The Making of ZX Spectrum R-Type
"In April 1982 Clive Sinclair launched the follow up to his successful ZX81 home computer, The ZX Spectrum. In the ten years that followed over nine thousand commercial games were written for this iconic machine. This is the story of one of them."
I recently read an e-book by Bob Pape which details his experiences during the 80's when he made his living writing computer games.
This was the era of the so-called bedroom-coder and this book gives an amazing insight into this world in all its glory. Specifically the book highlights the development, or rather a home computer port, of a game called R-Type from the arcade to the ZX Spectrum.
There are parts of the book which go in a little bit of technical detail of how he was able to make use of the ZX Spectrum's limited 8-bit capacity. Such as:
"Collision Map 2 is scanned through a byte at a time, if the value is zero then the corresponding character on the main screen is filled with zeros, overwriting any graphics from the previous frame. A non-zero value indicates that data from the back screen should be used, again overwriting any previous graphics."
The book is very well written and keeps the reader engaged throughout.
Although it covers quite a niche subject, anyone who is interested in classic video game development, the Spectrum home computer, remembers playing R-Type back in the day or has a passion for old computer games will surely find this book a illuminating insight into one particular corner of history.
What is most striking was how chaotic the working conditions were during this period. This is detailed in the following two passages taken from the book:
"If I was lucky when I arrived in the morning and climbed the stairs I'd be greeted by the remains of kebabs and empty beer bottles, if I was unlucky it would be vomit and full beer bottles - only it wasn't beer that was in them any more." - page25
"one of Kightley's suggestions was to cut out full page ads from games magazines and stick them up on the walls. I think the idea was to show prospective customers and visitors how professional and cutting edge we were but all it did was make us look a real Mickey Mouse outfit!" - page 25
The book is great value as it is available for free (as in beer) from Bob's site in either PDF, ZIP or Kindle formats. It's quite a short book at just 136 pages, so it can be easily consumed in one or two sittings.
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