Spectrum Computing

Episode 70 now live. Extra long end of series special... C-Tech get a drilling, plus a few more nice features.
https://youtu.be/iazea1u10DE

good exploration of what makes a good game

He deserves a knighthood for reviewing all those C-Tech games.

I liked the bit where all the old DOS emulators didn't work.

I think we forget how hard it was back then, configuring everything and managing the drivers manually. Programming was complicated by changes in the hardware and the OS, as time went on.

So many hardware aspects were non-standard and sometimes it was impossible to detect them, so you had to put an option in and explain as much as you could to the user in a text file.

The IRQ 8-15 issue was because they had to be programmed differently from IRQ 0-7, everything was just a little bit of a semi-documented nightmare.

Win'98 was probably the last very compatible OS for DOS emulators. After that you couldn't guarantee all sorts of simple things, including the ability to set up a timer interrupt.

I admire how you kept it together during the C-Tech reviews. To be able to plow through the available titles was quite something. I think many would have just drawn the conclusion that the publisher didn't care, made no attempt to improve their output and left it at that. I think it is one of the few examples where we can be thankful of MIA status games.

With C-Tech, they must have made some money to have been able to advertise like they did - why they didn't up their game? The financial incentive must have been present and they were in a position to take advantage of the market at the time.

Nomad wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 2:14 am With C-Tech, they must have made some money to have been able to advertise like they did - why they didn't up their game? The financial incentive must have been present and they were in a position to take advantage of the market at the time.

Yeah, they must have known they were ripping people off with substandard, buggy games. I was surprised to see the author actually put his name on the front screen of some of the games. That was the thing to do back then, but I wouldn't have put my name to such dross.

But it's all part of the history, isn't it? There are an awful lot of games we're not talking about 35 years later.

dfzx wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 9:09 am Yeah, they must have known they were ripping people off with substandard, buggy games. I was surprised to see the author actually put his name on the front screen of some of the games. That was the thing to do back then, but I wouldn't have put my name to such dross.

But it's all part of the history, isn't it? There are an awful lot of games we're not talking about 35 years later.

When you look at the business model, they basically leveraged bedroom coders to develop and write the product. They then promoted and sold it to distributors. And had a mail order distribution that they operated directly.

What blew my mind was this had retail sales channels. Therefore nobody checked or cared about the quality of the titles they were selling in the stores.

So for a guy putting his name on the software, I guess you can say its lack of self awareness that your game is crap. These guys would have just been stoked to have gotten a game published. Sure C-Tech probably knew what was up, but the coders that submitted programs that other publishers that were legit probably rejected... not so much.

Pure speculation here but from C-Tech's point of view, that was probably a liability thing why they were so keen to say that the product was sourced from outside C-Tech. Anything that eventually came back to bite them they could point to some random dude, show a contract agreement that in the event of a problem liability rests with the coder.

But from the video, these fellows were barely out of school themselves so perhaps we are attributing to malice what could just be put down to incompetence.

About your point with not discussing the crap/failure titles. I think that is a mistake, well if you want to learn about writing a good program. Its a lot easier to figure out what NOT to do by looking at bad programs.

With these car-crash publishers the stories about why they did what they did is often more interesting than a publisher/developer that just had a bunch of success.

When you get a hybrid like Imagine. That is where it gets really interesting.

Fantastic episode and in fast one of your best. Keep it going

Cripes, I had no idea CTech produced so many crap games.

I knew there were a few but I'd have been gutted if I'd bought one, some of those really do look worse than most type-ins. Could have practically filled up a second Cassette 50...

My theory with the C-Tech games was the authors already got rejected from the magazines for QC. It seemed to be stuff that didn't past the magazines sniff test.

Centipede is credited to D.J Perry. Probably David Perry, since he wrote type-ins for the ZX81 and later good games for the Spectrum...