Well it's about time I got off my lazy behind and updated the site with some fresh content. I hope you like the new front page. As I add new issues I still want to keep the old ones available for reference. By the way, when you see an article on this site use the first person it refers to me, Scott (unless stated otherwise). While DragonShadow Industries refers to both Dave and myself, I'm the one with the Yaroze and access to the site so I'll be doing most of the updates. Also any mail links you see on these pages will go to me.
Since I haven't done so yet I thought I'd take a moment to introduce myself. Like most of us here I've been a gamer all my life. My first experience with a computer was with an Atari 800. I subscribed to Antic magazine and every month I typed in the games they provided. I even created a game, Snowball Fight, and submitted it, but unfortunately got rejected.
As for the "Dragon" half of "DragonShadow", Dave had a
Commodore 64. I was always jealous when a game came out for
both the 800 and C64 and his version was better! Ah the fond
memories of staying up late playing Bards
Tale (I, II, and III), M.U.L.E., Racing
Destruction Set (a game has yet to be produced in the
same vein and of the same quality), and Adventure
Construction Set (or ACS)!
ACS really brought us into the age of making our
own games. It was awesome! We have probably half a dozen
half-finished worlds of our making. I don't think we ever
actually completed an adventure but man did we love
making the games!
And then came Gary Kitchen's Game Maker. Oh man,
a program with the game creator at heart. This program had
a sprite builder, music and sound effects maker, and
background maker. You used the internal programming
language to create games. While not that sophisticated, the
language provided all the basic constructs necessary
(variables, loops, subroutines) while also giving you simple
commands to move sprites around the screen. This time we
actually made a complete game! It's called Mega-Gun
and is great (albeit simple) fun. Granted it can't compare
to today's games (or even the games of those days), but it
was our game. That made it so much cooler.
Eventually the 800 and C64 got tossed to the side in favor of a PC (me) and and Amiga (Dave). And again I was jealous since Dave's machine could produce graphics and sound waaay ahead of its time. To top it off, Electronic Arts released aversion of ACS for the Amiga! This time it had a palette of 32 colors instead of the Commodore's four. We were in heaven again.
No matter what computer we had at the time, construction sets were always our favorite type of games. ACS, Racing Destruction Set, Shoot-Em Up Construction Kit (or SUCK as we called it), Movie Maker (okay, not exactly a game), Wizard, Load Runner, Load Runner's Rescue. These games provided us with a creative outlet to try our hand at game making.
Recently I went into nostalgia mode and pined for my old Atari 800 (which had long since been given away). To my delight I discovered the wonderful world of emulators. While not perfect, they run a majority of the games out there and let you relive the past. You can even connect your PC to the Atari or C64 disk drives (with a special cable) and copy files back and forth. Check out the advertising section for some useful links.
Given the past, it's a bit surprising that I never got into programming for the PC to any great extent. Something about DOS and Windows intimidates me; I shied away from drivers, video cards, and interrupts. I did attempt a couple games - one with Visual Basic and the other with Borland C++ for Windows - but neither worked out as I had hoped.
Then I learned about the Yaroze! This is the perfect thing for a budding game programmer. No need to worry about the hassles of different PC configurations; sound effects and graphics are achieved with the supplied libraries. The price is a bit steep, but I think it's worth it (if nothing else than for the ability to play Tobal 2 without the swap trick). Hopefully the games we make on the Yaroze will pave the way for eventual employment in the entertainment field. We'll just see how it goes.
Scott Cartier
As requested requested on the newsgroups, I have put up a memory card dump of Tobal 2 with the hidden characters enabled. When I bought Tobal 2 the company also offered a memory card with that save game. Since I can't read Japanese, the odds of my actually getting anywhere in quest mode are slim, so I bought it. Below is an excerpt from a newsgroup message by David Nyo describing how to put the data back onto a memory card.
My save game is called BISLPM-86033TOBAL2. You'll need that when you copy it back to the memory card.
NOTE: I have not tried this myself. So I can take no responsibility for any consequences. The worst I can think of happening is that it would copy the file to the same location on the memory card as it was on mine (which would of course overwrite anything that was there). I'd suggest trying it on a blank card first.
ANOTHER NOTE: This is for the memory card in slot 1. I'm not sure how to access the second slot yet.
To place a file from your PC back into your memcard, type
the following into SIOCONS to transfer the file into PSX
memory:
>> [F9][F4]
Dload[2]: wipeout.sav 80090000
Then write it to the memcard using the name you recorded previously:
>> write mem:BASCUS-94351WIPEXL 80090000 2000
Of course, substitute tobal2.mem and BISLPM-86033TOBAL2 in the directions above.
This web page and all other pages on this site are © 1997 Scott Cartier