Ebay Retro Watch 20th February 2012

So here we go with another 10 auctions that caught my eye over the last week or so. Completely randomly I seem to have selected several Saturn games as well as a few other interesting items...

Some bargains are still to be had on Ebay and someone got one with this Virtua Cop cab. Despite some niggling technical issues (which I'm sure could easily be rectified) this went for a good price of £64.00. Click here to view the auction.

Any Jupiter Ace on ebay always attracts a fair amount of attention, but not as much as this one! A final tally of 23 bids and an amazing price of £609. The seller is based in Germany and the auction included an American PSU (with an ominous warning not to be used in Europe) and apparently it is the "rare" real Jupiter Ace 4000 of which less than a 1000 were made. If that's true then it explains the price. I guess it won't be long before we see a few more of these appear in the wake of this auction. Click here to view this auction.

On a considerably lower scale, we have the trusty old Sega Megadrive of which there were certainly many more than a 1000 made! This looked like a decent enough bundle but my suspicions were raised when there was no list of games on the listing. Nevertheless closer inspection reveals a Shinobi game, Prince of Persia, Game Genie and Outrun in addition to the usual array of Sports titles. A final price of £70.88 was maybe a touch high, but the buyer got a few hours of gaming fun for the money. Click here to view this auction.

Is Panzer Dragoon Saga still a good seller? Well it would appear so as this copy went for £137. Mind you, the seller was offering a free cup of tea should you prefer local pick up although its purported excellent condition was probably more responsible for the end price. Click here to view this auction

Ah, the trusty Woody! A much-coveted retro console, but I can't help but wonder how many of these have been bought on Ebay, only to be played with briefly and, having sated that nostalgic desire, been discarded once more. This was a pretty decent bundle with 11 boxed games and 14 more loose carts that went for a pound shy of £50.00. Click here to view this auction.

Another game I was curious as to whether it was holding its price, especially having recently been re-released on XBLA. The end price of £97.00 would suggest classic Saturn shooter Radiant Silvergun is still a good seller. Click here to view this auction.

I could't let you go without a SNES auction could I? Once more the sight of the Nintendo logo and a few cardboard boxes sends Ebay bidders into a frenzy and this substantial bundle garnered a final price of £216.55. I couldn't see any special titles amongst this lot, it mainly appeared to be the usual sports titles, but maybe there's something in there for the Nintendo savvy amongst you...click here to have a butcher's at this auction

The penultimate Sega Saturn game this week is Shining Force 3, again in apparently excellent condition. End Price: £78.77, click here to view

This game caught my eye in Retro Gamer magazine's Sega Saturn Collector's Guide a few months back. It's a Resident Evil clone, of that there is no doubt, but I'd still be intrigued to have a go. Shame it ended up going for £95 quid! Still, as the seller said, "99p start, so grab a bargain". Lol.

Click here to view this auction.

Insane in the membrane. That's the best way I can describe this auction. OK, so it's sealed, but Link's Awakening is hardly rare by anyone's standard. But two grand?! Although, assuming there's no dirty dealings going on here, a winning bidder with zero feedback might be a little worrying. And all for a game that will never be opened or played. It could have the wrong cartridge in it. Or no cartridge at all!

Click here to view this auction

More next week!

CRL Feature Extras: Interview with Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor began programming in 1981 with a ZX81 game entitled Zaraks. This led to a Spectrum 16k version for Clem Chambers' CRL and the start of a very long and successful career in computer programming. A very small part of Richard's story was detailed in my CRL From the Archives feature which appeared in Retro Gamer Magazine issue 97 - click here to purchase this issue which is still available at time of writing from the Imagine Publishing shop.

Meantime, here is my full interview with Richard, conducted in August of 2011.

Jdanddiet: Hi Richard. When did you join CRL?
Richard Taylor: I joined very early on, I think in 1981 so a massive 30 years ago now. At that time I was 13.
JD: How did you get into computing?
RT: I had just got a ZX81 about 6 months previously, after seeing a ZX80 being used at school in the maths dept. I remember it was £70, don't know what that would be in inflation adjusted figures today but it was a lot of money for me to save up.

JD: How did you afford it then?
RT: I actually earned the money picking and cleaning tulip bulbs at a farm down the road over the Summer. At that time I was living near Spalding Lincolnshire, the Amsterdam of the UK. Come to think of it that was probably the last and only "proper job" I've ever had, been in the computer industry every since.

