Part Six – Higher Learning
29
I'd
like to say that my time at University was successful and productive,
but if I did I'd be fibbing. The bottom line was that I'd got into Uni
on the basis of a set of A-levels that were geared towards doing
Physics, and Physics simply wasn't what I was interested in any more.
Academically, I flailed around, found the maths really difficult, and
generally wasn't motivated enough to knuckle down and put in the study
and learn enough to keep myself afloat. And besides, I spent far too
much time playing around with the computers.
Socially, I had a much more productive time, and after the initial
couple of weeks hanging out with entirely the wrong crowd for reasons
of needing to belong to some peer group, I went for a wander one day
and, walking through E-block, came across a door upon which someone had
taped the logo from Pink Floyd's The Wall album. Rendered in
dot-matrix printout, too. Pink Floyd and computers - I thought there
was a fair chance that I might have something in common with whoever
lived behind that door, so I knocked and introduced myself, and met
Andy, who was to become a good friend in my life from that time
onwards. As a result of that Floyd-inspired meeting I fell in with a
much more suitable group of friends, and the need to get mortal drunk
among strangers in order to fit in vanished completely.
See the war medal? Good ol’ Roger.
Life at Uni was punctuated by, and anchored on, moments of gaming. We
lived in halls a couple of miles off campus, and the day always started
with a bike or bus ride. Lunchtimes were spent in the little games room
in the student Union hall, where there was an array of pinballs (Black Knight, Gorgar, and, memorably, Nitro Ground Shaker that some nutter got mad at and tore the head off) and videogames such as Tail Gunner – with its lovely vector graphics and metal analog joystick – and the sublime beauty of Asteroids. On the other side of the room, there was Galaxian (which you could sometimes get credits out of by flicking 2p up the coin return slot) and, of course Space Invaders.
I'd retire to the arcade at lunchtimes with my Healthy Student Lunch
(usually a can of Coke and a packet of Jaffa Cakes), play or spectate
as finances dictated, and hang out with the other gamers of that year’s
intake. Chief amongst those was Chico, who lived a couple of doors down
from Andy of the Floyd printout, and who was another of our circle of
mates. He was one of those people who are just awesome at videogames by
default. I'd encounter more of that type years later at Atari test, but
Chico was the first I'd ever met, and he was simply awesome at any game
he chose to try. You'd go into an arcade with him and he'd get on a new
machine for the first time, never having seen it before, and
effortlessly rack up a massive hi-score on his first go.
The complete bastard.
I'd thought I was good at Space Invaders until I met Chico. He was so good at Space Invaders
that he could play it forever - it was no longer a challenge to him at
all. So if he played the game at all he'd set himself some task that us
mere mortals simply could not even begin to comprehend. Shooting all
the Invaders was too simple. He'd time his shots so precisely that he
could shoot individual Invaders out of the flock to eventually form his
initials from the remaining attackers.
“’Retro’, my arse. Shottees were best.”
He taught me about the Execution Method, where he exploited a bug in
the game that meant the Invaders couldn’t bomb you if you let them come
down to the very last line before they’d land and end the game. By
shooting a ‘window’ in the Invaders' ranks, you could sit in complete
safety for most of the game gorging yourself on 300-point saucers, but
in order to progress you occasionally had to endure a nerve-wracking
few moments of ultra-precise timing as you shot the last few Invaders
moving directly over your shooter at ultra-low level. Miss one and the
game would end instantly. It was a satisfyingly flashy trick to master,
and elevated me to the ranks of not-too-shabby Space Invaders players. But I never got as awesomely good as Chico.
At anything.
The bastard.
30
There was more gaming to be had back in halls, where there was the Star Trek pinball and Space Wars as already mentioned, and a Future Spa pinball and another Space Invaders
machine in K Block (which could occasionally be coerced into giving a
free credit with judicious pressure of the knee on the coin door). It
was in K Block that I reached a significant point of Space Invaders
zen – I gained perfect knowledge of how the shot counting trick worked.
