so damn close...

[Yak]

I know somewhere in the house I've got the manual, which I hand drew in biro on some A4... I think that now needs scanned .

[andy]

That's what I just did, too!

These are really tough times for me, but every time I spot this thread, I find a smile. Thanks, Man!

[Yak]

Yeah I am super chuffed. I never, ever thought I'd see old Star Fire ever again .

Still may be worth going after the image on side 1 too, it *might* be a bit longer and maybe contain extra stuff (like the EXIDY refuelling ship, haven't seen one yet in the recovered version but that could just be because I'm crap at it having not played for years).

But bloody hell! Star Fire!

[Firefox]

[arron]

When you come to publish the "History of Llamasoft" as a book, how about having a CD-ROM of the entire backcatalogue along with the emulators to play them? People can then see the evolution of Llamasoft from PET up to the end of the 16-bit era on their machines?

[adam]

evolution eh?

i had a similar idea about the space giraffe music... initial levels early home computer style progressing to megadrive/opl3 at the end... or introducing newer sounds gradually so that it becomes a blend of older & newer (so sid type sounds + fm for instance)

[carlsson]

As for Headbangers' Heaven, I'm sure I had a copy of that somewhere, though under a different title. Was that you doing a rip-off or you being ripped off?

Maybe it is common knowledge, but that Yak game looks very similar to "The Pit" by Kingsoft (IIRC - the same company who published Bonzo), and of course Commodore's own cartridge game "Money Wars", which itself is a clone/unlicensed (?) rip-off of the lesser known arcade game Money Wars. Quite a good game concept, could probably be renewed with some power-ups or other twists.

[Yak]

As for Headbangers' Heaven, I'm sure I had a copy of that somewhere, though under a different title. Was that you doing a rip-off or you being ripped off?

Maybe it is common knowledge, but that Yak game looks very similar to "The Pit" by Kingsoft (IIRC - the same company who published Bonzo), and of course Commodore's own cartridge game "Money Wars", which itself is a clone/unlicensed (?) rip-off of the lesser known arcade game Money Wars. Quite a good game concept, could probably be renewed with some power-ups or other twists.

This was in fact explained in the latest part of the History:

"We had a couple of other simple Vic-20 games to sell too - “Rox”, which I have already mentioned, and a game called “Headbanger's Heaven”. This was a reworking of another popular game of the time, usually called “Moneybags”, in which you controlled a little guy at the bottom of the screen who had to walk to right hand edge of the screen, retrieve a bag of money (usually represented by a simple ASCII “$” character) and stash it at the left side of the screen. His journey was endangered by missiles that fell in a continuous rain from the sky. Shelters akin to the houses in Space Invaders afforded some protection from the rain of missiles, but these were continuously eroded, and eventually the guy would sustain a hit and lose a life. Simple stuff.

In “Headbanger's Heaven” I modified the way it worked a bit. The missiles were replaced by a rain of hammers (cue another excuse to use my Pink Floyd hammers as a logo) and the little guy was named Chico, after a heavy-metal-fan friend of mine from University (the same one who had achieved such awesome mastery of Space Invaders). Chico still had to collect the money bags, but the twist was that, as a heavy metal fan, he actually enjoyed being hit on the head by the hammers (“headbanging”, you see). However in order to score properly the hammers had to hit him directly on the head – a blow to the body caused a loss of life as normal.

Correctly nutted hammers would cause Chico's “pain meter” to rise, and the higher the meter, the more points he received for moneybags collected. If he sustained too much pain, however, he'd lose a life; the trick to scoring big points was to max out his pain meter and then look for an aspirin (the rain of hammers also helpfully contained the occasional aspirin pill). An aspirin to the head with a maxed-out pain meter granted the player a useful bonus, reset the pain meter and also rebuilt the protective barriers, allowing him to play on and build up the pain meter again for even more bonus points."

[strawdonkey]

Aha. Cheers for clearing that up.

[Yak]

Yeah, and in the end it made for a much better and more interesting game than the old "moneybags" formula. Risk/reward, y'see . Simply cloning stuff doesn't really develop any game design skills, whereas extending and improving an existing design can be a useful and productive exercise .

[carlsson]

Cool. I didn't realize this little hero was supposed to get hit in the head, but it makes sense given how you named the game. I've considered making a Money Wars/Bags clone in the MiniGame Compo (on the C64 most likely), taking advantage of its smooth scrolling and use sprites for the shelter. So far, I've not come very far, it took me a couple of years to implement a somewhat smooth double buffered scrolling.

[AndyH]

Not one of mine, but an ancient C&VG type-in!

Wow, an amazingly nostalgic thread! I remember that game, but I'd completely forgotten it was a type-in!

While on the subject of old Llama stuff, is this an early Gridrunner release or something dodgy?

E-bay Gridrunner.

I had the big box Gridrunner back in the day and this was one of my favourite games on the machine. I don't think there was anything that could have improved it. I even kept a list of my best scores and level reached in with the box, which I've never done for any other game.

[Yak]

While on the subject of old Llama stuff, is this an early Gridrunner release or something dodgy?

E-bay Gridrunner.

Nah, that is legit, although it certainly is a rare inlay version. There were some tapes that were released before the US cartridge version of GR came out which had those inlays. However the US people did some excellent artwork for the cartridge boxes, and we helped ourselves to that for the subsequent tapes (in that pre-Steinar era it was by far the best inlay artwork Llamasoft had).

The inlay shown on that tape is by far the rarest of the "day-glo" inlay types that we used. Looks like he's kept it in good knick too since it doesn't appear to have faded at all.

[PVB]

Okay, so I got all the files from Mayhem yesterday, but we've both encountered problems;

The Headbangers tap file fails to load completely, stopping at the title screen with the tape counter showing 24.
I tried with all the different memory settings, from unexpanded right up to Full.
The snapshot file works fine though.

The Star Fire one gets to the 'Length (1,2,3)' screen, but also shows 'Run' and 'Ready' below that and doesn't accept any key presses at all.

Help?!

[Yak]

Use the emu snapshot images, they should load straight in .