Oliver Frey - A Legend Passes Away - This Week In Retro 89

grab that thrustmaster it's time to fly for the corn fed all this and more this week in retro high resolution color graphics this land of high technology the revolution in technology that made the information age possible those kids are not afraid of computers the passing of a legend brand new diy computer inspired by sir clive wing commander 4 remastered all this and more on this week in retro up-to-date news for out-of-date tech hello chaps another week uh another well another weekend as this show comes out on saturdays and we'll pretend that we record it just before it's released on a saturday today that's slick and professional it honestly doesn't take a week for us to record this and edit it up and have the show that comes out honestly uh but it's been a good week um we've just had in the cave uh a patron event so all of the official cave dwellers came full house it was fantastic and it was the first time we got to give people the tour of the arcade that we're building alex was such a natural at giving people the tour he really has got the gift um talking people talking talking to people um i'd like me and um and just sharing all that knowledge he has about the history of these arcade games so i think people really enjoyed it it was nice to see we had 30 bodies in the arcade and it was nice to see there was room for them i was worried that it you know once you got the retro the meat in there as we've called it before the meat in the retro sandwich that there wouldn't be room for the cabinets and it would look um cramped but it was fine so that's great and we've got lots more cabinets arriving this week i'm blown over them i really am blown over the cabinets are coming it just it's just everything it's just a wish list of cabinets you could you could you wouldn't you wouldn't even dare hope they'd be this good it's incredible it really is tipping into that museum experience not just an arcade it's like a real uh step-by-step history through um arcades so it's fantastic to see that coming along and alex is doing a great job then we had the rest of the patron day and then we went for a curry what what's an acceptable amount of time to go chaps i'm going way off topic from retro here but i need to get this off my chest was an acceptable amount of time to wait from the moment of arriving at a curry house to having your food in front of you 30 minutes probably about 40 minutes is the longest assuming they come in and say let's get you a drink let's get you the menu are you ready to order there you go 40 minutes 40 minutes you're kind of looking at your watch thinking is this going to be any longer i also have to spend some time arguing with the waiter that in fact it is safe for me to have a vindaloo and i'm not going to die i do have that conversation quite frequently but yeah 30 minutes in my view yeah yeah maybe a papa dome and a pint of cobra while you're waiting for the food to come out yep yeah well two hours two hours is how long it took in fact just over two hours is how long it took and and um yeah i think it took about an hour to get to actually order the food at which point the chap said um you know right does anyone want any starters and there was just a universal no if we order starters we're gonna be here for five hours um yeah two hours uh it was awful anyway got that off my chest let's move on to more positive things chris you've got a train behind you on your screen trying to hide how was the curry was the curry worth the wait i was so hungry it didn't touch the sides so it was it just filled with space that's probably why they did it probably it was dodgy food day that's the leftovers from the day before oh also um also if you went up to the facilities and used the toilet this was brilliant the toilet door had a perfect cut in the door in the shape of a toilet because they'd obviously installed the toilet installed the door and then realized the door wouldn't open so when you open the door what's the shape of the toilet was in the door so that it could go the door could go through the toilet i like that because it meant you had a toilet sized hole if you sand the toilet i'm so confused anyway we won't be going back there again i'm hijacking the show remember at the start when i you know first came over and you know started helping you present on here and i tried to segue into cars it's trains now neil sorry yeah so we're gonna ditch computers and now some of the stuff i bought back over from england some of my toys from from my past so it is sort of retro nostalgia related but i bought some of my hornby trains over with myself just in all honesty that's what i've been playing about with computers and games of taken a sideline and i've been on the floor on the carpet setting up tracks that go round and round and even the wife has gone so what do you do with it when you've set it up and i go will you watch them go round and round i don't understand why that's a problem so yeah that's me yeah i wasn't sure chris if you treated your train sets like um pristine um i guess boxed micro computers and you never took them out but clearly you do you get them out you spread them out on the floor but i bet you put them back perfectly in the box don't you well the the box i'm actually surprised to see that i still had the box for the intercity one two five set that i had um but it was fairly crushed up in my parents loft so no i used to play with that back in the day and it'll be happily played with again the fact that the box exists is is just pure fluke the i've got a modern one though the flying scotsman set that's a modern one that i bought for my dad um and so now it's mine been passed down to me um and that is brand new so that will probably all go back in the box yeah but no at some stage i'll be finding a piece of chipboard setting out a whole layout tacking it all down like you're meant to and and annoying the wife with taking up even more space in the house with another hobby so yeah i'm excited dave maybe maybe she's going to insist that you have a streak [Laughter] nice dave can you outnerd train sets um other than everything we talk about in here no no i don't think i can i've never i've honestly never seen the appeal of it i mean i can see the when you see the the people having complicated setups that they've made things by hand and so on it's nice to have a quick look at it for a few minutes but the amount of work that goes into it doesn't seem to i don't get it so i i'm not uh i'm not on on board you're trained um i suppose you can compare it to a lot of what we do which is you know sometimes the pleasure is in repairing the system and then once you've fixed it and cleaned it up and it's looking like new you don't actually do that much on it yeah i i imagine there's a lot of crossovers getting it just so getting it just right having fun trying to find some peace and order and a complicated life that's it that's what it's about yeah having some control what you've been up to dave well i was uh i finished i did finish that game i talked about last week which i i really enjoyed uh i've never forgotten the name of but i forgot i enjoyed it the 3d one um fantastic it was a good game if you know what game dave is talking about please leave a comment [Laughter] i watched i watched a video on youtube and i watched a video on youtube with an australian and that when he's back in the uk if he nudges me i will give you anything you need to get your pentium 2 system your cellar on up and running it looks as if it meaning a new power supply or more bits i have lots of bits i'd love to get you up and running in that when you're back in england oh nice fantastic give me a little when it's sir when it's time for that yeah yeah cool we'll see something up excellent should we move into this week's stories yeah yeah let's do it we start this week off with a story submitted by listener mr costado hello costado um it's some sad news this week and um it's becoming more and more frequent as the pioneers of the industry age with us and um it's it's all about the passing of a man who would have well i think he would have stopped us in our tracks all of us as we walked down the aisles of news agents or corner shops just through the power of his artwork it is of course