I don't just mean that I could count the shots in my own game and
always score 300-point saucers - that was just usual moderately
skillful play. I mean that I could be anywhere in the room in K Block
within earshot of the Invaders machine, talking to people,
doing whatever else I might be doing, and if someone was playing the
game, I could tell them instantly what shot number they were on. My
brain automagically processed the sound effects from each game played
and kept track of shot numbers without any conscious effort at all on
my behalf.
There was gaming available in my room in O Block too, in the shape of my old Teleng/Rowtron console upon which matches of Gravity Tennis were played, and on my ZX80, which I spent many a night hunched over, bathed in the flickering monochrome cathode rays.
Being a student, in charge of my own finances at last, I decided to use
them wisely, and figured that a term of eating baked beans was a small
price to pay for finally assuaging my long-held lust for the Atari VCS.
So I set out on my bike one day and rode to BB Adams at the end of the
delightfully named Upper Goat Lane in Norwich and bought myself a VCS
and a copy of Space Invaders (112 game variations!). I rode
back to halls somewhat precariously, as the VCS box was quite large and
awkward to carry on the handlebars of my bike, and spent the first of
many afternoons worshipping in front of the VCS. My popularity
increased with this purchase, and my room in O Block became a regular
venue for sessions of Combat, Space Invaders and Basketball (but not Golf, which was complete crap, and looked more like a robot whacking a pixel with a pipe made of Lego than actual golf).
Wood is good.
31
Midway
through my time at Uni, Uncle Clive introduced the ZX81, which was both
cheaper and better than the ZX80. I couldn't afford to make the swap
(blowing all my grant on a VCS hadn't helped much), but I did send off
for the ZX81's ROM, which was a drop-in replacement for the one in the
ZX80 and upgraded the machine to have nearly all the features of the
ZX81 (apart, sadly, from the improved display that didn't flash when
you entered a key-stroke).
But now I had a somewhat improved BASIC in which I could actually use
floating-point numbers and rudimentary graphics commands, and I
tinkered with that for a while, making plots of 3D surfaces that looked
like they were made of black Lego on snow. A guy I knew in P Block had
an Acorn Atom, a much nicer machine with a 6502 like in the Commodore
PET and dot-addressable graphics. Some nights I'd go and hang out in
his somewhat evil-smelling room and hack on his Atom, producing a range
of free-running abstract graphics generation programs that we'd get
stoned and sit and watch.
There
were computers to be fiddled with at Uni too - PETs and TRS-80s over in
the comp sci block, Apple IIs downstairs in Biology which were the
cause of my buying my first ever floppy disk (not drive - I just mean a
single 5 1/4-inch floppy) to store my code on. Then there were the
University mainframes... a Vax machine to which we all had quite
restrictive accounts which allowed only a small amount of time each day
(nowhere near enough time for the geekily-inclined).
The Vax installation was relatively new, and the thing was full of
holes. We found that by carefully pressing Ctrl-C at the right time, we
could drop out of the restrictive shell that we were allowed to use,
and into a level where we could do whatever we liked - look at all the
files on the system, find anybody's password, edit our own account
status and allocate ourselves as much time as we liked.
Vax. The computer fewtcha – when tables will have annoying wheels.
We wrote little scripts which made it look like we were using the
intended shell while really allowing us access to the advanced stuff
underneath. We never did any damage and basically had a fine time for a
couple of months before we got rumbled and hauled up in front of the
Dean of the computing facility, who ticked us off and told us that we could
have been thrown out for what we did but actually they were rather
pleased that we'd found some holes in it so they could fix them.
That was pretty much the limit of my nefarious hacking career.
32
So,
life for me at Uni was basically a round of gaming, coding, hacking,
hanging out with my mates and getting stoned and listening to Pink
Floyd round at Andy's room in E Block. All of this was rather good fun
and excellent for my social and gaming life, but didn't really do much
for me in terms of getting a degree in Physics. I became less and less
competent and eventually failed my first year exams, and despite doing
re-sits (which was a pretty pointless exercise, given that I did sod
all to prepare for them) I was given the ceremonial order of the boot
at the end of the first year.
