Trivia Questions

writch

writch

Spaceman
Ok, you guys will likely KNOW this stuff, since for me, it was just work.

I'm trying to get credits for the audio tracks of the Japanese version of WC I and II. I remember it was a crew of really cute Japanese girls, but I never did catch their names. i think they might have been famous actresses in Japan, actually.

Chris was slightly jealous in this. The Japanese ALL knew who 'Rord Blitish" was (Richard Garriott was apparently was a cartoon character in Japan at the time).

The other thing I'm curious about is the QEMM Exception 13 computer glitch from WCII Special Ops.

Did that ever continue on into later versions, or was that a one-time gag?

Quarterdeck called us to ask if it was real, BTW. I about lost my lunch laughing so hard when I heard it.
 
I'm trying to get credits for the audio tracks of the Japanese version of WC I and II. I remember it was a crew of really cute Japanese girls, but I never did catch their names. i think they might have been famous actresses in Japan, actually.
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Well, I've got good news and bad news. I took a quick photo of the Wing Commander II FM Towns conversion's credits for you -- but you'll need someone who can read Japanese to figure out the names: https://www.wcnews.com/loaf/wc2conversioncredits.JPG

(I checked WC1 FM Towns, too - it doesn't have credits for the conversion team...)

The other thing I'm curious about is the QEMM Exception 13 computer glitch from WCII Special Ops.

Did that ever continue on into later versions, or was that a one-time gag?

Quarterdeck called us to ask if it was real, BTW. I about lost my lunch laughing so hard when I heard it.
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I don't remember this one! I do know that Origin's softball(?) team was named Exception 13 at some point...
 
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Back Cover!

Never saw it. I left to write 3270 emulators before it got put in a box (though I'm a bit dismayed that my name's not on there anywhere). Really all I did was library code and audio file work for that project, so I guess it's ok.

Cafrelli managed to get Chris Roberts name taken off the boxes of Special Ops (I thought he'd bust a gut laughing about that--Roberts never noticed and signed off on them).

On the other hand, if you can get either of them to boot up, when you play the arcade game, the high score is 'writch' not 'gryphon'. Gryphon was Phil Brogden, BTW.

One other interesting set of items on that same vein, 'Bluehair' (your character) is Ken Demerest, Angel Deveraux was Chris' girlfriend, and Lord British does really, in fact, look like Richard Garriot. The artist who did a great deal of the work for the characters in Ultima VII and VIII is color-blind, which is why they all look a bit green around the gills.

If you've got Ultima VIII, I'm the voice of the 'Viscount Armand' (Martin had to tell me how to pronounce that word, and I had to remind him that we'd gotten rid of that word's purpose over here two hundred years before). It's vy-count, BTW ,not viss-count.

ABTW, if you have never hooked up these games to a REAL sound card (the one it was designed to be run on, the Roland MP3 Synthesizer card), you haven't actually heard the game as designed to be played. You have to hook it up so that MIDI goes to the MP3, but sound-effects go to the SoundBlaster/AdLib card.

Martin's office was next to mine. He had a foot and a half of egg-crate stuff completely wrapping his office. Still, it sounded like a symphony orchestra was trying to break down the walls sometimes.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I don't remember this one! I do know that Origin's softball(?) team was named Exception 13 at some point...
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Exception 13 is what happens when you try to do a pretty standard 8086 operation (running the pointer past 'FFFF') on an 80386. The newer machine adds one to the address FFFF and gets 10000, the old one got zero. A lot of old routines were based on the idea that the largest chunk of memory was 64K.

We were getting roughly three Exception 13 errors a day for about two months. It was quite the education on programming techniques (exactly how many functions do you REALLY need named memmove?--try it yourself, and remember C treats capitalization as unique, and not everyone can actually spell).

Actually, the coolest coding for this area was on Ultima VII. There's NO other program on earth that uses that memory model (with good reason--you need a hardware strap to debug the damn thing). It's the only MS-DOS machine on earth that natively can address up to two gigabytes of memory in DOS mode (no 'LIM/EMM windows', no API, just memory). It's what you get when people actually read the manuals. Jeff was a genius.
 
Let me ask you a question - do you know anything about how Origin backed up data way back when?

I'm going to have access to Origin's tape backups from the early 1990s (8mm 112m Exabyte tapes with labels like "Ultima VII Project Archive") but I haven't a clue how to read them. I have the drive but I don't know anything about what software might be needed to recover them...

I'll scan the Japanese boxes for you when I get home - they have really cool original art.

The MIDI card you want is either the Roland MT-32 (external) or the Roland LAPC-I (internal). They really are spectacular.
 
Backups 'n Rolands

Bandit LOAF said:
Let me ask you a question - do you know anything about how Origin backed up data way back when?