oliver frey or ollie as he's known to his friends the artist behind the illustrations that we saw on crash magazine zap 64 antics and and just about um any other magazine um that we saw out there if he touched it it oozed coolness especially those crash and zap 64 magazines and it will likely come as no surprise that he was a fan of comics in his youth that style is um very clear in the art that he does particularly the eagle that was his comic of choice apparently and even in the early 80s he got to work on some comics he got to work on dan dare as well as a comic series which um i know i've seen mr costado talk about over on discord tales from the trigon or trigon empire that one passed me by dave are you familiar with that one i know you've got a few comics in your collection i did read the eagle the second release of the eagle uh in the 80s um so i must have i think he worked there or does something for us i must have seen the dander stuff there i did read it my dad originally read the eagle um but i don't i don't recall it was so long ago very very young it was pre it was maybe six or seven years old so i don't really remember it sure sure he also did other work under the uh pen name of zack he illustrated erotic fiction but i think for our audience uh it would mostly be those eight bit micro magazines that really did stick with us so let's i think uh celebrate his life and some of his art and um remember this is a podcast so we might need to be descriptive when talking about the art for our audio only ideal topic for the podcast i do so um i thought we could just pick out some of the art that stands out for us and i'm happy to go first um i mean there are if we if we're thinking about well when we think about olly frey my mind immediately goes to crash magazine i know he did other work but that's that's where it stands out for me i'm just gonna pick the barbarian cover um that was from crash issue 41. it's the one that depicts a barbarian covered in blood his opponents on his knees he's got a sword held to his opponent's throat and he's about to finish the fight and um i think this one stuck out for me because it it's gory of course it's gory there's blood all over this barbarian it's not the only one by olly to be gritty and blood covered and gory of course but when you saw this or when i saw this on the shelf mixed with all the other computer magazines you had other magazines that were super serious they had computers on the front cover they had businessmen holding luggable computers going this is the future and it was all a bit predictable in its nature so when you saw ali's artwork on a crash magazine it just stood out from the crowd um and as a kid it wasn't talking down to me you know it was it wasn't trying to be high bro in any way it was just fun and it was gory and it was it was on my level in fact it was above my level i looked up to it and respected it it wasn't talking down to me as i said so um it was enough i would say to make me want a zx spectrum as an amstrad owner i know he illustrated antics as well but i don't have anyone nearly nearly made me want to have a zx spectrum such was the power of his art so um yeah and it's actually in later years that i started collecting crash magazine driven i would say in part by his art just you know i've got many magazines which i haven't had the time to pick up and read yet but i lay them out just so i can see that cover up and of course he did illustrations it wasn't just about the cover right he did illustrations inside the magazines as well um but yeah the barbarian one i i remember vividly in w.h smith seeing on the shelves and standing out very i guess a personal memory it's not saying it's the best piece of art he ever did it just stood out for me um yeah dave how about you what memories did you have of ollie's artwork i used to buy amstrad action and then st amiga forma and then st format and i missed out on the artwork i tended to go for the more click-baity front pages the more kind of here's the value we're going to give you in this so they typically used um that rather than um [Music] the more cerebral artwork the more creative inspiring art whether he did or they used artwork from the big game they were reviewing um he worked for news field set of magazines which was crash zap and antics as you've already mentioned antics was the amstrad one i have only recently learned that there was a sort of a a tie-in with 2000 ad which is a gritty british comic that judge dredd among other things came from and they wrote a comic and he illustrated it and it was split into 12 parts and four pages each and putting a crash and then later into zap so i'm going to look that out um i've got the magazine somewhere in one format or another so i'm going to look that out and have a look at that because that sounds interesting but i did i must have at least have bought some issues of antics um because i remember antics accolade which was their award for a good game that definitely rings a bell um and i don't think i was especially loyal to anyone magazine i just took whatever promise the most on the cover and later the cover disc so there's three covers i want to talk about and two of them i had back in the day the first one is um from issue 13 and november 87 of antics and it's a fantastic spaceship drawing and i always liked that type of art particularly around games because it lets your imagination fill in the gaps when you're playing the games it's a round metallic spaceship with several windows in the front and lasers shooting out from the front the lasers are a bright white and you can see the reflection in the light of the metallic ship but because of the position of the eight windows on the ship it looks very much like an insect or arachnid especially with some of the bits sticking out looking like antenna or legs i don't have the picture of that in front of me but just from the way you're describing it i think that's related to the houston soft game of which i can't remember the name right now um but i can see it now do you know the name the game i'm talking about um i'm wondering if i can keep on talking long enough to look up and pretend that i did um i'm gonna fight cybernoid is it a red ship with okay well there's another one that he does which was um for the review of cybernoid on the front of crash and it's a round red ship with lasers shooting out and almost like the universe is exploding behind him or or some starship that he's blown up he really captures those space scenes well doesn't he yeah this is um i'm not sure if it's related to a game it's uh i'm not sure as late as a specific game or if he's if if he's in the magazine but this one's kind of a gray metallic color um so that that's great and the other two that i thought were kind of similar and quite appropriate the one that i remember is on the final issue of antics before it was merged into another magazine and it's of a cpc 464 made to look like a huge enormous spaceship and the distant part of his exploring in the middle of an asteroid belt so it's it's obviously it's a life-size 464 because that's how big they really are and this was the final issue of antics and that's only now that i realize that the very first issue of antics which i didn't see back in the day because it came out before i got my six one two eight it had the same scale of cpc 464 taking off from a planet so it looks with a couple of people on a rock watching it so it looks as if he'd cleverly made the start and the finish of antics this 464 spaceship taking off and then finally blowing up and if you actually look at chris willa chris uh wilkins m really semantics he's used um a zoomed in part of it there so you can see the um you can see the 464 spaceship taken off when thrusters coming at the bottom of it so i thought that was quite impressive because it's um well because of start and finish i'm texting that's some good continuity yeah yeah and you mentioned that re-release of antics because of course ollie was um good friends and working closely in more recent years with chris wilkins over at fusion retro books yeah so if you're interested in um you know the new versions of antics um unique pieces of artwork that they were selling of ollies signed not signed framed all the rest of it um then check out fusion retro books