Parsec Question
Bryan Roppolo Boulder
Seeing that Paul Urbanus reads comp.sys.ti I was wondering what Bob
Hendren's involvement was with the creation of Parsec? All I know is
that he hired Aubree Anderson to do the voice in the game and was
apparently heading the project? I know bouth Urb and Jim Dramis did
the programming, but just recently was told about Bob Hendren and was
wondering who he was and all that he did on the Parsec development.
Sincerely,
Bryan Roppolo
e-mail: bro...@hotmail.com
Paul Urbanus
Hi Bryan,
Actually, Bob Hendren had no involvement with the development of Parsec,
except as you have noted in finding Aubree, the speech girl. In fact,
there was no one who 'managed' this project from a look, feel, play, or
feature perspective except for Jim and I, although I believe that Howard
Hastings was Jim's supervisor at the time. That we had no one dictating
what the game should be or do was what was such a blast about Parsec. We
had carte blanche to do whatever we wanted.
Here's how Parsec came to be - best as I can remember. I was just
finishing up the Mini Memory stuff - Lines demo and the Line-by-Line
Assembler - and Jim was just finishing up Munchman. We were both
summoned together into the office of Don Bynum (then the head of Home
Computer), where we were informed that TI wanted us to do a game
together. They preferred that it be a space game, but that was not set
in stone.
I primarily worked on getting the /4A to do things that most thought not
possible, as well as coding some elements of the game, and Jim
implemented all of the initialization, game flow, scoring. The parts of
the game that I coded were:
o Smooth scrolling code. I think that some of my crude planet scenery
was retained by Jim in the game. I was aghast, since I'm not artistic.
o Simultaneous game play and speech. This came about because I wanted
to use the speech chip to make unique sounds, and the it became clear
that the new (in the /4A) user interrupt could be employed to allow
concurrent game play and speech.
o Asteroid belt - I designed the asteroids in TI logo because it was
really easy to animate them. Then I found the character data in the logo
program file and converted it to assembly DATA statements.
o Background stars - fairly simple. BTW, I think that the blinking of
the stars is an artifact of the VDP video encoder and not the result of
any explicit code to blink them. The stars may not blink on a system
with a 9929A (YUV output instead of composite video).
o Horz line draw - this was the 'shot' from the player's ship.
During all of this, Jim was putting the game together and I was testing
it and giving him feedback. Sometimes he took my suggestions. But
oftentimes he didn't, especially when I told him that some aspect of the
game was too hard. In the end, I think he was correct, given how long a
skilled Parsecian can play Parsec.
About the time I was finished with all of this, I was drafted to go out
to La Jolla, California and support Control Data in the implementation
of the Plato interpreter module. This was origin of the DISKO tool and
the menu item, RESIGN AND GO TO BLACK'S BEACH.
At the time I would come in early and leave in mid-afternoon and go down
to the beach - since there are no beaches in the middle of west Texas
where the Home Computer facilities were located. One of the beaches was
a nude beach - Black's Beach (I believe just below the Scripps Institute
of Oceanography). One day while tweaking DISKO I was musing about what I
might do that afternoon, so I added my musing to the menu just for fun.
When I came back to Lubbock after 2-3 weeks of supporting Plato
development, Parsec was almost done and heavy testing was under way.
Summer CES in Chicago was at hand and TI was anxious to release PARSEC.
The code was frozen shortly after I went back to New Mexico State
University for the fall semester of 1982.
Throughout the development of Parsec, it was just Jim and I bouncing
things off of each other. We would write some code and show the other,
discuss it, then keep either all, some, or none of it. I don't remember
a single truly contentious moment during that development. Of course,
Jim was a really easy going guy and I don't think I ever saw him get
mad. I have to say that was one of the most enjoyable periods in my
working life - all of the tools at our disposal to play with while
writing a video game and no one was telling us how to do it or that we
weren't following the storyline. The only annoying thing was toward the
end when we (mainly Jim) were pushed to finish the game and "ship it".
After PARSEC, that was a running joke between Jim, Garth (TI Invaders)
and myself when we were at SofMachine. As soon as any of us had even one
pixel on the screen for a new game concept, one (or both) of the others
would exclaim, "SHIP IT!!!"
