[HN Gopher] Commodore Amiga - The Settlers / Serf City: Life Is ...
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Commodore Amiga - The Settlers / Serf City: Life Is Feudal (1993)
Author : doener
Score : 41 points
Date : 2023-04-01 11:14 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| foobarian wrote:
| Never played this myself but it does seem very Warcraft-y. Wonder
| if any inspiration or even developers came from this team.
| haspok wrote:
| Couldn't be further from the truth. The fundamental difference
| is that you don't really control units in Settlers, instead you
| build the infrastructure and units get deployed and working
| automatically (if they can).
|
| In this sense I would compare Settlers to Populous, not
| Warcraft.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Widelands [0] is an attempt to make a similar-ish open-source
| game.
|
| [0] https://www.widelands.org/
| myth_drannon wrote:
| The human characters art is very similar to Gobliins games. I
| checked the artists behind each and they are different. I guess
| the style was popular at that time.
| syntheweave wrote:
| It's derived from various lineage of European cartooning in
| both cases - Asterix, Tintin, productions from DiC Audiovisuel
| come to mind.
| rerx wrote:
| It's utterly amazing to me that a single person, Volker Wertich,
| designed the game and programmed all of it in raw Assembly (more
| or less in a year).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_(1993_video_game)...
| pabloescobyte wrote:
| That's amazing and an insane amount of work! I'm just as amazed
| at how Chris Sawyer wrote Transport Tycoon entirely in assembly
| as well though I don't believe he did it in the same amount of
| time as Wertich.
| steponlego wrote:
| What a great game. One neat feature on the MS-DOS version (not
| sure about Amiga) was that you could plug in a second mouse and
| play two players on the same screen. This was very unique for DOS
| games.
| kiicia wrote:
| I've been playing serf city with two mouses (some work was
| needed to set drivers right under dos) and mouse and joystick.
| it was awesome.
| doener wrote:
| This was also possible with the Amiga version.
| snvzz wrote:
| Yup, and I have played it with others.
| alkonaut wrote:
| My guess is that it came from the Amiga and the dos port(?)
| had to do some pretty unusual magic to make that work on PC?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| There were mice for the serial port, for PCs. So only
| lesser magic. (One "standard" mouse, like "bus mouse" or
| PS/2 mouse, and one serial, would have worked fine.)
|
| If one mouse goes into the keyboard PS/2 keyboard connector
| (I think they were the same connector) then yes, very
| unusual magic.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| This feature was invented on the Amiga for Lemmings. The Amiga
| had two joystick/mouse ports fully supported by the OS so it
| was a natural development.
|
| MS-DOS made it much more difficult... using one mouse required
| that a mouse driver be resident in the 640k base memory and
| connected via COM or PS/2. Settlers had internal code to access
| a second serial based mouse but it wasn't straight-forward at
| all.
|
| The DOS port of Lemmings didn't bother.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| The mouse interface on the Amiga was remarkably and elegantly
| simple too, which would have made it easy to interpret the
| mouse inputs on a joystick port even if there wasn't built-in
| support for it.
|
| Basically, the mouse buttons were wired directly to pins -
| the same pins that joystick buttons would be wired to. Then
| also, the left/right and up/down steps would be indicated by
| a rising pulse on one pin with a direction indicated on
| another pin. The same pins that would be used for the
| left/right and up/down microswitches on a joystick. The way
| this was implemented by most early mice was to have two
| sensors on a sense wheel slightly out of phase, so as the
| sense wheel rotated it would produce a square wave on both
| wires. When one pin had a rising pulse, the other wire would
| be high if the wheel was going in one direction, and low if
| it was going in the other direction.
| vintermann wrote:
| There haven't really been more double mouse games, have
| there? Sounds like it could have potential, if people got
| used to it.
| unwind wrote:
| This is called a rotary encoder [1] and is still common in
| various control knobs on electronic devices.
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_encoder
| vidarh wrote:
| Two joystick ports was common on home computers years before
| the Amiga.
| timbit42 wrote:
| The Atari 400 and 800 computers had four joystick ports.
| Two paddles per port meant up to 8 paddles. The only game I
| know used four joysticks was M.U.L.E.
| erickhill wrote:
| Indeed. My Commodore 64 nearly choked on its coffee just
| now. There was an entire 8-bit generation that followed
| this model.
| vidarh wrote:
| In fact the 8520 CIA chips used to control the joystick
| ports on the Amiga were compatible _enough_ you could put
| them in a C64 in place of one or both 6526 's... (You'd
| lose the realtime clock, as the 8520 had timers instead,
| but "nobody" used the realtime clock on the C64).
|
| I tested that at one point when one of the 6526's on my
| C64 broke. I don't think the reverse would work, as I
| think AmigaOS used the timers, but never tested.
|
| (My parents were not amused that I opened the machines
| and swap chips around...)
| [deleted]
| rhdunn wrote:
| There's an open source game called Widelands
| (https://www.widelands.org/) that is very similar in aesthetics
| to Settlers 2.
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