I remember going to what they would call an "exit interview" these
days, with my tutor from the Maths and Physics department, and pointed
out to him that I could actually answer a lot of the questions on the
Comp Sci degree paper, and if they'd only let me back onto a
second-year computing course I'd be a happy little chappie and probably
do rather well. I was told that it would be impossible to "bend the
rules" to accommodate this scenario, and that I should get onto my
bicycle. I mentioned out of the blue that I was even thinking of
starting my own software company, and I was roundly told that the
market was far too competitive, it'd never work, and that I should get
a grip and find a place in a polytechnic the following year instead.
And so my Uni time ended - with a memorable night to round it off.
Andy, being a member of the Pink Floyd Fan Club, managed to get tickets
to see the very last night of The Wall live at Earls Court. I
left a maths exam early to get to that gig, and I don't regret it,
since I hadn't a chance of passing anyway.
Genuine, actual crowd-shot from Da Floyd’s 1981 Earl’s Court gig.
Spot The Yak! (Clue – he’s not in this picture).
33
Eventually,
I ended up back at my parents' place, in disgrace for having ‘failed’,
but with my VCS and upgraded ZX80 and a summer of doing bugger-all
ahead of me. On the day I arrived home, my parents were out, so I
installed myself and VCS in front of the family telly (where I finally
got to see those Space Invaders in all their orangey yellow
glory). I don't remember the nature of any conversation about how I was
doing at Uni, probably because my brain has deleted it on account of it
not being that much fun. What I do recall is that I badgered my dad to
have a go at Space Invaders on the VCS. He protested at
first, claiming to be too old for such nonsense, but eventually I
managed to press the VCS joystick into his hands.
I don't think I got it back for a few hours.
Despite the air of parental disappointment, I actually remember having
quite a reasonable time that summer. My brother would come by from time
to time, and we'd have games of Superman and Space Invaders on the VCS. We got super-expert at Superman,
achieving sub-minute times in rounding all the criminals up and
rebuilding the bridge whilst avoiding Lois Lane, kryptonite and that
bloody helicopter, and when we weren't hunched over the VCS then as
often as not we'd be down the Rec Soc playing Galaxian, Astro Fighter,
pool, and "wocka wocka" – my brother's name for the new game with the
little yellow ball that ate dots and was chased by ghosts.
VCS Spacies. Aah, crunchy-staticky joy.
I can't remember how it happened but I acquired a student - a lad of
about 14 who was interested in learning to program – and occasional
lessons were conducted in front of my ZX80. However, one day we
happened to be out when the kid came around for his lesson, and bugger
me if the little sod didn't break into the house and nick my ZX80 RAM
pack and my VCS and all the games! I thought that was a bit bloody
harsh, but it made me resolve that whatever I ended up doing, I wasn’t
going to rip off anyone else to do it.
So I suppose I should thank the little bastard for that object lesson,
but nonetheless it irked me greatly at the time, and I think I would
have cheerfully pushed the little bastard’s teeth down his throat for
him if I'd seen him around after that, but funnily enough, he avoided
me.
34
Over
the course of the summer, I managed to trade my ZX80 for a nice new
ZX81, and now that I didn't have to jump through hoops to get a stable
moving display, I was able to produce a few simple games, including a
version of our game Deflex that we'd made for the Commodore
PET back in sixth form. One day I went up to London to go to one of the
new ‘ZX Microfairs’ - gatherings of enthusiasts and vendors involved in
what was proving to be a hobby of increasing popularity as more and
more people got their hands on Sinclair’s cheap little machines.
I wandered round, bought a copy of Quicksilva's Defender
for the ZX81, and ogled the various bits of hardware and software
available from the vendors. I was dribbling over the 16K RAM packs of
one company, well out of my budget range at the time but nonetheless
worthy of a bit of drooling, as I only had 4K and 16K seemed an
astronomical amount of memory.