JD: So what were your thoughts when it arrived?
RT: I sent off my money to Sinclair Research and waiting for the post man every day, way past the 28 days delivery promised. The delivery delays on the ZX81 and Spectrum were legendary. After about 8 weeks it eventually turned up and I was captivated. The 16KB RAM pack was way beyond my means, but hey 1KB is big enough for anyone! The immediate conflict of course was that I needed to use the TV, which was unpopular after my Dad was home from work. So I remember my mum going out and buying me a second hand black and white TV for £6 and
somehow getting it back home on her push bike. I was set up then of course, and didn't re-emerge from my bedroom for quite some time...

JD: Did you start programming at this point?
RT: Yep, I got into Z80 assembly programming pretty quickly. I pretty much taught myself from an opcode list in the ZX81 manual and I spent many weeks hand disassembling the ZX81 ROM and understanding how the whole thing worked. I think in those early days there weren't even assemblers, you had to painstakingly assembly to the opcodes yourself and write a basic program to poke the data values into memory.
JD: Did you use it for games as well?
RT: To be honest, I was never into playing games, I was just fascinated by how it all worked. I was into electronics too and started adding various devices to the ZX81. I think I responded to an advert in "Your Computer" magazine asking for games, to this address of Computer Rentals Ltd in Whitechapel road. Their plan really was to rent computers and when that fell through Clement (Chambers) got into selling games.

JD: What were your initial impressions of Clem Chambers?
RT: Obviously extremely bright, a born entrepreneur. He must have only been 18 when I first met him, but I was an impressionable and not very worldly 13 year programming geek, and he whisked me off into this glamorous world of the games business. I remember he had a pretty flashy red BMW with a personalized number plate "CRL 1". He used to come up to Lincolnshire and take me down to London to the offices pretty regularly, at speed ticket-inducing speeds down the M11. It was all pretty exciting especially at the start as he was trying to cultivate my image as some kind of genius programmer after the Hi-Res on the ZX81 and there were several magazine interviews and other pieces written.

JD: Did you get on well with Clem Chambers and did he influence your career in any way?
RT: We got on really well actually and he has been pretty influential on me. His attitude and influence has probably really impacted my career direction. I think Clement was also just meeting Jay (Derrett), Ian (Ellery), Jeff (Lee) and Andy (Stoddart) at this time who would become the main in-house programmers and would backbone of the Zen room.

JD: Which games did you work on for CRL?
RT: My first game was something called Zaraks on the ZX81 and I immediately converted it to Spectrum although it was rubbish, kind of a rip off of the pac-man concept! I was always more drawn to the more technical challenges and my next project wasn't a game at all but a Hi-resolution toolkit for the ZX81. This allowed the ZX81 to show hi-resolution graphics a bit like the Spectrum, but without the colour, albeit slowly. I then went on to do a games programming kit for the Spectrum called FIFTH (a play on being a step beyond FORTH, at that time seriously mooted as the next big programming language). I did several games after that, some of them licensed tie ins. Clement realized pretty early on the value of this. I developed Terrahawks for the Spectrum, which frankly had little to do with the TV show and the license was an afterthought. I moved onto the Amstrad CPC machine and did a ton of game conversions on that, and finally did
BallBreaker and BallBreaker 2.

JD: Any others?
RT: I think there may be some more that I have forgotton, but I didn't really have any real smash hits! I wasn't actually drawn to games that much. I was into vector graphic games, liking the maths of it and spend months writing really highly optimised line drawing routines and hidden surface removal algorithms. However this big project never saw the light of day, and may look a little dated were I to return to it now! I also had a journalistic career writing many articles for Your Computer and had a monthly column for Big K magazine for a while. Usually I was writing around some utility program that was provided for users to type in. I remember doing a primitive windowing environment for the Spectrum in about 1985.

JD: And on the 16-bit's?
RT: I didn't really move onto the 16-bit platforms (ST and Amiga) - I dabbled a bit but pretty much left games in about 1989.

JD: Presumably you were a member of the "Zen Room"? Any specific experiences from that?
RT: The Zen room was basically an industrial warehouse space in Kings Yard. CRL had a main office in a two story building from about 1982 and expanded into the Zen room as well in about 1984 I think. It was pretty bizarre looking back. The place had this strange culture of the business people who would work normally 9-5ish and the programmers who never seemed to do much work at all during those hours.

JD: Were you one of the guys who actually lived there?
RT: I don't know about lived there but I spent some days sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag in to help get games out of the door, notably with the Spectrum version of Rocky Horror Show. We would have assembly code listings spread over the floor along with sleeping bags, empty coke bottles and fish and chip wrappers. In the old office I'm not sure there was even a shower, personal hygiene was not a high priority. But it was really exciting and I loved it - the intensity of the deadlines and extended debug sessions.

