State of the art game dev tools in 1989: #gamedev (source: mastodon.social/@grumpygamer...)

Restored the attract sequence of the Police Academy prototype

Published RadViewer to visualize the old RAD files from Atari/Tengen github.com/yaz0r/RadVie... It's been pretty annoying to look at old RAD files through Dosbox, so made a modern viewer for windows. For more context about RAD files: www.museumofplay.org/blog/thats-r...

What fascinates me in that stuff is the glimpse we get into how game development worked in the early 90s. For example, they didn't really generate fully formed roms, but just loaded all the compiled bits in a dev cartridge. If they needed a rom back, they would just read that back.

Folks at @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social received a hard-drive image of a VAX machine. Sadly, the disk had been mostly wiped and only showed up an empty folder. I went back to the 70s VAX filesystem specs and wrote a tool to reassemble as much as possible of the files. We got some cool roms out of it.

Spent some fun time the last few weeks getting some old NES source code of Police Academy back into a compliable state. Fun dive into the the early 90s development system and all that stuff. Code and instructions on how to build it I wrote are released today by @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social

Reminder: I'm dumping mystery prototypes live this Wednesday! Here's a teaser, real ones will see something exciting. www.youtube.com/live/RJwR8jX...

Some fun results of the data recovery I’ve been poking around recently. Given how mangled the disk was, we’re lucky to have something like that come out of it

Mission accomplished at the last minute!

My goal for the break is to finish Persona 3 Reloaded DLC. I'm close to the end (I think), but I probably need to grind quite a bit more... :(

If you have GDC Vault access, you can check out my 2024 talk about how we built quests for #DIabloIV. I'm quite proud of how this talk came together. I tried to make sure it was packed with actionable info if you're interested in #NarrativeDesign or #MissionDesign! gdcvault.com/play/1034226...

I’m hoping we have a tight enough scene that if someone spots this stuff for sale we can catch these shitheads

Pluribus is an interesting premise. I would have so many questions if I was in her shoes.

It’s a coffee by the bay kind of day

Hi friends, I'm still looking for freelance & contract work! I'd love to help contribute to bringing your worlds and stories to life!

As an french expat, this still triggers me. This is not a croissant. 🥐

"Return of the Obra Dinn" is seven years old this week. For this not-particularly-special anniversary, here's a re-cammed and narrated timelapse of (nearly) all character creation, object modeling, scene posing, and general 3D work for Obra Dinn from 2015 to 2018: youtu.be/90vqCKEEj3s

Haven't been posting much here. Mostly heads down working on pet projects and reading about interesting tech. Been digging into stuff like mesh shaders recently and how to leverage them on modern GPUs. I find it pretty interesting stuff and itching to write some code using them.

Haven’t had a landline in more than a decade, but would totally want a pacman phone.

Back in the bay after a week working from London. Mostly dodged the jetlag.

A very nice movie. Hope the Japanese public give it a chance

Mystery explained

Finally! Saved post!

Little bonus fact about that one. The game actually expects keyboard inputs on the 2nd controller port. The basic controls work with just a game controller, but the code checks for keyboard events for some of the more advanced stuff, especially the in-battle debug menu.

Panzer Dragoon Saga tech fact: The game shipped with a bunch of debug menus/features At boot up, if the game detect a save with a special name, debug modes will be enabled. More debug flags are enabled if a button on 2nd controller is pressed when hitting start. 👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC2L...

Panzer Dragoon Saga tech fact: The boot-up sequence is a bit non-standard for a Saturn game Normally, a Saturn game boots but first loading a sega provided file (IP.BIN) embedded at a very specific sector of the game disk. This in turn is responsible for loading the game exe. 👇 #panzerdragoonsaga

Panzer Dragoon Saga tech fact: The game use very little scripting. Many jrpg of the time (and I looked at quite a few) usually implement field events, or enemy AI using a scripting engine. This likely make development easier and you don't need a whole team of C programmers. 👇 #panzerdragoonsaga

Panzer Dragoon Saga tech fact: The game is built with a cooperative task system. At boot, a initial boot task is created, that will create all the sub task to run the game. Everything in the game is a task. Even the "press start button" is a little task that makes it blink. 👇 #panzerdragoonsaga

I'll be posting some random Panzer Dragoon Saga technical facts that I learned in that decompilation. #PanzerDragoon #PanzerDragoonSaga #パンツァードラグーン

This has been forwarded to me a few times today. Years ago I partially decompiled Saga. The project got to a semi-playable state, but due to the cheer amount of work, it stalled. Every location/map uses custom code, there is barely any scripting. I still want to revisit it in some form someday

After having finished Blue Prince, watching someone new to it play is pure agony.

Brush fire on 280 close to us. I can ear airplanes circling around. It’s going to be one of those days.

@kohler.bsky.social that reminds me, I'm in London soon, in case there is something you want from there. I recall you posted about grabbing some DE UK releases a little while back.

Hey! At 2:30 Pacific come watch my PAX panel live on Twitch. I'm going to teach you about the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System 40 years ago, and I promise you'll learn something new. Blue Dragon Theater if you're here, streaming you're not at twitch.tv/pax

@frankcifaldi.bsky.social @brandon.insertcredit.com about the insert credit convo about proto/cut content. To me it’s about seeing how the game was developed and the tools/process used. That’s probably just the engineer in me. But ageed that cut content was cut for a reason.

For some reasons, I might have been listening to the soundtrack of Katamari Damacy in loop for the last few days. I might need an intervention soon...

Anybody who knows anybody that might be interested in Demonschool and might give it a little boost, please entice them to fill out this form! We put a lot into this game and we really want people to see it.

Most people I know didn’t like Chrono Cross. Personally I really enjoyed it back then, probably because I didn’t go in without any expectations of similarities with Chrono Trigger.

I've been working on a way to extract DeskTape backups for @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social and got a first version working (with some limitations). I'm making the code public so it can be useful to others. github.com/yaz0r/DeskTa... Also, if anyone have DeskTape backups lying around, get in touch!

I've been working on a way to extract DeskTape backups for @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social and got a first version working (with some limitations). I'm making the code public so it can be useful to others. github.com/yaz0r/DeskTa... Also, if anyone have DeskTape backups lying around, get in touch!

Been motived to work on my Xenogears decompilation lately. Been working a the validation mechanism to ensure the game doesn't deviate from the original, and found a bunch of little bugs along the way. github.com/yaz0r/Noah #xenogears #decompilation #retrogaming

I've been keeping an eye on games decompilation lately. Looks like matching decompilations have become the norm, and I'm not a fan. They have some benefits yes, but the number of hoops one have to jump through (not counting the amount of extra work) to generate matching code is staggering.

[Technical rant] I never understood the point for CMake to not have debug symbols in Release. In what case would you ever want something like that? You shouldn't ever release software without having debug symbols saved for debugging. Always generate debug symbols, and strip them from release!

I just published the source code I could find for my old FFX model viewer: github.com/yaz0r/FFXView Also, uploaded the 2 releases: archive.org/details/ffxv... archive.org/details/ffxv... Amusingly, this all was released 20 years ago almost to the day! #FinalFantasyX #ffx #OpenSource

New neighbors at work

We've acquired the historic game magazine Computer Entertainer. As in, we got the rights. We own the magazine. And we're putting it into the Creative Commons for anyone to use for free. Learn more: gamehistory.org/computerente...

I kept virtually everything from my my childhood computer collection, and a load of ex-DMA development stuff, and donated it all to our local museum - @McManusDundee. Here's a breakdown of the crap... errr... valuable historical equipment I donated. lemmings.info/museum-donat...

I hunger! #sinistar