

Those bloody software houses and their lack of appreciation for the CPC damn you all that didnt think much of the CPC and rushed out and released speccy ports

[andycadley]

Yeah I don't think you can ever blame the individual coders for getting a job done, the publishers pushing tight deadlines and only giving limited resources (e.g. no graphics artist) were by far the biggest cause.

[mr_lou]

The money machine kills the art.
Not the artist's fault.

[arnoldemu]

I am not suprised, I have heard the same too.

It was far too easy to do a quick port to CPC so often it was the easy approach which brought in quick money.

[MacDeath]

we somewhat already knew/understood that those straight speccy ports were done to save money by the company, aka "no graphic artist budget for the CPC version".

seems like pixel manipulators were a rare and expensive thing in those days...
CPC had some specification rendering it hard to get proper ported graphics :
= palette : C64 has a very different one (good) games like Rick dangerous (check the sprites) or Stormlord 1&2 are exemples of graphics ported and vaguely converted from C64 to CPC.
Stormlord has a lot of badly used palette issues, Stormlord2 is even worse... as the very sprites are messy and not coloured enough... basically just palette swaps from C64.

= pixel ratios : Mode0 is not like the Atari ST 320x200x16... all those extra palette colours (512 or 4096 instead of 27) and the fact that you can't just divide resolution by two or you get big horizontal lines instead of ditherings (was actually often seen in some late french games...Jim Power, B.A.T...). also the speccy/Z80 code was never done so the Atari ST graphics would fit : sprites were often bigger on ST, display in 256x192 (speccy) instead of 320x200...

the main point with many french game was that they didn't really have Speccy versions so CPC had more often proper CGA/ST ports concerning graphics, yet the 64k limitation kicks in as well...
CGA PCs or Atari St were 512k RAMed most often...
CPC with 64k had to go through drastic reductions anyway.


strangely, a graphic artist with an Amiga/VGA PC and Deluxe paint 2 could mostly port properlly speccy ports graphics in like... 2 days ? sometimes even less.
more insulting : Speccy games woudl sometimes have graphics ported from Atari ST to begin with... they didn't even bothered to port for both speccy and CPC at the same time because production would not always decide for an Amstrad version untill they see the finished speccy version.



Yet we also kow that to continue to use Speccy 1bit per pixels graphics was a way to get it to work on 64K as a speccy port.

The difference between Speccy's 48k and CPC 64k was not enough to offer whole graphic conversion as graphics takes a lot of space on those games... (and AY sounds & music)

a CPC480 could have done it though, I believe. Really CPC needed just an extra +16k to fit it all properly.

But hey, most of you already know all those rants from me. 

Concerning this interview (good one)

= Midnight resistance : to me the main issue with slowishness is  that some animations and sprites are still too big or have too many animation frames as they are straight from speccy.

-big round fires when you fire triple shot or make them rain from the sky : too big, they are like 16x16 sized while they could only have been 8x8 sized. as they change colours, are masqued and cover the whole screen, this is quite heavy for the CPC. they were that big because on speccy it could enable to get them colour swaping despite attributes clashes. no real need on CPC.

-when you kill enemies : they would fall from the whole screen... so it remains a big sprite to animate... while most other version would get a frame of them being desintegrated and disapear... very very much light on the CPU.

- explosions : they are big with lots of 32x32 big animations frames... really ? seems a 2-3 frame explosion with some smaller sized frames could have been quite enough.

those few details could really get the game a bit faster on CPC.
just checked again via WinApe's find graphics option :
=big explosions are 32x32 sized and in 4 frames... at some point there are a lot of them on then screen.
= big round shots are 16x16 in 2 frames and they are litterally covering the screen at points.
=dead baddies : also a big falling guy in 32x32 that would fall smoothly from the screen... their screen time is too long.

check screenshot here :
= 19 freaking big balls in 16x16 to animate and move and check collisions
=5 explosions in 32x32 that would launch a cycle of at least 4 frames... while looking at the video I could even count up to 8 big explosions on the screen, there may even be more sometimes... really ? (check at 14:46)




So yeap no wonder the game is a bit slow on CPC.

[TFM]

It's easy to say... Oh they only have been employees and so on.


This slave mentality really suxx! If I do soemthing I do it real. If my boss want's me to do things quick then I tell him what's going on. And at the end he appreciates it, because it works out. 


Come on guys get some backbones and character, don't blame it on shit like 'Oh I'm just an employee and afraid to loose my job". Screw that! 

[TFM]

I am not suprised, I have heard the same too.

It was far too easy to do a quick port to CPC so often it was the easy approach which brought in quick money.

