Commodore Free 36/Commodore_Free_Issue_36_2010_Commodore_Computer_Club.d64/bubbler

Text File | 2023-02-26 | 7KB | 234 lines

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        Bubbler Found C64
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http://gtw64.retro-net.de/index.php

"The Bubbler" resurrected for GTW64!

After a long rescue mission, at long
last the lost C64 conversion of
Ultimate's "The Bubbler" has been
found and released.
The added bonus is that the game is
fully complete, containing the
loading picture, music and sfx.
Developer Matt Young, Sailor/Triad
and Jazzcat have been busy at work
and reconstructing things into its
final state, whilst compressing and
bug fixing.

Although the frame rate suffers due
to Ultimate's demands on how the
display worked, it is a massive
finding and still as playable as the
Spectrum original.
http://gtw64.retro-net.de/Pages/t/
Review_Thebubbler.php

Wow... well, there were always a few
questions about the existence of some
Ultimate games on the C64, but this
one was never really mentioned as a
possible conversion.

But in fact this rare Speccy game was
being transferred over to our beloved
breadbin back in the day by an up and
coming company under the name of
Lynnsoft (Run by Steve Law and Paul
Jacobs). The conversion was being
coded by Matt Young (Chris "Quota"
Young's brother) with Jake Simpson
and some contribution work by Simon
Jacobs.

Jason Kelk spent a lot of time at
Chris Young's place in the 80's,
where he played a reasonably complete
version which had the main game
graphics dropped from the Speccy
version and an enhanced status panel
by Jake and it was pretty good. The
game was unfortunately a lot slower
than it's Z80 counterparts, as we
find out why further below.

The project was scrapped by Ultimate
and the Amstrad PC based PDS machine
(Written by Andy Glaister and Foo
Katan) was formatted. It was rumoured
that no-one was paid, but Ultimate
did pay a flat fee to Lynnsoft for
the conversion. Matt later went off
to university and Lynnsoft folded
soon after.

However, with further digging we got
in touch with Matt Young and he had
the following to say about the game:

"Bubbler -- that's a blast from the
past! I do still have a bunch of
diskettes with all the source code on
(though no drive on which to read
them!). We had quite a lot of the
game working on the C64, and the
slow-down compared with the Spectrum
(which had a faster CPU and a
bitmapped screen) was comparable with
that of other 3D perspective games
such as Fairlight. But when Ultimate
saw it, they decided it was too slow
and canned the project. Jake "the
hat" Simpson was the guy doing the
graphics.

I was always hacked off that we never
got the speed thing in writing before
we started. The guys at Lynnsoft
(slightly dodgy intermediary company
through whom we were doing the work)
had a device you could plug into the
Spectrum to slow it down by any
amount you wanted. In hindsight we
should have found out what setting
took Spectrum Fairlight to the same
speed as C64 one, then shown them
Spectrum Bubbler with the same
slow-down setting and got them to
sign on the line that it was OK. But
we were young and naive... (I pointed
out at the time that we could
probably get it running faster on the
C128, but I don't think enough of
those got sold to make it an
interesting proposition to Ultimate.)
"

So although the Amstrad PDS was
wiped, not all traces of the game
were lost - there was suddenly a
large bundle of hope that GTW could
be able to find and preserve
something. We requested the
possibility of retrieving the game
for the site.

Whilst this was progressing nicely,
we also managed to locate Jake
Simpson (Thanks to Martyn Carroll)
who confirmed also that it was
functionally complete (Delivered as a
beta, and ready for bug testing, a
total of 8-9 months of work) - but
there was no time given to do so or
optimize further before Ultimate
scrapped the project. Ultimate
apparently had been looking around
for someone to do Bubbler and
everyone turned them down, with only
Lynnsoft being optimistic enough to
accept the challenge.

They were told according to Jake that
it would be a lot slower if they were
to replicate the spectrum code
methods - mainly because of the fact
that the C64's hires screen was laid
out in such a bad way that it was
damn expensive to draw it the way
they were done so on the Spectrum.
90% of the speed issues would be with
the drawing loop part of the program.
No sprites were used at all apart for
the display panel area.

Ultimate however still wanted a 100%
conversion, down to the methods used
- they were not worried about the
slow downs that were warned of.
Lynnsoft were given the Spectrum
source code along with some discs
with the original art on. They were
apparently a pain to convert due to
the very old C/PM machine and obscure
format the disks were formatted with.
Indeed in the end, the game was very
accurate and smooth, an impressive
conversion overall... but ran like a
dog at speeds of between 10-12fps.
Sadly Lynnsoft took on a little too
much with the project, but only
because they wanted to do something
big and get their name out there.

In the next couple of months, we hear
from Matt again who managed to find a
friend who converted the PC based
source code, but not the C64 disks.
We arranged to convert Matt's disks,
and within a few weeks GTW was busy
converting a few boxes full.

And after only a few disks we started
to encounter executable demo builds
of Bubbler on the C64, even versions
which were complete with music and
sound effects, some with enemies and
some without (running a lot faster
too!). More digging found the long
lost loading screen too, as well as
several disks with source code. There
was now serious potential of a full
conversion being here, but there was
a problem... there was no version
with everything bolted together in
one big piece.

Matt very kindly got digging into the
source code again (Extracted
successfully from the PDS files he
had earlier retrieved) after many
years and did a lot of tidying up and
patched together a full version, but
things hit problems with various bugs
appearing. Sailor/Triad was put in
touch with Matt, and both got looking
into things and trying to get things
working fully. After a few months,
both emerged with a complete version,
as bug fixed as possible and working
with all the music, sound effects and
titles all ready to show to the world
for the first time.

And here it is!....
with a big thanks to Matt, David and
Sailor/Triad, you can now check out
the final conversion of The Bubbler
on the C64. It is fully playable and
authentic to the original - the only
unavoidable issue is the speed, which
can be resolved in emulation by
speeding things up.

It is a huge shame that it never
quite made it out and also that
Lynnsoft were not left to come up
with a better drawing method, as it
is easy to see what an impressive job
they did given the restrictions they
had.

We hope you enjoy it!.... and with
that we can happily say "Case
closed"! :-)
Frank Gasking

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