because you'll find a lot of really awesome stuff i would encourage people to subscribe to amtix cpc because i want it to be a success and continue because i like it i wanted to keep going yeah they've got some lovely binders for them as well new binders for the new haptics looks great another thing that ollie did really well was he he could put a unique take on existing characters that we were familiar with so if you ever saw the work for turrican um you know it was instantly familiar as this is the character from turrican does the character from turrican have a name or is it just called are they just called mr turrican i think if i remember writing this called neil neil okay yeah must be awesome name um no ollie managed to uh really capture the essence of how the game felt to play while creating a you know a completely new looking character that was new and yet familiar at the same time likewise with barbarian and so many other games i mentioned cybernoid he was able to take you know the blocky graphics of an 8-bit game and just really bring them to life he did that so well yeah if i if i go back to what was mentioning about filling in the gaps in your head that's the kind of thing that helps when we saw the magazines we saw the artwork there we saw the game box and all the rest of it and then we played the game we kind of filled in the gaps in the game with with the artwork yeah and only had the skill to actually fill you know fill those gaps and then put pen to paper and um illustrate them in a way that i would never be able to do even with my best cray on hand he was so talented in what he did um chris how about you tell us about your memories of olly frey illustrations inside mags that perhaps captured your imagination yeah well i mean to be honest similar to dave i'd never uh read any of those magazines i was more a sinclair user or uh your sinclair um totally serious during the eight bit yeah and then obviously the imagination amiga format all the way whilst playing with train sets in between not even joking really controlled car street hockey let's not even go into my other hobbies from back then but obviously i would have seen them in the shops so i've had to have a point of reference you know what was connected to oliver frey's work so what i've used today is just um oliver frey art.com and just to browse through the images that i can see there so i can get a look at his artwork and and some of the ones that really stood out for me um one is the elite image so i believe this is from issue one of um zap 64 um yeah and it's 1985. and just like you guys were just saying the artwork whether it was box artwork or if it was from a magazine cover or a magazine article that artwork really did fill in the gaps and i hadn't really considered that until you guys were just discussing it there with this particular image because of now of course now we've got things like elite dangerous and we've had all the you know you have frontier you had um frontier first encounters and all that kind of thing so we've we've had the graphics to sort of fill in the details whereas back in 1985 well it was mostly wireframe wasn't it elite on the eight bits um or the very best it was flat shade poly on 16 bit systems later on so when you look at this artwork i mean it's got a beautiful starscape in the background you've got a little bit of um you know clouding the you know nebulous and whatever you've got just the corner just the hint of a of a planet or a moon and you've got what i assume is the cobra right in front and center using beam lasers against whichever ship it's just exploded so you know even though it's a static image because of course it is it's artwork there's so much movement in this there's other ships coming towards the cobra um firing um uh pulse lasers not pulse lasers what they're beam lasers forget the other one you call it yeah there's pulse lessons yeah so unless it says mining lasers or yeah lasers so there's just so much going on in this one simple image and that was you know the cover image for issue one and what that strikes me as it just reminds me of that could have been a promotional piece for any sci-fi movie or tv series of the time it just fits right in you know it reminds me of buck rogers it reminds me of star wars it reminds me of star trek they all had that similar art style in the way they drew the ships uh got the light coming from how do you how do you generate light in a in a graphic image they just did it so well um you know with the with the use of white and then bleeding off to the oranges for the jets coming out the back and the lasers firing out the front just a beautiful piece of artwork the other one as i scrolled through that really stuck out so i just picked two to talk about today is one for wek lemon so when was that for that was zap 64 number 45 in 1988 um and again just beautifully drawn le mans um uh race cars one coming around behind the other around a corner where clemont i know this was for a commodore magazine obviously zach's at 64. but it was one of my favorite racing games on the spectrum um really proved that you could actually get a decent frame rate on a racing game out of the spectrum played really nicely um and again this image it's a static image but there's it's just full of motion and full of emotion i would say you know you got they're coming around the corner one car is probably about to overtake the other as soon as he gets onto the straight um and again it just reminds me of from back in that period things like scale electrics box sets or tcr which was a an alternative to scale electric slot car racing again another hobby back in the past don't get me started um but that's the sort of thing that they put on the box to entice you to buy the toy um and this would have you know definitely sold me the magazine if not the game itself there's just so much coming through in that one image yeah that wetland one's great i mean the choice of colors is just capturing uh capturing that that dusky period because yeah in a 24-hour race they go into the night so instead of going with grey tarmac there's purples and there's yellows and there's it just captured the feeling of dusk and the excitement of racing all in one that could have been a box arc cover for the game easily easily probably better than the actual box art that they did have on this yeah yeah you've got the sun going down you've got the the reflection of the headlights off the off the road there at the front it's beautiful absolutely beautiful yeah wasn't scared to caught controversy um i think he came close a few times with some of these magazine covers we've got um zombies ripping their own heart out and offering it up in their hand there was the uh the one that a lot of people remember was the world championship leaderboard cover a golf game you know a great game but it's golf it's not the most exciting game um of games and he's come up with an image of a young lady sucking a lollipop with three young lads in the background just transfixed on her and then in her glasses somebody playing golf there's just a tiny snippet of somebody playing golf there's a reflection in the glasses the rest is just as obscene well obscene if you think about it too hard image and you know there's nothing there's nothing wrong with you should seem fine that image is absolutely fine i don't know what you're going to find in my head uh you've got arcades with monsters bursting out of the screen grabbing people there's all sorts but it's all so exciting and so well done and um i think anyone listening right now to the show will appreciate or have appreciated at some point at some po uh point the art of um ollie frey he really did lead the pack with his illustrations in our magazines and i think that the gratitude we all have for his body of work is is huge um ollie is survived by his long-term partner and collaborator roger keane and our thoughts are very much with him with ollie's friends and with all his family at this time and uh i'd just like to say thank you ollie for all of the work and all of the happiness that you gave us over the years um i'm not sure if you guys have been watching but the bbc archive youtube channel has been dropping some very interesting videos recently yeah um they really tug at the nostalgia strings hey um of