I
got chatting to the bloke on the stand and happened to mention that I'd
written a couple of games for my own 4K RAM ZX81. I fished out a tape
with the games on and we loaded them there and then on a machine on his
stand. To my utter amazement, he expressed an interest in actually
*buying* some games off me to sell, and right there he *gave* me one of
the 16K RAM packs to work with! Nothing like that had ever happened to
me before, and it was with great happiness and surprise that I returned
home with a 16K RAM board that I couldn't have hoped to afford yet had
got for free.
£29.95 in 1981 actually equates to £800.03 in modern money.
Thus equipped, my programming efforts redoubled, with the added
satisfaction of thinking that now I was actually *working* - doing
something I might make some money out of, or at the least use to score
some more cool hardware. I started quite simply, polishing up Deflex and writing one of the inevitable 3D maze games (mine was called 3D3D
because the maze was inside a cube, and you could go up and down as
well as left, right, forward and back). But I wanted to do more than
BASIC programs, so I acquired the sacred tomes of the hardcore ZX
programmer - the ROM Disassembly and a good z80 machine code reference
book. I came up with a version of Centipede, which was a
coin-op game I hadn't actually played at that point, but which I
figured I knew enough about to make an attempt at…
From Sinclair User, Issue 1, April 1982,
‘Software Overview’:
"The last arcade game at which I look at is DKtronics Centipede. I
cannot describe it adequately without confusing all and sundry, so
suffice to say it has excellent moving graphics and is very
attractively presented, with the game becoming progressively more
difficult in several ways.
What is also very creditable about it is that the player can decide at
the start how many bases each game should have and how fast the game
should run. That means that several people can play at the same level
of difficulty and the program produces a high score league table."
My first review!
Nice thematically wrong cover concept.
35
Attending
another ZX Microfair, I was standing in the queue outside and
experienced my first moment of geeky fame. The two lads in front of me
in the queue were talking about their favourite ZX81 games, and I heard
them mention Centipede. There were a few versions around at
the time, and I was curious to see if they had heard of mine. So I
asked them "Have you seen Centipede by DKtronics?" They said
that was the version they’d been talking about. I told them that
actually I was the one who had written that game, and they said, "Wow,
so you must be Jeff Minter!".
That was a very odd moment, but I was not dischuffed.
This minuscule foray into the emerging games biz showed no sign of
actually being able to sustain me in terms of a career, however, so
plans proceeded to get me back into further education so I could get a
degree and a proper job in due course.
Eventually I found a place at Oxford Poly (Ox Poly as it was known to
the denizens, and they had a rather excellent T-shirt with an ox logo
that I regret not buying). It was, again, on a physics course but with
an understanding that I would get to transfer to Comp Sci at the start
of the second year if all went well. I attended Ox Poly while still
living at my parents' house, which involved a rather hefty commute each
day, by bicycle to the train station, then train to Reading, another
train to Oxford, then another bike ride through town and up a steep
hill to Ox Poly itself. Once there, I'd arrive in time to meet up with
my fellow students for an hour, sitting round in the lobby and smoking
occasional roll-ups, with perhaps a spliff between lectures and a pint
of bitter and barley wine at lunchtime if the afternoon contained
nothing too stressful. There was a PET and a Research Machines 380Z
there, and occasionally I'd bring in my ZX81 and show off some of the
games I was making.
This is a very tiny picture of the old
Ox Poly,
but it should give Yak a dewy eye or two.
My days at that time began quite early, up before 7 to be on my way in
time to arrive at Ox Poly by 9, and often not back until 8 or later in
the evening. Once home, I'd retire to my bedroom and continue with my
programming for the RAM pack company. The guy who ran the place came up
with a hardware hack that, in conjunction with a tiny bit of code,
allowed me to use alternate character sets on the ZX81. This would
allow users to have character sets full of graphics characters like on
the PET. This really appealed to me, as the ZX81's font was devoid of
any game-oriented symbols at all, so I offered to design all the
character graphics for the ROM hack - about 8 sets in all. If you
examine the graphics in a DKtronics graphics ROM, you'll find the
initials ‘JCM’ in one pair of characters. And another pair which is a
little pair of llamas.
