Don't complain, I've been using programs written in English all my life even without knowing the language. Not only that, the NES documents were in Japanese! I had to figure it all out.
Learning some Spanish words isn't going to hurt :P
By the way, and continuing with the topic, I'll be participating in a documentary about the history of video game music, just in case someone wants to check it out and pledge.
Are you saying you had to translate the text or did you have to just experiment with the hardware? Man, the old days seem much harder than I thought! Though I can imagine that by taking the job of a video game developer, you had a lot of time on your hands to experiment and figure this stuff out. I've tried out a little assembly and NES programming, and it's such a slow process for me that even the smallest of changes and additions feel like a big difference. Thank time & technology that we have readable documentation available for this on the internet!
You had the list of hardware registers and had to experiment. Besides, hardware also has bugs, and it doesn't do what it's supposed to do sometimes. You had to learn that the hard way.
Yeah that's why a game which now seems so simple took many months to do back in the day. All was much more slow and complicated to do, and you couldn't ask anyone. But that was also cool in its own way.
The time you take now reading info you used it back then to experiment, which IMHO was orders of magnitude more rewarding.
See, ImATrackMan has an advantage here because he speaks Spanish :P
I'll make a tutorial if I ever figure it out. Alberto, you're amazing for giving us these tools and insight into how you worked.
EDIT: Never mind, ZX Spin is being a shit and has given up on any form of mouse or joystick emulation. so it looks like I won't be working with this any time soon.
It's good to see you here again sir! I always thought developers were given some sort of a manual, these days there's a lot of documents available, a lot of them are very detailed. I wonder what kind of descriptions were given, like did they even tell you which register was the volume/frequency or whatever?
Oh and I really want to learn Spanish some time in my life, mainly because of you. I'm just too busy with German and Russian for now.
AlbertoG: Thanks for your reply! I can imagine the amount of work needed to hear the results back then. Today it's very easy with all the kind of emulation available.
I found this interview with you now as well, it contains some interesting details so I recommend it for anyone interested.
Never mind, ZX Spin is being a shit and has given up on any form of mouse or joystick emulation. so it looks like I won't be working with this any time soon.
Compact Editor doesn't work with mouse or joystick, only keys. To move the cursor use the keys O P Q A and Space. Anyway, don't feel obliged to suffer it all
za909 wrote:
I wonder what kind of descriptions were given, like did they even tell you which register was the volume/frequency or whatever?
That is, just technical information about the registers and the purpose of each bit of them, but not much more. Certainly no libraries or code examples. Anyway, that information was all we needed! But you had to code it all from scratch.
jsr wrote:
I found this interview with you now as well, it contains some interesting details so I recommend it for anyone interested.
I have a SoundCloud account where I have uploaded many of my old soundtracks and other things. Many of them have facts and anecdotes noted. There are also links to more recent interviews in my profile description.
Perhaps I'm giving too much info! By the way, is anyone here able to record from a real PAL NES?
Never mind, ZX Spin is being a shit and has given up on any form of mouse or joystick emulation. so it looks like I won't be working with this any time soon.
Compact Editor doesn't work with mouse or joystick, only keys. To move the cursor use the keys O P Q A and Space. Anyway, don't feel obliged to suffer it all
Thanks to that, I've actually figured out how to do a few things. The instrument editor in particular is rather cool. Was the test song you included used in anything?