The MIDI card you want is either the Roland MT-32 (external) or the Roland LAPC-I (internal). They really are spectacular.
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Brain fart on the Roland (I think the MP3 is a keyboard, now that I think about it).

Martin had an MT-32. I had the LAPC-1 (because I wrote audio code).

I would assume that 'untar' should take apart almost any tape, but that might be just because all the other ones have.

There was plenty of backup to floppies, too.

If you can get working copies of the backups, then I would assume that the suggestion I just made might come work (I told some folks to get the old code and we'd recompile it for the iPhone with the accelerometer as the 'joystick'. The screen's just about the right size.

That sounds like a bunch of fun.
 
Edfilho said:
Wow, that's all I can say. Thanks for showing up!
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Sure, it's actually kind of fun. In the old days, in our jackets, we PWNED Austin.

I've not felt that for some time. It's still kind of weird (since I'm just a geek), but it's kind of cool to have fans, in a way.

I thought of something funny (one of my best code inspirations, possibly my best, uttered out of desperation, actually).

It was my first day at work. I'd been assigned to Strike Commander, and I was sitting in a big office with Todd and Rey. Todd was giving me the rundown on my task. My assignment, as I understood it, was to consolidate the rest of the graphics data for the 'world' and stitch it together to use in the game.

The current set of graphics data we had was four megs.

It was thirteen square miles of area in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

We shipped on eleven or fewer disks (or else we wouldn't make as much as the spreadsheets said we would).

I pointed out that since the standard hi-def floppies at that point held at best 1.2 megs, and we already had close to four disks, and we still had to fit a game on the floppies, that we wouldn't fit the rest of the world, which I estimated to be greater than simply an additional thirteen square miles, on the floppies.

I was sent to Wing Commander to work that afternoon because I had a 'bad attitude'. It was essentially 'punishment' (dunno what Cafrelli and Muchow did to deserve that, though).

They did actually take my suggestion of the only possible way to put the data on the disk (rough elevation estimates with fractal landscapes making up the majority of the space between elevations).

They still couldn't fit the whole world on the disks, though. You have (if I recall correctly) a two-hundred mile 'buffer' at the possible edges of your mission path.

If I remember right, every person who was married when they started Strike Commander was divorced when the product shipped.
 
Origin: We Create Worlds (and wreck marriages)

Seriously though it is a lot of fun reading these stories of the old Origin days
 
writch said:
I've not felt that for some time. It's still kind of weird (since I'm just a geek), but it's kind of cool to have fans, in a way.
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It's definitely quite cool to hear the stories directly from someone recounting them from memory. To the people who hang out here, hearing from a former Origin person is like going back in time and being able to interview some historical figure.
 
Yeah, this stuff has been amazing so far! Keep it coming, this is why I check here in the morning even before I check my email.
 
Toys At Work

After Wing Commander II, when I was starting to do the WCI Japanese conversion, there was a period where we were being 'courted' by Electronic Arts, and we were supposed to 'behave' (wear shoes and clothes and stuff, yano).

I think the worst hit here were Richard Garriott and his girlfriend at the time, who both had these kind of cool lace-up clothes (kind of like body-chaps) that they wore.

Anyway, Robert (Richard's brother, and a GIANT wet blanket) came out of Chris Roberts' office right when Virgil Buell was showing off his new blowgun in the hall (the dart missed his nose by inches).

Robert sent a memo that afternoon telling us to get rid of all games and toys in the company.

Robert was kindly informed that we were, in fact, a game company, so literally, that wouldn't be possible, and not only that, but if the programmers and writers had to send their toys home, many of them would go with them.

A subsequent memo clarified the situation and merely prohibited sharp projectiles in the hallway.

Robert spent a great deal of time after that having Nerf® crossbow-bolts fired at him.
 
Donut Horn

Dunno. There was ALWAYS a lot of food there, mostly junk food. I don't eat a lot of sugar (makes me sleepy), so if there was a 'horn' I would have ignored it, anyway.

There were donuts almost every day though (almost every person I worked with was a sugar FREAK, so I got a lot of commentary on the daily carb-load).

And Jason's Deli for dinner (almost every day--we got free dinner with overtime).

I'm SURE they were violating labor law, since that 'practice' stopped cold when we were acquired by EA. There was one point where we were REQUIRED to work 84 hour weeks (we were 'salaried' yano).

I was getting REALLY sick of Jason's Deli by that point, anyway. They had a lot of offerings on the menu, and it was all delicious, but after a year of eating it, I wanted Taco Bell, or Burger King, or Pizza Hut, or ANYTHING but another stuffed potato or French Dip or salad or soup or macaroni and cheese (I ate it all over time).
 
i remember using QEMM to run wc2 but i dont remember any exception 13 bugs (although there were a number of games that i had to use a clean bootdisk to run, so maybe wc2 was one of those.
 
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