JD: You were still very young - weren't you studying at the same time?
RT: Yes. I used to work in the Zen room quite a lot in the first couple of years of University (86/87) and I'd go over to Stratford in the afternoon do some coding at night and then kip in the office in a sleeping bag and then go in bleary eyed for lectures. Quite frequently not much work would get done, we use to go out for chips down Carpenters Road then frequently rent some kind of bad Sci-Fi movie to get inspired and around about 11pm some work would start, usually with music blaring in darkened rooms with only the glow of monitors. Then people would crash out about 3am or 4am, and would be lying all over the office for the 9-5ers to discover the next morning.

JD: Can't imagine it working like that these days!
RT: Indeed, but there was something pure and creative about it though, and there is still a bit of me that would like to work like that. Even at home as a school kid I often used to pull all night coding sessions and went to bed at 5am, getting up for school at 7am. By the late 80s the games were getting too complex for one person to code and the home computer bubble was dying, being
overtaken by the first generation of consoles. Nobody was earning thousands in royalties anymore and there was more discontentment, and some of the original Zen Roomers started to scatter.

JD: What of the buildings themselves?
RT: The Zen Room and CRL offices were in Carpenter's road and have now been completely redeveloped as an Olympic site. Bizarrely a campaign to save Kings Yard itself was started, which I presumed failed. I didn't notice the uniqueness of the Belfast C-20 roof trusses at the time, I'm not that much of a geek!

JD: What have you been upto since?
RT: I had the option of going on and becoming a games programmer full time once I left school, at 16 or 18. However I knew myself that this was a bit of a dead end career and had to have some academic qualifications behind me. So I stayed on and did A-levels and then did Software Engineering at Imperial College to learn how to do things "properly" (although I fear I've been forever contaminated by my assembly programming years as a teenager!). My main interest areas

have also been compiler technology (assembly code and performance optimisation again) and microprocessors. I moved to Edinburgh and worked in a compiler software house for several years, then joined a startup in memory technology for a few years. Back in 2002 I then co-founded my own company called CriticalBlue, a software house specialising in software tools for multicore software development. A lot of its about low level programming and getting the best out of microprocessors, which I think can be attributed right back to my ZX81 programming days. There are a lot of people in my industry of my age that can trace their entry into the business through the home computers of the early 80s, it has had a powerful and lasting economic impact in the UK I think.

Many thanks to Richard for his time.

Two of Richard's most famous games on the ZX Spectrum were the Ball Breaker games - click here to read my previous blog article about these games

For further reading on Richard Taylor and CRL have a look at this article in Crash Magazine: http://www.crashonline.org.uk/19/crl.html

Ebay Retro Watch 14th February 2012

This week I'm focussing on some rather expensive games, some expectedly, some a little bit surprising and a couple of other items that took my eye.

But we'll kick off with.....this! An original and working Defender arcade cab!

It may not be everyone's favourite but no-one can deny Defender's iconic status. I don't imagine original models come up very often on Ebay, and this seller refurbished one went for the princely sum of £970. Click here to view the auction

A brace of predicatably expensive Super Nintendo games next. Firstly the perenially popular series Castlevania, and a SNES outing entitled Vampire's Kiss. I've never understood the particular affinity many seem to have for this series of games, but there's no denying a few people wanted this! Sold for £188 and 3 pence.

And for a similar price (£185 from 23 bids) came Sunset Riders in what appeared to be very good condition.

Last week I was in Gamestation when a fella came in the store and asked if they had any copies of Scrabble on the PC. He was politely informed not, and that if wanted to play the famous word game on his PC, he should try the internet. Now I don't like to judge a book by its cover, but this young lad looked like he'd be more suited to Call of Duty than Scrabble, but now I have a sneaking suspicion he may not have wanted to actually play the game as this copy of Scrabble Interactive 2009 went for £46.00. Click here for auction

Some more pricey SNES auctions now and a brace of games from the same seller that attracted a lot of interest. They were both boxed and in apparently excellent condition which no doubt helped the seller achieve some pretty impressive final bids...

Firstly we have Cool World which closed at £313.13 (view auction here)and then even more impressively, Final Fight 3 which sold for a massive £363 and 53p. Click here to view auction

Unlike the vast majority of ZX Spectrum games, ZX81 games tend to fetch decent money. This bundle of 15 titles garnered 20 bids and a final selling price of £79.00. Surely the buyer's not actually intending on playing any of them though...? Click here to view this auction









The Atari Jaguar always seems to get a lot of attention on Ebay despite (and perhaps because) of its lack of success on release. This boxed CD version of the console came with only a small bundle of games yet still fetched an impressive price of £155.09. Click here to view this auction




That's it for this time, more next week!