course um i mean what's better than a video about the past and let's not knock the very thing we're into but it's a video from the past there's just so much that comes out in watching that kind of thing and of course the bbc were very good at not only championing everything british but also producing excellent programs on technology and innovation so she betina on the subreddit brought a recent upload to our attention and it's all about sir clive sinclair the father of the sinclair spectrum of course and the c5 electric car i will call it an electric car but also things like the uh pocket calculator the affordable digital watch and the pocket tv are among many innovations he's credited with as the piece shows if he wasn't inventing something as a first he was trying to make an existing technology better and more affordable to the masses or to quote himself to do for 10p what anyone could do for a pound and he says that in the interview and the video in question which is well worth your time as it only goes for nine minutes anyway it's all about his stab at making a flat screen tv that as the reporter points out in the piece could one day perhaps simply be hung on the wall rather than producing a protruding sorry into the room i mean an example right behind me you know on my wall here every week we're all used to that as a reality but back then that was the stuff of science fiction no not always with a train on it dave not always with a train sorry of course if you were if you were wealthy enough and you had the space and the skill you would just knock a hole in your chimney so the whole back end of the crt could slot into the wall yeah yeah that would be another way of doing it yeah i mean it blows my mind this was you know this was back in 1981 1982 this innovation it was being discussed and you know we couldn't have even dreamt of it back then back in the day all i knew was that my mates had zx spectrums i didn't really know anything about clive um or circlive and all i knew is i wanted a zx spectrum and it's only recently that i've learned about all the inventions and innovations that cycle worked on and i marvel at how much of his vision has actually come to pass in certain ways yep so personally i i really think about close to claire as a man ahead of his time who continues to inspire even today and that brings me on to a diy computer project and that as confessed by its creator ivan farafontov is inspired by sinclair computers ivan details in his video shared with us by oz retrocomp his z80 single board computer so this machine um as he details in the video and also in the description is a machine he's built from the ground up and it features a zylog z80 10 megahertz cpu eight kilobyte rom eight kilobyte vram 48k ram two serial ports so nine pin zero ports um that are controlled by a z-log sio ic two atari compatible joystick ports sorry those are the nine pin ports um uh they're controlled by the first z-log pio i see an a-y sound generator by general instruments a completely custom mechanical keyboard which has the second z-log pio ic chip and uh a z-log ctc clock chip servicing blanking video interrupts and yes most of that is complete dutch to me and i'm quoting directly from the video description the whole thing as he mentions in the video is built then from really readily available brand new parts with the exception of the ay chip um it's mounted in a very sleek looking gray painted 3d printed case and the mechanical keyboard mentioned before is again fully custom with its own special pcb ivan says in the video description that um this is a basically he describes it as the sinclair zx spectrum personal computer reimagined it's what i wanted it to be is a direct quote from what he says and the best way i can describe this to to the listeners is imagine an acorn electron but in grey um but booted up and it boots to a white screen with a sorry a black screen with a white command prompt similar to the acorn um but obviously with an internals that are more like the spectrum than the acorn electron around the back envision all the required ports are integrated with no need for add-on cards but of course there's no expansion edge connector either uh and before we go to get into what he demos on the machine what do you guys make of this neil have you had a look yeah it's very great isn't it it's it's right battleship gray i would say is the color um it's a fun looking project just going back to the bbc archive that you mentioned uh the bbc archive youtube channel well worth a visit but if you go there go to the retro tech go to their playlists and they've got a whole playlist called retro tech and it's got everything there from a program in 1964 about concord uh what else have we got here moog synths the car that runs on chickenpooh in 1971 what is a computer virus interview with clive sinclair paul daniels on computer games and quite a funny one to watch kenneth williams presenting a thermoelectric watch so um it is i mean imagine kenneth williams presenting a science piece it's everything you would expect from kenneth williams presenting a science piece it's brilliant so there's loads of great things to watch in that uh coming back to this computer itself i love the fact that he said it is the zx spectrum that i wanted it's his own zx spectrum next if you like true it doesn't matter that somebody else has done the zx spectrum next and there have been loads of other clones over the years and expansions on the zx spectrum um particularly by people in sort of eastern europe who really were using the spectrum late and then developed it further and then in fact got involved in the zx spectrum's next development and things like that so loads of people have said what did i want the zx spectrum to become and that's no reason to stop doing it yourself this is one of those things where nobody has the right to say to you why what have you done that for me why have you done that because i could and because i wanted to and those are some of my favorite projects um he's a really neat looking board uh he's built it from the ground up with joystick ports on which indicates to me that he wanted to have some fun with this from the start um d9 joystick ports um he shows a demo which you mentioned you want to talk about in a minute chris so i won't go into that uh i'm in that demo i didn't see any color clash so his graphics card which he's implemented on a cpld chip is it appears to be an improvement over the original speccy although i've only seen one thing demoed on it yeah but it looks like he's taken that on well this is how i wanted the spectrum to evolve this is what i wanted better the ay chip we had in the later spectrums but he's added that into his um yeah so just piecing it all together i guess what he's made is an amstrad cpc right chris oh watch it didn't see that coming um no it's not at all no what it really does actually and i've got one sitting right here in front of me on the desk because it's always there it really does remind me of the acorn electron especially the fact that he's implemented a a proper you know full-size key keyboard um and it's a mechanical keyboard so that really does help back to the electron but yeah with with similar to spectrum internals um that's a question would circlive have won the bbc contract if the zx spectrum had come out looking like this project that that would be an interesting thing it's not alternative first time that question's been asked is it because we had a story some months back where somebody created a spectrum of their own based on that question you know this have won the contract if if sinclair had done this and that was an interesting thought exercise as well yeah yeah yeah it's true so what does he demo on it where he demos basically some of the commands that he's got built into the the rom um and shows how he would then load a game and the game that he loads is a custom version of balderdash um which seemed to run very smoothly and as you said neil didn't seem to have any color clash ran nice and fast smooth scrolling um and then he comes out of that and he boots into a custom tile editor that he wrote himself and explains how this tile editor that he used to customize the version of boulder dash that we would have been seeing in the demo before yeah i couldn't tell if