Category: Otaku

Competition Pro

June 24, 2010

That is a picture of the ‘Competition Pro’ joystick – the first (and I believe only) item I ever bought on lay-by.

Known as ‘layaway’ in the US, lay-by is the process of buying an item in installments. It is virtually unknown these days due to credit cards, but used to be very popular.

One day in 1984 (or early 1985), after endlessly reading about how great the Competition Pro joystick was in the imported UK game magazines of the day, I discovered they were sold at K-Mart, Charlestown Square. I remember seeing one in a glass case in the electronics section and wanting it so badly. In those days game systems did not come with controllers, so there was a vibrant market of third party devices. For me, the competition pro was at the top of the pile. The pinnacle of control! It even had microswitches!

This was the box:

I forget the price, but A$40 comes to mind. Whatever the cost, it was much more than I had available, and I was so worried about the joystick disappearing from the shop I hastily put it on lay-by. I remember being very excited as I collected the various documents (including payment slips) with all sorts of dates on them (“Pay this much by XX” etc.). I planned out my repayment schedule, based on what meagre income (pocket money?) I had in those days. I can even remember having dad drive me to the shop one day just so I could put $2 onto my lay-by! Only when the full price was paid would the joystick be mine.

Oh the unfettered enthusiasm of youth 🙂

Eventually I got my competition pro, and it was awesome. I still recall how much I loved the thing, and how much I loved the little clicks from the microswitches every time you moved the stick or pushed the button. It was the ticket to even higher love for my Commodore 64. I even carried it to friends houses when I went over to play games with them. I was so proud of it, and that I had lay-bought it.

Remembering this, and writing about it now, makes me wonder what ever happened to that beloved competition pro of mine. Is it in a box in an attic, dusty and forgotten? Or was it long-since buried in a mountain of landfill, or crushed in some reprocessing plant?

Or could it be – impossibly – that some retro enthusiast is loving it still, and using it to this day?

A Technical Discussion

June 1, 2010

So I was thinking yesterday, during a hot walk to the post office “How did Eugene Jarvis do the lasers in Defender?”

I swear this is not a joke post. Such thoughts as this do occasionally work their way into my mind.

To see what I am talking about, here’s a video of the arcade version of Defender:

There are countless amazing things about the game Defender. The sound effects, the controls, the particle effects, the sublime design. All this in a game that is 28 years old.

Pay close attention to the lasers the ship puts out. See how they are not an unbroken line? See how they seem to start as a random stream of particles and then connect into a solid line. They are simultanenously chaotic and structured; solid and discrete. Could this be a representation of the wave and particle duality of light in video game form? Who knows… certainly not me… but I do know the laser graphics are mesmerising and one of the most memorable things about the game.

So I wondered to myself yesterday, in my memory, how did he do these very organic and colourful particle-y laser beams? How did he make each beam unique and therefore special?

I came up with what seems like a good technique. Start with an 1 dimensional array representing the laser. Pick some random positions (on the left side) and occupy them: these are the dots that begin the laser. Then do a pass through the array populating empty spots with a frequency depending on the occupancy of nearest and next-nearest neighbours. This gives a good representation of particles knitting together to form a beam. You could even fake the movement of the laser by making the array width the same as the screen width and base the start on the ship start position (ie. no sprite movement is needed). Using this technique you could even write to the screen memory directly and possibly avoid sprites.

I’d solved it! Randomized laser beams that look like those in Defender! Voila!

But…

Take a look at this video:

It’s a little tricky to see but if you inspect the lasers you will notice they all look… similar.

Can’t decide? This may be clearer:

Nothing special about those lasers. Just lines… but more importantly: all the same lines. (As an aside, that previous video deserves a blog post unto itself…)

So is it because the BBC Micro and the 2600 are craptastic computers that the coders couldn’t reproduce the majesty of Jarvis original lasers? Perhaps, and this is certainly an attractive thought.

But go take a look at the original video again. Look very closely.

Yes, the sad truth: all the lasers in Defender are identical. There is no magic coding at work there. Just a sprite.

Another childhood illusion dashed on the shores of truth 🙁

Speed Demon

May 26, 2010

What’s a speed run? A speed run is where you try to do something as fast as possible.

I made a few attempts recording a speed run in Monster Hunter, specifically the killing of the easiest boss monster, Great Jaggi. Here’s the video (on youtube) of my best attempt:

Great Jaggi dies in under a minute.

I didn’t embed because the video is in HD and you want the best resolution! Especially so you can laugh at my mistakes! (For those not playing the game, the quest has a maximum duration of 50 minutes).

I could (and have) beaten this time, but I didn’t (and won’t) record better 🙂

Robot Claw