Ebay Retro Watch 8th February 2012

In what will hopefully be a regular feature, I'll be highlighting some of the auctions that have caught my eye on the world's greatest car-boot sale. So let's see what's been on my watch list lately...

This Playstation One bundle attracted one solitary bid at its starting price of £15.00. The £12.00 postage may have deterred many as it's a fairly solid package with 22 games included. Strangely, the console is described as NTSC but the games look like the PAL versions.

Still, the prescence of Crash Bandicoot 3 and Resident Evil 2 makes this a decent enough lot - provided the winner collected!

CLICK HERE TO SEE AUCTION

Ah, the CDi. Underloved and unwanted - for good reason - it was rubbish!

To be fair it did have some decent games and many early CD consoles were plagued with terrible FMV titles.

This boxed 470 model was the more compact version and seems to be more desirable as the final price of £26.00 would suggest, despite the lack of games or extras.

CLICK HERE TO SEE AUCTION

The Sega Master System has a pretty good following the UK despite struggling against the home computer formats of the mid-late 80's. This is a really nice bundle of a boxed Mark 2 and 36 boxed games that appear to be in pretty good condition. However, with no really outstanding or rare games (except perhaps Ghostbusters), the auction starting price of £79.99 was rather optimistic and

unsurprisingly failed to attract any bids.

CLICK HERE TO SEE AUCTION

Next we have another Playstation bundle, his one a bit more interesting.

As well as boxed original Playstation, there was an arcade stick, boxed Assassin Handgun, 2 controllers, 3 memory cards and 20 games. Whilst there were no particularly rare games, the prescence of a pair or Resident Evil titles, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid and Crash Bandicoot ensured this auction got a good final price of £41.00 with local pick up only. I expect the decent games have already been separated and sold on ebay once more.

CLICK HERE FOR AUCTION

Finally, an auction containing that Ebay alert word - Nintendo! Yes, for reasons I'll never understand, once more a Super Nintendo auction seems to attract the most interest of any retro console.

Here we have a not-particulary-rare SNES with four (boxed, but tatty-looking) games. The games aren't anything outstanding, just the usual bunch of Mario games, but it was still enough to garner 5 bids and a final selling price of £44.51 plus £12.00 delivery. Bizarre.

CLICK HERE FOR AUCTION

More soon!

CRL Group Retro Gamer Feature: DVD Extras: Interview with Paul "Andy" Stoddart

This is the full interview I conducted with Paul "Andy" Stoddart for the CRL article in Retro Gamer issue 97.

Paul started off his career at CRL programming Spectrum games before moving across to the Commodore 64 and was also involved in some of their infamous horror adventures. He left in 1988 when the distribution dispute between CRL and EA left Clem Chambers with no choice but to close his development department.

For the full story on CRL, issue 97 of Retro Gamer is still available at the Imagine shop, click here for link.

Jdanddiet: Firstly, I did come across the Crash cartoon. Why did you end up having a bag over your head?
Paul Stoddart: At the time I was quite shy and did not seek the public gaze. My first game just said "by Paul". Other games had no name at all (except via a backdoor LOL). So when the article was raised by Ian (Ellery) I asked not to have my face shown.

JS: Were you part of the "Zen Room"? If so what was it like working there, including your impressions of the office, colleagues, vibe etc?
PS: I was very much part of the Zen room. Worked for CRL when they used the old fire station as the base of development and management. Got crowded so Clem spun development out to the Zen across from the fire station, where management still operated from. The Zen was a fun place. No doors on some of the rooms so we would drop in and out for chats and suggestions. Clem would hold discussion sessions in the central office/reception area on game ideas and technical ideas. Some of the programmers etc would stay overnight and have movies for ideas and a laugh.

JD: When did you start work for CRL? Was this as a freelance or employee?
PS: April 1984. Studying at college. Top of the class for microprocessor programming. Maths was a bit shaky so my head tutor heard about CRL and suggested I have a look. Two off/on at CRL offices for expenses only. Clem liked my programming and approach so said have a full time job here.

JD: What were your first impressions of Clem Chambers?
PS: Clem in those days was very active and some would say hyper. Really hands on and excited about computer games. Very smart he predicted in my opinion things like jpeg compression where image or data could be reduce by a high margin using powerful maths. So he was alway pushing for the programmers to find new techniques for getting more graphics data into the machines. So you can imagine his response on seeing Tau Ceti. Brilliant use of maths to create graphics from very little data. I remember quizzing the programmer (Pete Cooke) on it. Once he explained it was blindly simple.

