[HN Gopher] Parsing the C64 Bubble Bobble Wind Currents
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Parsing the C64 Bubble Bobble Wind Currents
Author : geon
Score : 135 points
Date : 2025-01-06 14:57 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (geon.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (geon.github.io)
| wzdd wrote:
| Nice analysis, and cool to see how simple it is to get quite a
| satisfying effect. Also quite fun to see that the level symmetry
| was indeed exploited multiple ways to save space. If the author
| is here, they write '"@123" are the first 4 entries in the
| default c64 character set' but likely meant @ABC.
| geon wrote:
| Dammit, fixed.
|
| And thanks!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| In two player mode, still even today, C64 Bubble Bubble is one of
| the _best_ casual games. I can sit down almost anyone on the
| couch and they 'll enjoy at least a few rounds, experienced video
| game players or not.
|
| That the game design _and implementation_ cuts through FOUR
| decades of time to be enjoyable says something. There are many
| old games which still are good but not as accessible to a modern
| audience.
|
| There are even more old games which are impressive even in
| retrospect, but don't play well today.
| mbajkowski wrote:
| Indeed, my kids who are 5 and 8 enjoy it about just as much as
| Mario Kart 8 - especially the earlier levels which require less
| of the balloon jumping.
| fidotron wrote:
| Bubble Bobble, arcade and ports, were wildly popular especially
| in the UK, to the point that when I was working as a game dev
| in London in the early 2000s if you mentioned what you did to a
| random person the chances were they would start lamenting how
| complicated these modern 3D games were and how after a bit of
| digging it would turn out they just loved Bubble Bobble/Rainbow
| Islands etc.
|
| I think it's up there with Asteroids, Defender and Robotron
| honestly.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Is there anything specific about the C64 version that sets it
| apart from the arcade, NES or other versions? As for design,
| old arcade games had to both look and be fun fast in order to
| earn your quarter. As for implementation, the story goes that
| the original source code for the arcade game was lost and all
| ports had to be done by reverse engineering an arcade board.
| _sys49152 wrote:
| c64 was just so much smoother playing + looked better
| visually. not choppy.
| geon wrote:
| I don't think source was ever used for porting in those days
| anyway. The asm wasn't directly portable for sure.
|
| The c64 levels are pretty close to the arcade, apart from the
| arcade having 26 rows of tiles rather than the c64's 25.
|
| The nes versions levels deviate wildly. Some have been moved
| and some are replaced.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Not at all? If I was porting a game, I'd at least want to
| make important behaviors 100% true to the original -
| accelerations, jumping physics, hitboxes, speeds... these
| are pretty tedious to reverse-engineer without source.
| OTOH, the source was assembly and the binaries could be
| disassembled...
| beagle3 wrote:
| Not at all.
|
| Frame rates varies widely, resolutions varied widely. The
| exact behavior was in e.g. pixels/frame, and you had to
| work hard to get the same feel on a 50hz 256x192 4Mhz z80
| ZX Spectrum, as you did on the 60hz 160x200 1Mhz 6510 C64
| ; Also abilities differed widely : C64 had hardware
| sprites, tile (text) mode and hardware scrolling;
| Spectrum had nothing but a frame buffer (it did have a
| much faster memory copy instruction, LDIR, but that
| didn't compete with hardware scrolling).
|
| And the original arcade, of course, had multiple
| playfield with hardware scaling, and often game-specific
| hardware (in the early days at least)
| fidotron wrote:
| I think you underestimate how different the original game
| and port targets were, and overestimate how capable the
| machines the porters had access to as workstations were.
|
| To take a famous extreme example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_H.Q.
|
| Arcade video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfz2qofmZx0
| ZX Spectrum video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2aYrkofKHM
|
| And that ZX Spectrum port is brought up all the time when
| people talk about great Spectrum games, while it is, at
| best, kind of themed the same way as the arcade original.
|
| In the case of Bubble Bobble the hardware was:
| https://system16.com/hardware.php?id=646
|
| That's 3 Z80s, not counting the sprite hardware.
|
| The result was in practice a lot of this would be done by
| playing the arcade machines and then attempting to
| replicate the feel on the target (which is why so many
| ports miss easter eggs), and at that the C64 did
| remarkably well here.