I do have to tell a story about Jim. Actually, it's a story about Jim
telling a story. Before Jim was hired into the TI Home Computer
division, he was doing some substitute teaching. This subject was
remedial math, and most of his students were slacker and stoner (pot
smoker) types. There was an upcoming test, and one of the last things
they learned before the test was the Pythagorem theorem. Jim was giving
them the nomenclature for the sides right triangle. There are two legs
that form a right angle, and the remaining (tilted) side is called the
hypotenuse. As a memory aid for 'hypotenuse', he told them, "Remember,
you get 'high when pot in use'."
Everyone correctly identified the hypotenuse on the test. :)
BTW, I'm still working on getting that Vangard source code released :)
One of the floppy disks is not readable, and I have a plan to put
together some special hardware to read this floppy. I'll have to say,
though, that in hindsight the code I wrote is really ugly - not many
comments and lots of obscure stuff.
He...@famkoplien.de
> Bryan Roppolo Boulder wrote:
Hi Paul,
great writing and seeing the backgrounds! Nevertheless, the game when
advanced was never too hard. I remember going in the mids of 2.000.000
after a couple of hours, and I assume there were other Parsecians doing
even more. In the end it was always some sort of concentration and not
skills due to the compute power of the console, so Jim was really right.
Henry
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
snail mail : Henry Koplien \|/
From the Center of Nowhere o(O O)o
---- eMail : He...@FamKoplien.de ---------------ooOo---(_)---oOoo-------
Michael Zapf
I actually never expected to talk to one of the PARSEC creators, but for
that opportunity, a late congratulation and thanks for that masterpiece.
I'm now 38 years old, I had a TI since I was 12, and I think it must
have been in 1983, I bought PARSEC from part of the money I got from my
Confirmation. At that time it was DM 140,-, would be EUR 72,- today ...
strange that I'd never buy such an expensive game today, but it seemed
OK in those times. Perhaps because there weren't that many games, so it
was more like an investment intended to last for quite some time.
I remember me and my friends playing PARSEC after school, whole
afternoons, mastering the asteroids, killer satellites, dramites (the
really challenging ones ...) and also triggering some few bugs here and
there...
- it was sometimes possible to wrap around the screen to reappear on the
right, which made the enemy ship fire frantically at you, but the shots
disappeared on the left :-)
- I think it was related to the killer satellites scenes - sometimes the
ship was drawn upward and wrapped to the bottom of the screen,
crashing into the ground from downward. I think it happened when the
asteroid belt was just over and the satellites appeared.
- Sometimes one of the asteroid sprites of the asteroid belt got so fast
in higher levels that there was a speed value overflow, so it changed
direction.
Whatever, even the guys with the C64 had quite some joy with the game.
As I said, we met at my home, and after some time we had so good skills
that we had to pass on the controller to the next one because it took
too long until one of us lost all ships. That was the real weak point of
PARSEC, getting 10000 points for the next ship was way to easy in higher
levels. From a todays point of view it would have been better to
increase the interval from level to level.
We then set up the rule that whenever someone loses a ship, we passed on
the controller to the next one; but the fourth guy was a bit weaker, so
he had the "duty" to crash so many ships that the display showed only
three remaining ships.
Actually, I don't remember how many counter overflows we had. Must be
have been well over 2 million points, and some dozens of levels after
the highest one mentioned in the manual. I think it took us more than
four hours.
This was also the last day we played PARSEC. We just declared it to be
"solved".
Of course, I sometimes played it on my Geneve, and now, just recently,
on the MESS emulator. This gave me the opportunity to try "Beyond
PARSEC", but this latter one was by no means comparable in gameplay or
quality to the original game.
Of course, from all of us, I was most interested in the technical
details behind PARSEC, because I started writing assembly programs in
those years (when I was 14 IIRC), and I quickly noticed that this soft
scrolling was some decent masterpiece in the game. Especially because of
this sprite blankout problem. I'd guess you have created different
phases of the landscape and changed the character definition to give the
illusion of movement.
So far, thanks again, and now it's
TIME TO REFUEL,
Michael
He...@famkoplien.de
> Hi Paul,
>
> I actually never expected to talk to one of the PARSEC creators, but
for
Also interesting that really a couple of ex TI-99/4A users still pop up
here from time to time ;-)