JD: What was it like working on a "big" license like Blade Runner?
PS: In reality just like another game. You were of course excited that is was a known title. But in terms of engineering etc, no real change. I believe the graphics artists found it less interesting because of being constrained by images already there ie it has to look like Blade Runner. They had more fun when they needed to come up with things from just a title idea or game concept.

JD: What were your thoughts working on the horror adventure titles? They were quite controversial at the time and your animations helped the C64 version achieve Clem's coveted 18 certificate.
PS: The graphics were a real departure for us. They used digitization of real people acting out the horror. The blood etc was then added by the graphic artist (bit like CGI film today). then had to develop animation software to move sprites & bitmaps to bring it to life without using up loads of memory. This why the stuff looks real. Now of cause it is all done this way for POV games etc. Again this idea was Clem's, he was ahead of the curve. It was fun but I think it might have been too successful when we got 18!

JD: When did you stop working for CRL? What did you do afterwards?
PS: There until the end. So the day it (development) was shutdown was my last day. After I got involved with a project setup by Ian Foster & Richard Taylor called Wildfire a contract project with a company called Destiny. It was a big game like Cyborg on three platforms. Speccy 48, C64 and Amstrad CPC. Sadly it all collapsed. There was a big press article with a picture of me, (yes my shyness had gone) Ian, Richard and someone else who was helping with graphics. Richard was doing Speccy 48 and CPC. I was helping on C64 mainly. I did a tiny bit on Speccy as well but mainly Richard's coding. The idea of cause was to lift the code onto the CPC from the Speccy and convert the graphics from the C64. After that I left the game industry found a job in the business world needing Z80 programmer (small ad in the Evening Standard LOL). Blew them away in interview, hired about a week later. Stayed doing that.

JD: Which of the games you worked on were/are you most proud of? Which would you rather forget (if any)?
PS: Tough one. To be honest I'm not proud of Blade Runner. Rocky Horror was great once it had good C64 graphics ie the USA version. I am proud of Magic Roundabout for it being my first game and I think it was a experiment by Clem to have games for a younger market. Again ahead of the time. Death or Glory from a game POV is not great but from a coding POV very good in fact the system was re-used by another coder for Traxxion (I think that is the name). Clem loved the system and technique. The game was developled from the technical experiment by me. I showed Clem the new "scrolling" updating system, so he suggested a straight forward blow everything up game. Mandroid was a nice idea (sequel to Cyborg) but I pushed the C64 too much I believe. The graphics were great though, good use of module system which I simplied from the complex coding of Cyborg (I had to debug some of it for Ian). I was one of the senior programmers at the time so would help out here and there also did mastering of games for loading effects for games.

JD: What are you upto these days?
PS: Sadly not a lot. I worked in the business programming area from 1988-2001. Learned C & Pascal programming. 68000 machine code as well. Ethernet networking etc. But the business went down in 2001 (had been shrinking for awhile). So I stayed at home looking after my kids etc. My wife (who I met at CRL in 1986) started bringing in the bucks. Now I am looking to get back into work. Would love to get back into computers again but unlikely. I do quite abit of photography. Build my own PC etc.

Thanks very much for your time Paul.

CRL Group Retro Gamer Feature: Extra Material

A couple of months ago Retro Gamer Magazine published my feature on CRL Group, the 80's software company responsible for such classics as Tau Ceti, Academy, Dracula, Bored of the Rings and Glug Glug. As usual there were a few bits left out.

First of all I submitted four "games to avoid" instead of the usual three, thinking it was an exception in CRL's case (sorry Clem!). Retro Gamer only found room for 3, here's the fourth:-

[Game name] Mandroid (C64)
[Body] The sequel to Cyborg utilised the same engine which unfortunately replicated the same gameplay problems its predecessor had suffered. “The graphics were great but I think I pushed the C64 too far.” says author Andy Stoddart, although the game did once again feature superb music from Jay Derrett.

Secondly, an extra boxout concerning CRL's iconic premises:-

[Title] King’s Yard
[Body] CRL’s second office was set within an idiosyncratic set of buildings on Carpenters Road, Stratford and was originally used by Clarnico, a sweet and chocolate manufacturer. “There was a campaign to save the buildings a few years ago,” says Richard Taylor, “which presumably failed. It was quite a place; at the time I didn’t notice the uniqueness of the Belfast roof trusses that hung above us.” Another campaign to have these magnificent trusses removed prior demolition succeeded, but sadly they have been left neglected since, a slowly decaying reminder of a bygone age.

Carpenters Road then...

...and a few months ago, an Olympic stadium in-waiting. Photos courtesy of Arran Riddle.

For some nice images of the old CRL buildings themselves, check out this website

More to follow.