|
| The Atari 2600 Pacman is the canonical example of this
| going wrong.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > If I was porting a game, I'd at least want to make
| important behaviors 100% true to the original -
| accelerations, jumping physics, hitboxes, speeds... these
| are pretty tedious to reverse-engineer without source.
|
| You're wildly overestimating how professionally done a
| lot of video game ports were in that era. It wasn't
| uncommon for home computer ports to be written by a
| single developer whose only access to the original was
| being able to pump a pocketful of quarters into it at
| their local arcade.
| fredoralive wrote:
| There's a bit about the port as a section of a longer
| discussion about publisher Firebird:
| https://youtu.be/LWHJomIX_As?feature=shared&t=2297 .
| Which does state that yep, it was mostly made by playing
| the arcade game lots then doing the best they could. They
| apparently did have some documentation... in Japanese.
|
| AFAIK "here's an arcade PCB, write this for the C64 /
| Speccy" wasn't an uncommon thing back then. Arcade
| perfect wasn't really a thing for the 8 bit micros...
| geon wrote:
| No source is truly lost when you have a disassembler. :D
| kmoser wrote:
| Quibble: no source _for that target architecture_. If the
| source included pragmas for other targets, you 'll never
| know what they were.
| jandrese wrote:
| Was the C64 version available as a cartridge or did you have to
| load it in via the painfully slow floppy drive or worse off of
| a tape?
|
| An advantage of the NES version is you could be playing it
| within seconds of hitting the power button, which made it great
| for casual pick up games.
| fidotron wrote:
| This reply is amazing because it's like people from totally
| different universes trying to communicate.
|
| The sort of people playing Bubble Bobble in the 80s on C64s
| would almost certainly have been doing so from tape, more
| than likely pirated. The NES was not really on the radar of
| these people at all.
|
| I heard of C64 piracy operations in northern europe where the
| local radio station would play C64 games for recording on
| sunday afternoons. That's how pervasive it was.
| ajuc wrote:
| Or you could live in Poland and only get C64 and (clones
| of) NES in 90s. And copyright only started being a thing in
| like 1993. So before that public radiostations broadcasted
| computer software sometimes :) And there were open air
| markets with pirated games in the center of most big
| cities. That's where CD Projekt RED guys started - by
| selling games they got by paper mail from abroad on these
| markets.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Speaking as an old person who learned to code as a young
| teenager on the C64 (motivated in part by the ability to
| pirate games because I otherwise had no means to afford
| them), by the C64 era disk drives were a lot more prevalent
| than tape in my experience, at least here in the USA.
|
| The C64 users of the time that I knew, including myself,
| were all using the 1541 floppy drive (keep the screwdriver
| handy so you can quickly pop the top off when it inevitably
| needs to be realigned because of how common it was for
| anti-piracy measures of popular games to knock the drive
| head around).
|
| Still slow (but probably sped up by a 'fast load' cartridge
| if you were and avid user), but not quite as bad as the
| PET-era cassette tape situation.
|
| And back to the main topic -- I played a lot of multiplayer
| Bubble Bobble on the C64 with my sisters and cousins.
| Enough that I can still easily recall the theme song
| decades later.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I believe tape was much more common in Europe, the 1541
| was _expensive_. My second-hand C64 (my first computer!)
| did come with a 1541, but that wasn 't until the early
| 90s...
| fidotron wrote:
| Yep. By the era in question in Europe if you had money
| for a C64 disk drive you were buying an ST or Amiga
| instead.
|
| I don't think many on the western side of the Atlantic
| appreciate how relatively poor, and tight fisted, much of
| Europe was and remains, even the good bits.
| geon wrote:
| Exactly. Everyone used tapes and turbo loaders.
|
| The screen of "Turbo 250 By Mr. Z" felt like magic. Not
| only could you load a game in one minute instead of ten,
| but you suddenly had extra commands available in the
| basic prompt.
|
| https://csdb.dk/release/?id=20633
| beagle3 wrote:
| Fast loaders were a thing after 1987, and we're plenty fast,
| even the tape ones were acceptable. Not cartridge fast, but
| 10 sec floppy disc load for games, about 30-60 secs for
| cassette.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Back in 1998, a level editor was made for the Arcade version of
| Bubble Bobble, named "Patch-A-Bobble". This level editor revealed
| the directional airflow in the levels.
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