Or no money. I games would have been better the CPC users would have bought way more games, so the marked would have been bigger.


Personally I bought game after I had a crack, if i liked them. Examples are Starglider, Hacker II, Gunship and more. I never bought that cheap crappy speccy clones. 

[mr_lou]

Come on guys get some backbones and character, don't blame it on shit like 'Oh I'm just an employee and afraid to loose my job". Screw that! 

So.... what you're saying, is that, if only developers had said: "Look sir boss man! I need more time to make this a GREAT CPC game!", then the boss would have said: "Oh! I had no idea! Well go right ahead and spend all the time you need!"
I had no idea it was that simple.
I would have thought maybe the boss man would just have found someone else to make it, but what do I know.

[arnoldemu]

Or no money. I games would have been better the CPC users would have bought way more games, so the marked would have been bigger.

I don't know if that is true. The Speccy market was bigger so sold more.
CPC needed a bigger market through more sales of computers.

Personally I bought game after I had a crack, if i liked them. Examples are Starglider, Hacker II, Gunship and more. I never bought that cheap crappy speccy clones. 

You were possibly in the minority on both counts.

In the UK, I think most games bought were budget and on cassette because they were cheap. (£1 going up to £3.99) Spectrum was the leader in market share. Getting a full priced game, (£10 on tape) especially a disc one (£15) was a big deal and often reduced to birthday's or Christmas presents.
Discs were £4 each.

[arnoldemu]

It's easy to say... Oh they only have been employees and so on.


This slave mentality really suxx! If I do soemthing I do it real. If my boss want's me to do things quick then I tell him what's going on. And at the end he appreciates it, because it works out. 


Come on guys get some backbones and character, don't blame it on shit like 'Oh I'm just an employee and afraid to loose my job". Screw that! 

Maybe this happens now and in big companies, but in the smaller companies, and games companies I don't think that happened.

I know artists were paid less than programmers, musicians were freelance or there was only 1 at the company.
Programmers often worked through the night to get games finished.

On some projects the release date is fixed. So if you take too long, you have to work overtime to reach the fixed date.


Maybe Jim can confirm some of this?

[McKlain]

I don't know if that is true. The Speccy market was bigger so sold more.
CPC needed a bigger market through more sales of computers.

France is an example. The CPC was really big there and you can see the kind of games that were made for the Amstrad in France.

[TFM]

So.... what you're saying, is that, if only developers had said: "Look sir boss man! I need more time to make this a GREAT CPC game!", then the boss would have said: "Oh! I had no idea! Well go right ahead and spend all the time you need!"
I had no idea it was that simple.
I would have thought maybe the boss man would just have found someone else to make it, but what do I know.

Well, I hear talk the fears and the scars... But yes. Talk to your boss if you want to have a good life. It's like with Liberty, if you don't work for it, then it will be take away (we see that currently in Europe).

But of course, if somebody's life is dominated by fears, that person can't open the mouth to speak. So continue this sad life on your knees as slave. But not me!

Look, if you talk to your boss, you may not get everything, but you will get much more than you had before. And honestly people can't be replaced that quick.

I worked as programmer of two German companies. One is a global player and I'm sure you had (at least once in your life) a business relationship with them.

I can only say get off your knees and get people to appreciate what you do. For this lesson alone everyone is supposed to live in the USA once for a time. Because that's what learn here.

[cpc4eva]

i have PM Jim Bagley sent him the link to here and asked if he would like to post something on here so hopefully he can / does when he has some free time and we can learn some more

[chinnyhill10]

It's quite well known why games had to be done as they were. Software houses were businesses and the CPC was always the third best selling 8 bit in these companies main UK market. You put money where the sales are.


Now I have an MSX and have been reviewing MSX games I try to point out just how good CPC owners have it. There are ports to the MSX that are so lazy they still have the Sinclair joystick options on the menu. And look at the Continental Circus review I did the other week. CPC gets a full colour mode 0 version, the MSX gets a mute port of the Spectrum that runs at half speed!

[Brian Beuken]

Its a little sad to see people suggest we had no care over what we did. But you really do need to understand the mentality of the games market in those days, especially at one of the contract coding companies that employed most of us. Even the bigger companies with their own publishing and development depts, were essentially code factories pumping out product rather than art. If they were lucky they had good people who managed to do amazing things regardless of the pressure. But quality often took a back seat to delivery and that sometimes meant we had to deliver work we'd much rather have spent a few extra weeks on..If you were getting paid..the piper called the tune. We had very little say in the end results apart from our personal stamp of pride.
But why was it like that?