it was killer clash or not because i think every sprite that was on there was a square so i don't think there was any overlap to be able to actually say if there was colour clash but i'm assuming that he's developed that yeah yeah one of the important things to note here is um even though it that we're referring to is his vision of the spectrum it isn't spectrum compatible and he is very clear in in that um in the video so yeah but it's a nice little little project to like it did you have a look dave yeah i did um before i go in to talk about the spectrum i want to lament the type of programs that bbc used to make compared to modern telly it's been a long long time since they did these properly informative things and instead they they pander to click bait and drama i always watch these these old things with a touch of melancholy for the time that we use to look forward to the future rather than graspingly at what we have for fear of losing it it's always interesting to hear the tech pioneers talk often they seem to be saying the things that they want you to think that they are thinking rather than what they're actually thinking um alan sugar and steve jobs in particular um but sir clive is right on everything he says he really did bring tech to the masses at low price um i don't know that television was a was was a complete success but that doesn't mean he wasn't trying to do it and you could you could see that it wasn't just vapor where you could see had a working model of the television there and there was a single line that stood out and he said at present sinclair has got just a pilot production line underway next door to his old premises at the mill so bald bearded man bringing amazing technology to the masses who's based in the middle ring any bells neal well he did didn't he marry a a couple of strippers along the way as well so so yeah it's pretty much your life story [Laughter] i was about to i haven't quite emulated his life story but dave knows something we don't know um i i don't believe lilly watches this but lily i apologize no resemblance to those comments um now i think you're both wrong about the color clash um when he describes how it works it uses colour attributes which is what causes which causes the colour clash inspector okay and people think that people think people think that the the colour clash and spectrums is a bad thing and it's a double-edged sword the reason why the spectrum was so good is because it used these colour attributes so it had a block on the screen and that block only had two colours the background in the foreground but you could have different colors in each blocks that meant that the screen took a lot less um ram so that you could move the screen around much faster because it had a lot less data in it which is why some spectrum games run faster than the amstrad even the amstrad had a slightly faster processor the spectrum had much less data on the screen so it ran much faster so people talk about the color glasses a bad thing it kind of is and it kind of isn't if you design a game around the color clash the game looks good like bowler dash for example there you don't see the color clash because it's got he's used each of the blocks he's got for for for for boulder dash he's used to match what the the way the system works so we don't get the color clash so i do believe the color clash would be there it's like any limitation those who master the system stand out through their mastery and you see you know even if you don't try and take on the color clash games like last ninja two on the spectrum which were just in black and white looked absolutely superb so yeah yeah yeah get great scent out of it savage i'll go on sorry so there's modern games that that use uh clever ways to get around the color clash and they end up being they end up having huge sprites being lightning fast really zippy really responsive really smooth and you don't you don't feel as if there is any color clash yeah and they were that's what i was about to say they were doing that back in the day as well so savage which i think is a firebird title it was exactly that as a sideways scrolling um kind of a shooter run running and shooting well you're actually throwing axes but large sprites lots of color and you didn't notice the color clash it's a lot slower game but again large sprites trap door you really don't notice it in there so yeah they were even doing it back in the day towards the end of the spectrum's life granted but it but it could be done yeah yeah cool so it's basically a spectrum but three times the speed um so it gives you a lot of headroom to do things and so it's not compatible sadly but it's a neat little project so ivan has kindly shared all the schematics on his github page so while this isn't available to buy must be clear on that you can of course build your own version as long as you can get the ay chip that said in the comment of the youtube channel somebody did the youtube video that we're talking about sorry someone did say that they'd like to buy one and his response at that time was that he may think about selling it in kit form down the track so he's certainly not made any promises at all um but he but he has mentioned in a comment uh down in the comments section that is something he has thought about at least so building something like this from scratch is way beyond me i'll be honest about it it just blows my mind there's not a bit it's not well no not in kit form but doing it from scratch and design and in fact doing it in kit form is well that harks back to what clive did originally in terms of selling things like the z80 in kit form so that people could build their own computers at home before they started then using them and programming them on them so kit form if this did come out to buy actually is a nice full circle until the arrival of hard disks games were mostly constrained to just a few discs sometimes a little more and i know that amiga people are jumping up and down here saying your games are a dozen or more discs but the truth is they were hard disk games on doors ported to the amiga which didn't have high density disks the arrival of of hard disk games in the early 90s opened the door to a lot more graphical content in games the point-and-click games that we keep mentioning monkey island last week for example relied on a lot of data to get beyond the simple sierra style of graphics and we didn't get a great deal of speech in hard disk games we also got just a little and it's important to remember the game still shipped in 1.4 megabyte disks so you still just install them from so they still needed to have a reasonable amount of disks which meant there wasn't a great deal of content the next big step forward was cd-rom games a cd holds around 700 megabytes and back then that was gigantic absolutely enormous the difference is it's just incredible even in 1996 when cds were very much mainstream a typical hard disk was less than this in capacity you could get hard disks larger than cds but most hard disks were less than a cd in size now one of the games that i remember to come in cd and be enhanced is 1994's ultimate eight now when it came out it was on floppy disks um i'm holding up to the camera you can see here and it was originally intended to be a cd game and they went back on that and made it on floppy disks but they then released an expansion to it at the same time with the speech pack on it so you could then install even more floppy disks and get it up to what i thought a cd-rom game should be but it turns out it's only 37 megabytes in size so even then with all that stuff on it is still a fairly small amount of floppy disks compared to the size of cds about 10 now we talked about the games that were streaming a few weeks ago we talked about games streaming audio from cd and that was one way of using up the space but the big way for them to use up the space was with fmv cut scenes full motion video cut scenes and what that means is the cd would contain video clips i was a little bit behind the curve for the cd because i didn't get one until maybe 19 so i missed out the early wave of fmv games neil what's your first memories of fmv in games and do you think they add to the game or are they a cheap trick um good question i was just thinking about hard disk capacity