I'm looking for a student for an M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Calgary. *This is a fully funded position.*
The project: building tools to help understand how "retro" video games were made under amazingly constrained circumstances. While it's a CS position, this is interdisciplinary work done in collaboration with archaeologists and others.
Needs: strong coding skills, good writing abilities. Ideally: low-level, reverse engineering, or compiler experience.
@herrprofdr Since you use the word "retro", this is about how people made games that fit original form factors even though larger computers are around, and not how people made games back in the eighties?
Not that you need archeology for either, you can just use anthropology and history, since many people who made games since the seventies are still available.
But I'll give one hint: coat-hangers were really important to keep everything together.
@herrprofdr It kinda feels weird, though... I've coded and made amateur games in the eighties, and I remember a lot of stuff from back then, like how to use Z80 assembly, or how to do Lords of Midnight stuff. Or map out a bitfield.
But I''m also still coding these days, despite long covid, and I feel it's all like a continuum -- I mean, bitfields are still a thing.
(Back in the early eighties I was twelve, though.)
@herrprofdr Oh. the coat hangers remark was real btw. You'd cut up and bend wire coat hangers, take out some screws from Speccy and disk drive and bend the wires so the drive and speccy were securely connected.
Otherwise you would get typing-induced resets.
And saving your work to tape instead of discovery disk drive was way too slow....
@herrprofdr Oh, one side-thing you might want to consider is Wen Yidou. When it comes to dancing withing limitations, his Dead Water is kinda relevant.
(Not that the 48k speccy felt like a limitation, not after trying to do stuff on the 16k one.)
@herrprofdr If I was in Canada, I'd apply. This sounds like some very interesting research, and overlaps with much of what I have been doing over the years.
@halla @herrprofdr right, but with the right tricks (changing the background colour at the right times, you can still makes some interesting effects on the screen)
Here's a video of it if you're interested.
@halla @herrprofdr I started with the C64, and did some assembler on it, but I didn't really get into it until after I moved to the Atari ST.
More recently I went back and did some simple stuff on the C64 and it's quite different.
@herrprofdr Awesome. Interesting work, I tried writing a little Apple ][ demake game in 6502 a few years back and even with a host computer emulating the Apple, and all the Internet's resources at my fingertips it was torturous work and is on hold indefinitely :-/ How on earth did they do it back then?
https://nick.zoic.org/art/writing-an-apple-2-game-in-2021-1/
@herrprofdr “fully-funded” = paid position? or does that just mean students shouldn’t expect any tuition costs?
if it’s paid, is there a salary band?
@demofox @herrprofdr very little is truly new, computers are just much faster now as you'll be aware, and high end technologies trickle down to commodity systems.
Witness the use of a virtual machine back in 1979, into the 80s, and then the modern day with different tools to run Infocom interactive fiction games on many different resource constrained systems. They probably got *that* idea from mainframes.
@herrprofdr Some of us were in the room where it happened and are still around.
It was a struggle for the most part.
@herrprofdr A lot of people have done insights on The Cutting Room Floor (https://tcrf.net/), a wiki about video game assets that have been discovered as cut, unused or otherwise included alongside the playable portions of games.
Good places to look as well, are the various decompilation projects for several vintage games - oftentimes, they have had to reconstruct or emulate the development tools originally used to produce the ROM, assets and executables within.
Finally, there have been various commentaries posted on the basis of leaked or found original-source disks or workstation backups, especially for games prior to 2000.
@herrprofdr Have we as a discipline really gotten so far away from the machine that trying to understand how to write non-trivial software without gigabytes of memory and IDEs is a _research topic_.
Like, do I need to just show up on your doorstep with my Apple ][+ and a copy of SC-Assembler and teach people how to computer again?
@androidarts @herrprofdr we all agree that we like the term retro. why not just hyphenate and/or add some words?
retro-inspired
retro-themed
etc?
this comes up a lot in the chiptune scene where people are debating whether someone's music is "chiptune" because someone is a part of that scene.
we don't have to use just one word. "cave story is a beautiful retro-themed indie game with pixelart and chiptune-inspired music." done.
pardon the toot gravedigging and late-night musing!
@herrprofdr I'm thinking of a compiler I wrote constrained to 16KB of ram on an 8 bit processor and chuckling at the definition of "amazingly constrained circumstances" in that call.
How times have changed.
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