1st there were a lot of coders....a lot...so it was very easy to get replaced. The idea of standing up to the boss, whose only interest was shipping the game and getting paid for it is absurd. You can have artistic integrity if you are working in your bedroom and happy to wait for it to be done. But when you're being paid the princely sum of £8K a year, have rent and food to pay for, you get the jobs done as quickly as possible.

We did however try to do good work, there was always an atmosphere of showing off what you can do, producing something better, faster, less memory hungry than your coding peers. That was our drive, making something work well. Often entire games were based around some clever trick or workaround we discovered.

When porting a game, or developing a license in the 80's the key issue was not the design.. It was how long will it take, advertising budgets were set by publishers and due to the use of print magazines mostly, they were paid for 2 or 3 months in advance, so the deadlines were fixed...a strange concept these days, but then a deadline was a deadline...missing it was the worst crime imaginable, and not only did you not get more work, but your company got a reputation for not delivering. ALL the publishers had this time deadline system, there was no way to say...hang on, I'll just tighten up these graphics on level 2....it had to be done...and shipped. End OF.

The best way to produce a great game, was to work on it quietly, without a publisher signed up and then take the finished games to them...Some of the very best and most innovative games were done that way...and then promptly ripped off by the porting houses. But it did drive the market.
Timescales of 6-8 weeks were common, sometimes less, rarely more. The Crunch was unbelievable, I worked many many nights without sleep, once 72hours straight. Because we had a deadline coming up. Our tools were primitive, though they did improve over time, but compared to the debugging we have now, most of our bug hunting consisted of hunting for needles in haystacks of code.

So you can understand why coders started to develop standard routines for menus, sprites, keys and other common things, dressing them up to look different, but the base code was the same...That gave us an edge.

It was a hard hard job, it was without doubt done with love, but it was hard.

[Joseman]

I think that i'm talking for the majority of this forum when i said that  you guys were some kind of "heroes" to us on that time.

We know now that the software houses and the deadlines where the main problem for some poor conversions, not the developers fault!

Last year i read the ebook "It's behind you" where Bob Page explains how he developed R-Type for the Spectrum and how thinks worked on that times... this book is very clear on that cases of deadlines!

[Baggers69]

Thanks guys, and as my ex co-workers Brian said, when you were given a job to do, and a time to do it, it was because the advertising department had set a date for it's release, and they were prepped ready to push it in all the magazines etc, so if you were late, as they were scheduled slots they released in, so you didn't just mess up slightly, it cost the company a HUGE amount of advertising money also, and as Bri said, there were others who would have just taken over your work, a lot of coders and artists did get dropped if they weren't quick enough!


As for taking the time to do a decent CPC version of my games, I've said this in a few interviews, I was pushing for time so that I could do a decent CPC version, but alas, I wasn't the boss at Special FX, and they obviously had deadlines set by Ocean also, and because I was working on 2 ports, not 1 like most other coders, I wasn't allowed the extra time, because as I stated above, they had release slots to hit.


Maybe one day I'll get to do a decent CPC game with 16 colours in it.


I've just finished Dragon's Lair for the Acorn Atom, and was thinking of jumping back onto the CPC next, so who knows!

[MacDeath]

Damn, what a messy bizness... as in other industries, the sale executive would take promises the real worker could not finish because they  advertisement and sales peoples or even executives would knew nothing about the technical part...


Yeah, R-Type on CPC in 3 weeks... what not a speccy port but from scratch ? you'd bet ?

Snow Bros on Amiga was dev'ed by OCEAN France.
Even had some dev' coverage in Joystick magazine...
Badass well done game.
they had some delay and couldn't fit the deadline.

Game was plainly canned/cancelled despite being finished like 1 month after... and being a freaking huge nice game on Amiga500...

Was un-officially released after as bootleg/pirated one.  like in 2006...
Game was fucking great and would have sold a millions, but hey, was too late for deadline so better to release nothing than to cash for the work done.




Fucking biznessmen in suit. They live in Another World.
As if the deadline thing was actually an excuze for an insurance scam.
(seems logical)

Snow Bros - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64/C64GS, GX4000 and ZX Spectrum versions of the game were developed by Ocean France and completed in 1991, but were not released by the publisher Ocean Software. The original master copy of the Amiga version was found in 2006, and the disk image has been distributed online.

seems like the Video games press was also part of this screwjob after all...
advertisement and tests slots were timed and paid for...

these days, it is somewhat a bit better because internet enables for updates, but many games never get proper updates after release anyway and stay bugged beyound recovery.