Preparing
the ROM was quite a slow and painstaking business, involving drawing
the characters onto graph paper and then converting the lines of dots
into hexadecimal numbers which would then be programmed into the EEPROM
burner that was used to make the chips.
36
One
night I was sat in the living room with a graph paper pad on my knee
doing this, and something very odd happened. I remember it quite
clearly: my dad was watching Tenko on telly while I sat
translating dot patterns into hex, and all of a sudden, for no reason
at all, my heart started pounding at a great rate, as if I had just
been running as fast as I could. I felt quite peculiar and started
sweating. Since I was sat at rest on the couch, this was pretty weird
and a bit frightening, but after some minutes things returned to normal
and I thought nothing more of it.
I carried on commuting to Ox Poly, working on the code at nights. As I
got more involved - taking trips to Great Yarmouth on the train at
weekends to work more closely with the guy who was making the graphics
ROM - I bought myself one of the latest new things, a ‘Game And Watch’,
where you had to control little LED firemen bouncing people out of a
burning building and into an ambulance. It was made by some company I
had never heard of called Nintendo. I played this a lot on the train
during my commute to Ox Poly and journeys to Great Yarmouth. Soon, I
began work on a version of Space Invaders using the graphics ROM, and it was shown to some acclaim at a ZX Microfair.
“Fall slower, you bastard! Where’s that freakin’ negotiator?”
Something wasn't right, though. I began to feel uncharacteristically
knackered and ill a lot of the time, and the instances of tachycardia
became more frequent. I went to the doctor a couple of times, but he
refused to believe that there was anything wrong with me and sent me
home with instructions to have a hot bath. The general consensus was
that it was all in my head, perhaps a byproduct of stress from all the
work and commuting.
But my mum
had found some entry in a medical dictionary pertaining to "disorderly
behaviour of the heart", a psychological condition apparently suffered
by soldiers at wartime, and brought on by stress. She showed me the
entry one morning when I was getting up to go to Ox Poly, and, fed up
of feeling ill all the time, I decided that if it was all in my mind
I'd *prove* it to myself by damn well exerting myself to the full on
the journey to poly.
Accordingly
I rode my bike as fast as I could to the train station and ignored the
feelings of discomfort and nausea I felt upon arriving there. I took my
trains, raced through town and pelted up the hill to poly, parked my
bike and went and sat down with the guys in the lobby.
There's a very definite moment when you realise that something is
seriously awry, and curiously enough it isn't accompanied by panic -
just the certain knowledge that you have to start doing something *now*
to help yourself. As I sat there, the world seemed to recede down a
long tunnel, and all I could see was a spot in the middle. I felt great
discomfort in my chest, and after a minute or so, although I could see
properly again, I felt terribly, desperately weak. I apologised to
everyone and left – using my bike as a crutch – and got myself to the
train station, where I phoned my parents and asked them to come and
collect me at the other end, because I was certainly not capable of
making my way back from the station by myself.
My dad ended up carrying me and my bike back to the car, and I was
taken to the doctors' where they finally hooked me up to the machine
that goes ping, and discovered that actually, no, it hadn't all been in
my head after all.
And that was the end of my further education career, and at the time it was horrible and terrifying.
But that unfortunate incident left the way clear for the start of something else…
Jeff Minter, March 2005.
Part One – In The Beginning…
Part Two – Colour, Sound, Poking Around…
Part Three – Welcome To The Machine…
Part Four – The Joy Of ZX & Hex.
Part Five – Fur-Ther Education.
Part Six - Higher Learning.
First published
at Way of the Rodent.
http://www.wayoftherodent.com/
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