| Posted By
Gaia
on 2001-12-21
|  Wow!
What a great honour! Doug Turner himself!
Have you noticed too, that Icicle Works was so immensely popular, that a level editor had been developed and several "new" version was "released" by enthusiastic amateurs!
Maybe other have already answered your question, but on Landos's site you can find all the games contributed by you. What more he is the greatest Icicle Works fan ever, that you can check in the news archive around April 2000...
May we know some more about your current activities?
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2001-12-27
| Emulator source code
Thanx for the story, it was quite informative 
Of course you can have an emualtor with source: my own
It's called Yape, and it has got two versions: a Windows and an SDL (http://libsdl.org) one (which you can compile on several platforms where SDL is ported to such as: Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mac, oS/2, BeOS etc.
The source code for the latter version I released under the GNU General Public license, so it is available and you can do with it what you want. So far, not many people dared to do anything with it... 
You can find the source on my website:
http://plus4.keepitretro.com/download.htm
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Posted By
Doug
on 2001-12-26
| What I do these days
Hi Attila,
Sure - I can you fill you in on a few details if you like. I did most of my 8-bit stuff during a year off from uni in '84/'85. That was when I did Icicle Works, and a bunch of other stuff. Some made it, some didn't. Mostly it was C64 oriented, but I didn't ignore the old Plus/4 obviously! Some of the stuff I did that never made to market was a mixture of failed business ventures, and hacking for my own entertainment. I did a game with another guy from British Software, for the C64, which was a really cool action game. Two elements to the game - the first was a 2D smooth scroller, in which you flew a natty little ship around a huge maze infested with nasties while looking for a bomb to destroy. Once you got out of there, it was on to the next bit in which your little ship took off, and you went through a pseudo 3D bit skimming the surface of a planet and blasting stuff. We completed it, and got paid, but the game was bought by some German outfit (I never discovered who), who sat on it rather than distribute it, since (it turned out) it was a bit too similar to something they had been working on ... bummer.
Other stuff I did around then:
Managed to play audio tapes through the C64 tapedeck with the SID: crackly but recognisable!
Wrote my own C64 BASIC enhancer - a whole bunch of graphics commands. Spent a while on this while at uni. I still think it had the fastest area fill ever seen on the old C64. It screamed!
Wrote Fingers Malone & Prospector Pete (did these while at uni for beer money!)
Much consulting to the games industry, writing loaders, copy protection code etc. Which was ironic since I was also a prolific hacker - I broke just about every game there was to break.
Messed around on the C128 (yawn). Was I the only one ever to figure out how to put it into C64 mode, and yet run with a 2MHz clock - it was cool.
Anyway, I left Uni with a nice Computer Science degree, and started work. I consulted at IBM for a few years working on some really cool stuff. At this time I got an Amiga, but the stuff I was working on at Big Blue was so much more powerful, it never got looked at. I was playing with leading edge PC technology, working on graphics and multimedia. I one of the lucky few who got to work on digital video back in the days when no-one had even heard of MPEG. Writing software codecs on a 33Mhz 486 was a challenge!
From there I carried on playing with multimedia and digital video, until I wound up at a start up company in Boston Mass. Spent two happy years there trying to make digital video a reality on the PC. This was pre DirectDraw, fast processors, AGP, PCI you name it. We were doomed....
Came back to blighty, and resumed consulting at IBM - this time working on disk drives (note the slight change of direction?) These were no ordinary disks, these were IBM's SSA drive - super fast serial disks (made me laugh to think back to the old C= serial drives). These suckers could shovel data at 160 Mbytes/sec. Stayed there way too long, but it was too much fun.
After that, I wound up where you find me today - working for ST Microelectronics, running a team of software engineers designing and writing embedded system OS's, mostly for the digital TV market. If you've got a SkyBox, or Pace digital TV decoder, you've got one of our OSes in it! We are currently working on the next generation stuff, which is pretty mind blowingly cool. I find it hard to differentiate between these boxes, and a tooled up DreamCast. Loads of CPU grunt, load of graphics, loads of video bandwidth, and tons of stuff I'm not allowed to mention 8o( ... but its cool 8o).
Any of you guys out there who have written Plus/4 emulators care to share the source code with me? I'd love to put a Plus/4 emulator up on one of my boxes. It would make a great demo - especially since we drive TVs as our output device - not a computer monitor!
Keep on hackin'!
Doug.
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Posted By
Crown
on 2003-06-11
| Re: Wow!
Wow that's interesting, a year ago or two, someone from the semiconductor industry approached the Vice team, about their new one chip system (CPU/RAM/etc) targeted to be included in TV sets. Their idea was that we should make a stripped down version of Vice, so it can run on it, and they can pitch the idea to manufacturers, so they can include old C64 games embedeed into the TV.... ))
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