France is an example. The CPC was really big there and you can see the kind of games that were made for the Amstrad in France.

yeah, we were lucky CPC was the main 8 bit home-market so we had some ST-CGA ports sometimes.
But just look at Jim Power's port on CPC (latest CPC commercial era) and you'll see cheap ports were also done.
UBI soft was into some "creative casttle" concept at one point.Some companies were created by real coders as well so they would try to get things done well, and they often aimed at original games instead of Movie/arcade licenses.

Captain blood from ERE/EXXOS was like that.
some French CPC games could benefit from great graphics because Thomson TO8/MO6 had some graphical compatibility with CPC and CGA/ST could be well adapted via Mode1 as well.

Palace software were quite into "C64 ports", but managed to do that well and dev'ed original games anyway...
Raphael Cecco games wer also heavy on the speccy/C64 cross dev done somewhat well... but no scrollings so this could help on CPC.

comics licenses were a thing but you could take more time on them...
Arcade or Movies : got to release the game very soon, at movies release (next year the movie will become unknown... no more buzz for it...)... and arcade : should release while the arcade was exploited and a success...

Maybe one day I'll get to do a decent CPC game with 16 colours in it.

such speccy port would need a huge amount of rasters in Mode1...

[cpc4eva]

after reading through this thread and what the coders have stated about the companies and tight deadlines and how it all operated with advertising etc etc does this also lead onto another area of the 8bit era as to why there were so many games that weren't ?

[dlfrsilver]

Damn, what a messy bizness... as in other industries, the sale executive would take promises the real worker could not finish because they  advertisement and sales peoples or even executives would knew nothing about the technical part...


Yeah, R-Type on CPC in 3 weeks... what not a speccy port but from scratch ? you'd bet ?

Snow Bros on Amiga was dev'ed by OCEAN France.
Even had some dev' coverage in Joystick magazine...
Badass well done game.
they had some delay and couldn't fit the deadline.

Game was plainly canned/cancelled despite being finished like 1 month after... and being a freaking huge nice game on Amiga500...

Was un-officially released after as bootleg/pirated one.  like in 2006...
Game was fucking great and would have sold a millions, but hey, was too late for deadline so better to release nothing than to cash for the work done.




Fucking biznessmen in suit. They live in Another World.
As if the deadline thing was actually an excuze for an insurance scam.
(seems logical)

Snow Bros - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
seems like the Video games press was also part of this screwjob after all...
advertisement and tests slots were timed and paid for...

these days, it is somewhat a bit better because internet enables for updates, but many games never get proper updates after release anyway and stay bugged beyound recovery.
yeah, we were lucky CPC was the main 8 bit home-market so we had some ST-CGA ports sometimes.
But just look at Jim Power's port on CPC (latest CPC commercial era) and you'll see cheap ports were also done.
UBI soft was into some "creative casttle" concept at one point.Some companies were created by real coders as well so they would try to get things done well, and they often aimed at original games instead of Movie/arcade licenses.

Captain blood from ERE/EXXOS was like that.
some French CPC games could benefit from great graphics because Thomson TO8/MO6 had some graphical compatibility with CPC and CGA/ST could be well adapted via Mode1 as well.

Palace software were quite into "C64 ports", but managed to do that well and dev'ed original games anyway...
Raphael Cecco games wer also heavy on the speccy/C64 cross dev done somewhat well... but no scrollings so this could help on CPC.

comics licenses were a thing but you could take more time on them...
Arcade or Movies : got to release the game very soon, at movies release (next year the movie will become unknown... no more buzz for it...)... and arcade : should release while the arcade was exploited and a success...
such speccy port would need a huge amount of rasters in Mode1...

I can talk about Snow Bros, i'm the guy who got the master disk and dumped it as a gift for the communauty and the farewell of Pierre Adane to the Amiga 

The truth is that Gary Bracey told me that Since Rainbow Islands had not the success he tought it should have back in the day, and this while for him RI was a very well done game ; he told me also that Snow Bros was a second zone license. So it would have not been a hit.

The whole remaining is a personal opinion. I answered him that i did not agree with this.

Rainbow Islands had some problems because Ocean didn't allowed Graftgold to add a 3rd disk (on the atari ST version !).

People knew about this fact, that the game was not the full thing. This is a serious push back, who would want to buy really an "unachieved software" ?

Snow bros was state of the art, and better, enhanced with an intro and an outro, and 60-64 colors on screen, a feat that RI can't even think of since the game was built first for the Atari ST.

[MacDeath]

yeah, games wouldn't get one extra disk, wouldn't be in extra RAM version and so on...
They would also never use advanced configs such as STe or PLUS because...

Men in suits would think licenced product with easier quick refund efficiency, not marketable nice game.

Basically most Shadow of the Beast non amiga versions were this.