i was very quickly trying to find a chart about average hard disk size at home over the years but um i haven't been able to find one quickly i i did have a quick look i was doing the research for this and um it was between megabytes and one gigabyte around 1996. yeah yeah it sounds about right yeah so 700 meg on a cd yeah i mean it was significant i mean i got my first cd drive um even before i had a cd driving a pc it was an a570 cd drive on an amiga and the thing about that was i wasn't really in earnest running cd based software i was running floppy disks which were archived on mass on a cd extracting them from the cd and running them there were cd games there were things like sim city which had a few extras thrown in and music and stuff like that um but i wouldn't say i was really using the cd to its potential outside of its floppy archiving uh potential and you're right um i am i was one of those amiga users jumping up and down when you said it because i had a copy of beneath a steel sky which came on i think 14 floppy disks didn't have a hard drive to install it on and later a talky version would come along that made full use of the cd now i can remember the first cds i ever bought for pc and that was when i got my 486 back our bell pc with it it came with a bunch of multimedia titles edutainment titles there was the um the animals which was a tour of san diego zoo with little postage sized uh postage stamp sized videos and things like that but of course the the big games at the time well i'll come on to those but the games that i bought at the time to go with that were day of the tentacle and tfx the flight sim so both of those were available on floppy disk but tfx had an added cd version of the soundtrack which if you got on floppy disk it was a midi soundtrack so they'd they'd essentially piped the midi music through some really high-end equipment recorded it and released it as the cd version of the soundtrack and um also dave the tentacle which was available on floppy a lucasarts point-and-click adventure with added speech um that was really that really shone because it was making full use of the vga you know 256 colors the hard drive capacity to have these tremendous animations in there it really did feel like you were playing a cartoon and then to have speech layered on top of that was was superb i'm not going to talk about ultima um ultimate 8 because it's an absolutely atrocious game that was released way too early um we could talk about that today platform puzzles on an ultra game i know i know pixel perfect platform jumping uh but the games the two games which um i didn't actually buy but i did play of course everyone shouted about in this new era of cd-roms was missed and the seventh guest did either of you buy those can you remember not at the time no no no i played a demo a missed i've got them no they're on my shelves no yeah i have of course played them they're a big part of gaming history but i was really wary of them i wasn't going to go out and spend my money on them a they were pretty expensive fmv games carried a premium when they came out although seven yes seventh guest did start getting bundled with anything and everything in later years um i just knew i couldn't trust the screenshots i mean we grew up with 8-bit micros where you could you had the arcade version and the 16-bit version on the back of your spectrum or your amstrad tape say we were all a bit dubious about screenshots um i knew that these weren't the these sandbox fully immersive 3d worlds that you could freely move around and explore i knew that they were they were fun puzzle games of course but they were largely videos with junction points and the reason i think i was so cautious and savvy to them is because i had previous experience dragon's lair spaces you know it had been done before with the laserdisc format and we knew this was too good to be true so i think those of us who'd had that experience were a little bit more cautious about it um so i was very much on the side of things like the sierra and the lucasarts games with speech added on top of an already superb game flight sims with some radio chatter added in or some extra scenery games with some cool music but the gameplay had to come first in those early cd-rom years for me did get better they did find the balance and i think one of the perfect examples of that was um under a killing moon which was a four cd detective extravaganza which had a 3d world you could explore with cut scenes with actin um yeah who did you have in there you had some pretty big names in there um james o jones was in there you know darth vader himself um he had all sorts of actors in there um and yeah they did manage to bring it together but even lucasarts came close to slipping too far into the fmv world when they came out with games like full throttle uh but they did quickly correct themselves um and pull that back so and sierra they went all in they went feet first with like the seven cd movie epic of phantasmagoria and other games like that so it was really quite hard to avoid fmv in games at its peak um it was an exciting time but um you know yeah well we all know how it played out yeah yeah command and conquers another one with the full motion video cut scenes in it and they were awful um we now have a remaster of wing commander four look around here out the picture and chris roberts isn't making this one i understand that by 1996 he'd already started working star citizen which has been in the works now for 42 years that that's so that's a lie it didn't start working until 2010. um he was involved with this one but not as much he was an executive producer rather than producer of it um so i'm presuming he was in the background somewhere the wing commander series is origin who made ultima uh it's there space flight combats and heavier in the combat than on the sim and this time the game is deeper and is less black and white with the kalrathi not being present as the main protagonist the fmv in this one is really well done and that's the big deal with this series they've got a-list actors and they've got mark hamill who is luke skywalker but also superb voice acting malcolm mcdowell uh john rhys davis and i said the fmv in this game is really well done this is the first game that i think i can think of where the fmv was maybe up to weekly sci-fi drama series rather than the usual um unrehearsed drama club where nobody's got any idea what's going on you'd rate that above wing commander three would you because that's when mark campbell first appeared and they had fmv coming into the series yeah so this is where this is where they really got when commander see when they when they when they picked it up and then this is where it really settled in the stories much better here it's much deeper it's much better done i'm not saying when commander 3's bad that way but this is this is where it really all all gelled together this this is for me this this is a great example of when cds unlocked fmv for games uh the theme's a bit different as well the previous wing commander vibes of world war ii fighter pilots are still there but there's far more going on here in the background there's shades of grey i won't spoil anymore now the article says that wing commander 4 hasn't aged well and i'm not sure i would agree i think it has aged well but parts of it certainly haven't the right to identify the full motion video presentation as one of those that can be improved on um but this is one of my favorite types of remaster it's an unofficial one it's done in the way of a fan mod so you need to own the original game to do it and i think that stops any copyright problems i think it stops any ability plus any any desire to shut the project down because you need to go to to gorg and buy the game to use this uh this this fan mod for it so it should drive sales in it rather than stop sales in it so hopefully there now it's not ready yet but there's a demo and it looks great and it will use the original mission files which in my book is is essential otherwise it's a different game we've mentioned the x x-wing series fan remakes in the past and this seems to sit along with them and i'm delighted it exists chris one commander sounds like it might be in your wheelhouse do you fancy it yeah it's an interesting one because