Wire Wrapping

Wire wrapping is a very slow, tedious job of twisting a wire from the leg of one chip, to the leg of another. In other words, every time you see a complex circuit board, think of how long it would take to do that by hand. 

C64 Beast

Shadow of the Beast had 13 levels of paralax scrolling, the same as the Amiga version. Richard also copied the duel playfield system used for the trees that Mike had created on the PC Engine. 

StuntCar Racer

Stuntcar Racer was one of the very first true multiplayer games available, it did this by using a null-modem cable. While simple to make, it still required you to use soldering iron, and  this lead to shops selling these to gamers as the first multiplayer revolution kicked off.

The Complete History of
DMA Design
By
Mike Dailly

Chapter 3
Part 3

The Shoot-em-up Ship

The shoot-em-up consisted of a space ship which sat at the left hand side of the screen, and had "multiples" above and below. When all weapon pods were colleted, the ship would filled the screen.

The Animations, and backgrounds were beautifully done, and Mike was having a blast doing real Amiga work.

Dave now also sought something different. His new idea was an Action replay for the Amiga, called the "Monster Cartridge". The idea was based on the C64 action replays and Expert cartridges that were common on that platform, and the Amiga was yet to get such a tool.

Coming from an electronics background set Dave in good stead for attempting such a mammoth task alone. He bought in lots or breadboards (special electronic test sets), and software for auto-routing tracks ( this is software that automatically worked out connections for wires that connected the chips together).

He started all this by planning it all out, then wire-wrapping it all by hand! Fortunately, Dave found this very therapeutic, and spent many hours in the back room with Tony and Gary, wrapping little wires to his board. Once the basic design was complete, Dave needed software to test it on.

C64 Shadow of the Beast

Richard was getting on great guns with Shadow of the Beast on the C64, by now he had lots of code writen, and the first level was progressing nicely using all the converted graphics Steve had done.

While Mike chipped in with minor technical help now and then, Richard was mostly on his own. This was partly due to the fact that since he was still at school, he usually coded late in to the night and early morning. Once the school holidays started, he was coding almost 24 hours a day!

Scott surprised everyone one day when he brought in his new Amiga game to show off. He had been working on if for sometime, and now had the basics running. It was an RPG game, much like Dungeon Keeper, but this time, it allowed you to control all four players, and each had their own view.

Dave was impressed, and this would soon lead to a deal with Scott to publish it, although Scott would continue to write this at home for some time yet.

An early version of Hired Guns

Brian was progressing with the debugger, and it was by now a fully featured tool, and totally self contained. That made the choice simple; Dave took "DMA Debug" and put it on the Monster cartridge (hence the name change to Monster Debug).

Unlike most cartridges on the C64, Dave's was software programmable. This gave it a huge advantage, no longer did you just throw it away to get the new version, all you needed was a new floppy disk.

Tony volunteered to try the new toy out while developing Cutiepoo, and seemed to enjoy the ease of use it provided.

While all this was going on, Dave had finally decided to start a version of Lemmings himself. He didn't really take it very seriously at this point, he just wanted to play and see what happened.

Gary, now split his time with Cutiepoo and Lemmings graphics, but there was a problem. Gary just couldn't get the hang of doing background graphics, so Scott came to the rescue and produced the first the rock and earth set.

Lemmings Ground

Once Dave got the basics going, he and Gary came up with the basics skills, and screen layouts and Gary set about creating the animations.

While Gary did this, Dave carried on with his Monster Cartridge. He was having some technical problems with it, and it didn't always work the way it was supposed to.

Mike meanwhile was getting on well with the Amiga game. He had the basic ship flying and animating over a right to left scrolling background, and was just about to start adding aliens and bullets, when Dave stopped him again. Dave wanted to try something else.

The current games of choice at work were populous, and Stunt car racer. Both these games had a 2 player link-up option using a NULL-MODEM cable. This being the simplest cable you can use to connect two machines together.

The Expert Cartridge

The Expert Cartridge and Action Replay allowed gamers to stop a program in its tracks and "change" things. The most common was to give infinite lives, or health, but to programmers, it was also an invaluable debugging tool.

Amiga Beast

Both Mike and Richard would try and copy the Amiga version as closely as they could. The 13 levels of paralx would cause problems for each of them.