[HN Gopher] C64 Blood Money
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C64 Blood Money
Author : mariuz
Score : 123 points
Date : 2025-10-23 08:41 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lemmings.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (lemmings.info)
| mkl wrote:
| From the domain, I was hoping for Lemmings info. They have it! It
| is here: https://lemmings.info/lemmings-gamehistory/. In its own
| submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45679873
| Razengan wrote:
| Man I'm still waiting for a modern (2D) Lemmings remake or
| spiritual successor :')
| Bairfhionn wrote:
| Last I checked it wasn't even really possible to buy Lemmings
| anywhere. I think Sony owns the license nowadays.
|
| Companys remake every game that has some nostalgia but not
| Lemmings.
| mrighele wrote:
| A spiritual successor would be Zombie Night Terror [1].
|
| I find it even better in some ways (atmosphere, dark humor,
| gameplay). Highly recommended.
|
| Edit: it has also an editor and community made levels.
|
| [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/416680/Zombie_Night_Te
| rro...
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Blood Money was a good game - way too hard for me as a child but
| it had an atmosphere and soundtrack that gave it it's own
| following at the time and place in my memory banks as an
| extremely well crafted game. Thanks to OP for the article,
| appreciated!
| the_af wrote:
| Yeah, it was _hard_. Then again, many C64 games were hard, but
| I remember my brother and I really struggling with Blood Money.
| Aldipower wrote:
| It is even harder for me now. I found such games easier as a
| child.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Blood Money is way too hard now. Even when playing on an
| emulator and cheating a bit with savestates!
|
| Was super-impressed by the visuals of the Amiga version at the
| time, those jellyfish animations and huge claws on the 2nd
| stage.
|
| (Never played the C64 version back in the day, but it does look
| surprisingly impressive, quite faithful to the Amiga version, a
| whole lot of stuff moving around at a good speed)
| rkomorn wrote:
| I don't know if I'm just at an age of gaming incompetence
| senility but all the NES and many of the SNES games I've
| played with emulators lately have been so much harder than I
| remembered.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| Parts 2 and 3 are password protected, with no obvious hint how to
| obtain a password. For patreons only or something like that?
| dep_b wrote:
| Would like to read them as well
| Razengan wrote:
| Games like Blood Money, Xenon 2, Mr. Heli gave me a lifelong
| craving for shoot em ups with shops: Games where you want to hone
| each run to get the most money possible and experiment with
| different upgrade loadouts, making for an inherently repayable
| experience.
| thom wrote:
| Yeah, played both of these on the ST, absolutely loved blowing
| up weird alien squid things and collecting loot.
| bluescrn wrote:
| The problem with these games was that you tended to lose all
| your upgrades if you die, and later levels were essentially
| unplayable if you lost all those upgrades. So you really only
| had one life.
|
| And you'd quickly figure out a fairly optimal upgrade sequence
| and stick to it.
|
| Still, I enjoyed them back then too. X-Out was another one,
| with a particularly interesting shop/ship configuration system
| for its time.
| fidotron wrote:
| Many people have this illusion that home computer games were
| written on the systems they run on, but the more serious
| devs/publishers had setups like the one here with a host PC.
|
| There were stories of Sinclair game devs using CPCs in a similar
| way simply because they couldn't stand the Sinclair keyboards.
| warpspin wrote:
| While some of the professional development probably was on host
| systems, not all of it was.
|
| Especially since the release of Turbo Assembler in 1985,
| serious development on the C64 was quite comfortable.
|
| Years later in the 90ies, Fairlight enhanced Turbo Assembler
| with REU support, which made development on the machine itself
| ridiculously comfortable. Basically the only thing missing I
| can recall was there was no concept of version management back
| then.
|
| Of course, this came too late for professional development but
| it's basically what the demo scene ran on till cross assembling
| from PCs came in vogue.
| bluedino wrote:
| I remember reading a story about writing games in the 80's, and
| the programmers were all using some powerful timeshare system,
| but during the workday it slowed to a crawl as everyone
| compiled their code.
|
| It was far more productive to just write/run code on a
| dedicated Atari/C64 or whatever the target system was.
| bluescrn wrote:
| The C64 was being actively developed for for a decade or more,
| and Blood Money came in 1990, towards the end of that period.
| The Amiga was reaching its peak popularity by then.
|
| By that point, more powerful development machines and tools
| will have become much more affordable/available than in the
| early 80s.
| pengaru wrote:
| Ron Gilbert (of Maniac Mansion / DOTT / Monkey Island / SCUMM
| fame) speaks to this in an interview he gave at Handmade Con,
| you can find it on youtube.
|
| IIRC he says they used UNIX workstations to develop Maniac
| Mansion/SCUMM for the C64. Complete with hot loading of levels,
| presumably they had a similar hardware interface to what's
| shown in TFA for manipulating C64 memory contents from the UNIX
| box.
| bitwize wrote:
| "AAA" publishers of the period definitely used larger systems,
| all the way up to VAXen, but smaller devs worked on the systems
| themselves because that's all they had. If you buy some
| teenager's game for PS10 at the chemist's, that teenager can't
| afford a large powerful system to develop with.
|
| I seem to recall an interview with Paul Urbanus in which he
| noted that the graphics for Parsec on the TI-99/4A were
| designed _on_ the TI-99 /4A, which to him proved the machine as
| a tool for serious creative work.
| mrighele wrote:
| Any good suggestions for tools for writing C64 programs in Linux
| and running them in Vice ? I only found a couple of guides that
| cover Windows, alas.
| michalpleban wrote:
| I am using ca65 / cc65 for all my Commodore programming. Should
| run under Linux just fine.
| mrighele wrote:
| Thanks a lot, I will check it out.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Prog8 requires 64tass (for which a .deb package exists it
| looks like) and a Java runtime:
| https://github.com/irmen/prog8
|
| TRSE should also work on Linux: https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-
| rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu...
| s-macke wrote:
| Take oscar64 [0]. So far the best C compiler for the C64 with a
| lot of extra options, good library and a good documentation.
|
| [0] https://github.com/drmortalwombat/oscar64
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| https://ide.retrogamecoders.com
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Youtube example of it in action:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Igevw8PRRY
|
| Amiga example with intro:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxciUa4YmeY
| justinhj wrote:
| Great to see these technical retrospectives. I remember David
| Jones wrote a similar one for the original Amiga game and it was
| published in a magazine around the time of the release. It
| included a description of how the scrolling works and the code
| was on the cover disk.
|
| It was actually this code that really kick started my own Amiga
| game programming of demos and games and lead to a two decade
| stint in the game industry, so I am forever grateful.
| bitwize wrote:
| The PDS sounds like a fairly typical console devkit of the time:
| basically just a larger, more powerful system to host the build
| toolchain and an in-circuit emulator you plugged into the
| cartridge slot. I remember an interview with the Mega Man devs in
| which they mentioned they used an HP 9000 workstation with an ICE
| simulating a Famicom cartridge to develop the game.
|
| Fancy devboxes with custom console builds, like the PS2 TOOL,
| would come later (probably necessary when cartridges were phased
| out).
| Jare wrote:
| Ahhhhh PDS the memories and the crashes and the corrupted source
| files... I used it for 2 years against the ZX Spectrum (and I
| guess Amstrad and MSX but I don't actually remember) hosted on an
| Atari ST, and it was fast to iterate. But its speed, compared to
| development on 3" disks on the target machine, also gave me a
| glimpse into the value of those moments to think while the thing
| is building.
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