it should be in our wheelhouse and i remember you know talking about fmv and user cd-rom i remember adding my first cd rom to my ibm 486 sx um and i remember trying wing commander back in the time well at the time i was into more the space games i was into by then were frontier um so elite two frontier and then the much hated frontier first encounters which again is an example of a game that was released too early um it was it was terrible on release really really buggy but that had two versions so you had the floppy disk version which was the bear game but the cd version if you got your hands on that actually had full motion video so where it had it um and it was actually with with an alpha channel as well so in the floppy disk version the bulletin boards in the game where you're looking for there it is first encounters i love that game i seriously love it um i spent loads of time on it my huge improvement on on frontier yeah it is yeah and you get the thyroids back again and everything yeah so and on the on the floppy disk version is that the is yeah yeah there you go yeah i know that's with the package on this floppy disk on this floppy disk this is the patch for it says game tech frontier first encounters patch version 1.06 and written at the top of the disc in handwriting this patch is a joke so the person that owned this before me got it got the patch used the patch and the patchwork joke it has since been fixed they released i think more patches and i only really attached it but and it's a good game as a result of that but yeah famously buggy we're segueing slightly but it's fine um because with frontier first encounters um i had a heap of trouble getting it to run i was lodging at the time and the guy was lodging with um his machine ran it fine he had a much better 486 than i did that ran first encounters absolutely fine my one really struggled and the reason they struggled to even run was because i was pinning all my hopes on the minimum system requirements so i had i had to actually ring up game tech and complain and say how do i get this game to run they couldn't help me out so they said here's a telephone number ring these guys who are they okay they're the developers all right okay so let's ring the developers that happens easy yeah yeah so who do they end up speaking to now i can't remember obviously you got david brabham and who is the other guy i don't know if ian bell was involved in that one no he wasn't normal he was there so i think it was actually david back in the day anyway whoever it was that picked up and i think the way i tell the story in my head it's like no it couldn't have been david surely i didn't get to speak to david but i actually think it was but anyway whoever it was they basically talked me through making a larger swap file to basically use a file on the hard disk as additional ram is essentially what that does in the code um and that got the game off the ground for me on my 486sx still was a bit choppy um but yeah but anyway let's go back to full motion video so in that the the floppy disk version on the bulletin board everything was just static graphics um and on the cd version some of those characters were actually replaced with um really really poor um actors pretending to be you know somebody wanting to you know get a ride across the galaxy on your spaceship or whatever you know um or give you a hit a pirating contract or whatever so yeah there was that use of cd as well nice i'm gonna bring us back on to wing commander the the topic of conversation because yeah sure what was when come on that's what we were talking about i was actually playing that this week uh the reason being i got an analog flight stick for the 3do and a copy of super wing commander which is just wing commander um i guess patched improved it's got a far nicer looking um menu system sort of a grittier because the whole menu system is based on walking around a spaceship isn't it a starship and then you get into your fighter and fly out of it so that's all been overhauled um there's fmv sequences and i can play it with an analog stick with a little throttle on the side of it on the 3do it's a really nice experience to play it that way um my i had wing commander one on the amiga 500 back in the day which i absolutely loved but if i get back and revisit now it's a complete dog in terms of frame rate and low times i had and then i didn't have wing commander 2 i went straight to wing commander 3 on the on the pc so that's when the fmv kicked in um i didn't go any further with the series on that you know i played wing command this is what i tend to do i play a game to death and i'm not really interested in the sequels because i feel like i've got everything out of it i feel like i've exhausted it you know um so i never went to wing commander four so actually to try a remastered modern day version of wing commander four would be a perfect way for me to get back into it yeah i'd like to try this yeah and say for me i mean before i got distracted by elite frontier um that's what i was gonna say basically i dismissed this back in the day i dismissed the whole series wing commander one and two didn't even come on my radar number three i'd heard it had you know mark hamill in it and i heard about the full motion video sequences but i just dismissed it as a poor x-wing clone with gimmicky fmv thrown in so it would be interesting to to have a look at wing commander 4 remastered and yeah use that as my first experience yeah so in my opinion this is very welcome it's something i'm really looking forward to i will i will i'm sure play eventually it's one of the things i'm holding up wing commander for there so i've got it ready here waiting for when it arrives it is it's a it's a big big box um you compare it to elite it's slightly bigger than that yeah so um for viewers at home it's viewers at home for people with a black and white television is slightly bigger [Laughter] yeah it's a big big box i think that was towards the end of big boxes in 1996 yeah and they were they were wondering what to do let's make them even bigger was that lack of ideas so yeah i i i love this type of idea of the idea of doing it as a mod no one can i don't think anyone can object no one's taking money at someone else's pocket and we end up with a a a much better game to play where can i get it dave you can you have to you'll have to wait uh duncan will put a link in there to the demo and you can look at the video online i i tend not to to look too much into previews because i think that too many spoilers so i just watched a little video on it it looks great it looks it looks absolutely great they've uh they've improved everything um so i uh wait and uh you'll be if you're patient enough it'll come out eventually it's time now for our community question of the week and i've been really looking forward to this one i'll just remind you what the question was last week i i honestly haven't peaked at the subreddit yet to see what the answers are so this is going to be genuinely the first time i've read them um do you guys have a sneaky look in the week or do you wait till the show today you've had a lot i've never i've not had normally i have a look but i've not had a look today and i'm glad i've not had a look because these these ideas sometimes the ideas submitted are are really daft like the golden axe and vr um and sometimes the catches uh unawares like daddy danny mulk yes yes okay so the question of the week last week was pitch us your ideas for a game to movie adaptation we don't mean things like tomb raider which already has a plot we're looking at simple games such as pac-man which have no real plot to speak of what would your choice be and what would the story be so i uh dave's had a look in the pace dave's already giggling so i'm starting um oh okay so the top answer is it's very short one for me to read out it's from us retro comp has submitted this and he simply says doom the musical that's it it doesn't it doesn't reply and then suggestive parsnip has replied featuring the smash hits any imp will do one night in phobos strafing in the rain if i was an arch vile and the unforgettable don't die for me armed marina [Laughter] super lovely uh better team up there suggestive parsnip and odds retro comp doom the musical we want to see that happen