he trick was to copy a selected set
of pattern/track data to the correct location addresses, so that the music routine "believes" it is playing a brand new song from the beginning. The advantage of this is that currently unused musical pattern/track data can
be crunched and stored away on the cartridge memory, and the musical pattern/track data to be currently played can be stored well within the
maximum memory range advised by Skull. Of course, it was a long-winded and difficult process, but it was challenging; and helped me understand better
on how music routines work. :) If you want to read more technical write up about this, have a read on the Bomberland article in Vandalism News #60 by Onslaught. Available from here www.at
lantis-prophecy.org/onslaught/mags/va ndalismnews10.zip

AS: Conrad completely surprised me, because he created the whole service system sound - including support for SFX!

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: You mention the game supports enhancements on the Commodore 128. Can
you describe what these are?

AC: Skull will need to answer this one, since I never owned a C128. :)

AS: Well, I have c128D and in truth it is only using the registry to speed
up the processor in some moments such as unpacking... but also in the game
on the bottom border - it gives you an even better fluidity of movement
mainly in the fierce game play of multiplayer mode or to increase
performance for ntsc systems. The game recognizes the platform on which it
is running and automatically adjusts itself. One of the curiosities is to
use the second button, when a joystick is attached to Commodore GS. That
in the game serves as a pause (GS system does not have a keyboard).

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: What projects are you currently working on and can we expect another
game release this yea?

AC: As far as myself and Skull are concerned, no other projects have been confirmed yet; (We're taking a break ;)). I personally however; have been working on another (small) game with another Samar member, that will be published officially in Poland.

AS: At the moment I'm taking a break due to the birth of a second child,
so my time for C64 has decreased recently. The plan is to help with making
a new Samar demo at some point in time. I'm also creating a file manager
for the SD2IEC called "sdbrowse".

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: Why was the game released on Cartridge from RGCD and what promoted you
down this route rather than another distributor?

AC: I'm only answering this with what I have heard, read and experienced,
but Protovision was actually the main guys who wanted to publish this game.
But for some reasons that I don't know of, they were inactive for quite a while; and I think it convinced Skull that we should just release the game
on our own. Around the same time, RGCD were publishing a lot of really
good C64 games on cartridge, including a couple of games I worked on such
as "Not Even Human" (2008) and "Assembloids" (2012). James Monkman (who
I've known since 2011), the founder and organiser of RGCD, came across our "Preview" version of Bomberland, this was released publicly in 2012; and
that's pretty much where it all started. James, Skull and myself all
agreed to work on a 64K cartridge version of Bomberland which quite
honestly, woke both of us back up to get this game finished, thoroughly
tested, and published at a great and affordable price.

AS: Yes exactly, The first interested in the project was from Protovision.
I was glad at first, but soon I began to fear that the game would transform
to "BombMania 2". As I mentioned earlier, Bomberland is of a different
nature to BombMania, besides issuing two titles of actually the same genre would seem a little odd for Protovision. However, for a long time we had
not been in contact with each other. Then interest in the game was shown
by James of RGCD. After some years and a release of Bomberland Preview, he asked us again about the game, as opposed to Protovision which by this time were silent. I liked the idea of publishing games for cardridge, Conrad
too liked the format- so we agreed to terms and conditions, then Jacob of Protoviosion contacted me again, but it was just before the release of the
game in October - which was now ready to sell. But the idea was born, the concept of release of the game (extended) on a floppy disk, with the cooperation of both RGCD and Protovision.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: How was the game created what tool did you use? For example, was it created in a cross compile way or entirely on the Commodore 64?

AC: Shamelessly, the music was composed in a cross-development tool named GoatTracker, a SID tracker that I've been using for a lot of years now.
But, due to that memory issue I answered previously, a new music routine
was developed, using a cross-assembler named KickAssembler. Although the
final music routine code was written this way, I also wrote some testing
code directly on a real C64, using the machine code monitor on Action
Replay V6, remember my attempts to show you raster interrupt programming
with the Action replay cartridge! You see, I like to make sure that actual parts of a music routine work 100% on a real C64 before I attempt to write
and document it on a text editor, so I would say I have developed code both
on a real C64 and PC/laptop. The final music compilation was also tested
on a real C64.

AS: My development environment used in this project was Relaunch64 editor
with 64tass compiler and the Vice emulator. Next I had a whole bag of interesting tools... Exomizer, Timanthes, MUSC converter, makedisk,
CharPad, SpritePad etc. (I don't remember them all)... but I started with TurboAss running on the emulator and tools from C64. I am not sorry that I didn't use a real C64 for all the work, because I couldn't; mainly due to
the complexity of such a project and constantly keep refining the small details.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: Apart then from the Music routine, what else caused you the most
problems in creating the game?

AC: It was mainly all trial-and-error from that point. James helped us to test the game for bugs, which we found along the way. There were also
problems to solve when tested the game on NTSC machines, so that kept us
busy. Another interesting fact is that me and Skull promoted Bomberland at Silesia 7 demoparty, 3 months before the game was officially released. We
did this through a "Bomberland tournament". The idea was, not only to have
a fun competition at a party, but to also check for gameplay bugs tested by real human beings. We found many bugs this way, which we took note of and fixed afterwards. I personally want to thank the sceners at Silesia 7
party who took part in this... you lot were a great help.

AS: I don't want to think it all over, but it was a hassle! - errors
popping up exponentially - and the removal of some resulted in the
formation of new ones! I think I complicated the code about a million
times. The project "Bomberland" has more than 50 files of sourcecode in
them; tens of thousands of lines. At the end, mainly the problem with not enough memory on the cartridge :)

- - - - - - - - - -

Q: is there a question you would have liked me to ask but I haven't

AC: Not that I can think of... I think you've asked us enough. :)

AS: I have to admit that you are asking quite clever questions, you are
good at this job :) Thx for the review.



*************************************
REVIEW: FASTBOY FOR THE
UNEXPANDED VIC 20
By Commodore Free
*************************************

Author: Misfit Requirements: Unexpanded VIC-20
+ Disk Drive + Joystick Tested on: VICE 2.2 and real
VIC-20 (PAL)

The game was created in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare 27 competition

You can Download the game as a D64 from here

www.riimukivi.net/data/fastboy/vic20_ fastboy_ld27.zip

The Download for th

--- MBSE BBS v1.0.01 (GNU/Linux-i386)
* Origin: Dragon's Lair ---:- bbs.vk3heg.net -:--- (39:901/280)