um no who's going to read the next one i'll do it i'll do another fight with last week um khan mang says the paper boy was having a bad day a really bad day after bratty neighborhood children this is a novel by the way after bratty neighborhood children missed throws and nearly being flattened by a car backing out the final straw came when the paper he just threw flew apart content spreading everywhere and washed the inflatable jack-o-lantern on the lawn seemed to be laughing at him what he did next was he would soon come to regret he locked his eyes on that pumpkin with a twisted grin took aim and shot off ready to give that all the decoration what it had coming too bad he didn't notice the tree right behind it he woke up to a twisted version of the streets his paper wrote is this for real he asked himself am i in some sort of coma ahead of him he could see break dancers people people pulling out and back into the driveways kids playing weirdos on unicycles unicycles as he roared delivering papers as he did he noticed a dark house and looked at the gravestones in front just then he collided with the grim reaper running out of the what as he picked himself up off the ground he noticed the gravestones had changed he could see a couple of letters up here the first two letters of his name his heart sinking he knew he was in trouble what would happen when his name was spelled out he was sure nothing good if this was a coma would he no he couldn't think about that he would just have to keep delivering his papers and hope that he didn't find out watch paperboy and see the careless news carrier as he winds his way through people and everything in fact seeming out to get him as he tries to get his papers delivered on easy street middle road and hard way can he do it we'll finishing the route wake him up watch paper boi and find out look for the full immersion 360 degree video video movie next year when you really do become the paper boy fantastic thank you for trying to get me to laugh in that nail bravo uh yeah sorry i don't know if that will come across but i was playing the paperboy arcade music in the background as dave was speaking i don't know if that actually gets recorded in the podcast but um that's quite a popular streak we could hear it so in theory it's recorded so yeah paperboy the movie i mean yeah it's a pretty simple premise the paperboy game isn't it so um there you go i want to watch that now yeah i've been talked into submission to go and watch that one i like it all right there's only one read the third one yep so from dave dev retro dungeon keeper a fly on the wall documentary following kevin the imp as he gets to grips with the trials and tribulations of dungeon life while fending off advances the advantages of matilda the dark mistress apart from i wouldn't be fending off my tildes advances i was confused by that yeah um yeah i can see that being a netflix series yeah it would work that actually would work as a netflix series yeah yeah i mean you've had lucifer the the um you know the cheeky uh the cheeky devil the series about that which uh i i think i got through two series and then it they they were stretching it out for me but you know the series of dungeon keeper that could be fun yeah good should we do some more because of so many submissions yeah there's well even if we just do the titles i mean the next one came from sundance at ge tetris x bob the builder hang on i'm gonna have to read this one now ross bob the builder i don't know well let's find out yeah maybe it's tetris crossed with bob the builder the story of a man whose passion for building houses all of a sudden turns on him as everything he completes suddenly disappears on the quest to find answers why this is happening nasa issues an alert of giant cubic objects heading for the earth and only he can save the earth if he manages to align them just right nice yeah that works any others stand up for you guys you asked for it so here is pong the ultimate challenge featuring tom cruise as roger federer rafa nadal as himself and dwayne johnson as novak djokovic the tree was accidentally uploaded into a mainframe when an electric storm hits a promotional act inside the mainframe they have to play to death in badly made cgi wireframe tennis courts until they manage to overflow overflow yes overflow of the points counter oh yes overflow the power point counter conveniently quoted into an eight bit signed integer to make the mainframe explode at the end only federer survives because tom cruise are the best lawyers to negotiate his contract spoilers fantastic wow who knew pogba would have such depth of story uh we've got jumpman the sequel to running man bring back arnold give him cybernetic enhancement classic sci-fi that's from ash duvil and then another suggestion is cubert a lovable alien with an intense fear of snakes crash lands in mexico you can see where this is going and after being befriended by some local children helps them protect an ancient just discovered mayan pyramid from greedy resort developers by creating a force field around it which naturally would involve lots of jumping [Laughter] very good good answers i think that's the most participated in question of the week we've had so do go and check it out there's a lot of answers to read through there thank you everyone for taking part um i think for this week's question in the week we should um continue the celebration of the work of ollie frey and we'd just like to ask you what were your favorite pieces of art by ollie it doesn't have to be from the computer magazines it could be from the um from the comic books that he worked on from dan dare or from the other ones that we talked about so um just just go over to our subreddit reddit.com this week in retro where you'll see the question of the week pinned leave a comment and if possible a link to the image itself whether that's the magazine on archive.org or through um what was the name of the website chris that you mentioned earlier ollie's um artwork website yep that's a good question is it was it thank god i'm having to scroll up through oliverfrayarts.com so oliver freyart.com have a browse through there and see if you want to highlight one of those in particular and if you can share with us your personal memories where did you see it what did it mean to you um you know did you draw did you draw glasses do you remember drawing glasses on your magazines you'd get your bic biro out and you'd scribble all over these you anywhere what imagine the hate you'd get that if you started bringing out crash magazines now on a youtube video and just scribbling on the cover but these don't do that don't do that but this is how disposable things were back then you know we treat these things so preciously now yeah but they were so disposable we just scribbled all over them anyway the the full question of the week will be pinned because i've just gone off and rambled that so um ollie frey artwork let's celebrate it let's talk about it over on the subreddit all the links to that and everything else we've talked about today are in the show notes as always thank you duncan for your sterling working editing our rambles thank you guys have a good week and thank you for listening take care everyone bye-bye [Music] this week in retro was presented by neil from rnc to cave chris from double o5 aguima and dave it was produced by me duncan styles the podcast version of the show is available to your favorite podcaster including apple podcast and spotify and the video version is available on this week in retro youtube channel join our community subreddit at r this week in retro to suggest and vote on the stories we cover on the show if you watch this week in retro on youtube please give us a like and subscribe to help us reach new viewers if you enjoy our show and would like to support it then please check out the link to our patreon page in the show notes or description thank you for listening and we'll see you next time for more up-to-date news for out-of-date tech

Channel: This Week in Retro

Views: 8,709

Keywords: This Week in Retro Podcast, Retro Gaming Podcast, Retro Computing Podcast, Retrogaming Podcast, This Week in Retro, TWIR, RMC, 005 agima

Id: uWTyNBcr3QA

Length: 67min 40sec (4060 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022