I was going to come in here and mope about how hard this is to play. (As in "get running", not even mentioning in-game difficulty! :P)
First I tried a random Amiga ROM I found, which seemed like it was trying to cooperate but couldn't (the game kept freezing after the intro but before the interactivity began).
Next I tried the DOS version, which fared better but was still a little glitchy in terms of latency (old computer).
Both versions had the silly code wheel thingy as well. Completely respect it, but it's VERY annoying to deal with. ("another world code wheel" has a very very nice result from oldgames.sk.)
This VM emulator is awesome. It Just Works™ on Slackware, only uses 12-16% CPU on a decade-old machine (very nice!), happily picked up the resources from the DOS copy I'd found, and the transparent load/save system works very nicely to a) make the code wheel (which is built into the game bytecode, not the runtime/EXE) less of a nuisance, and b) deal with "30 deaths per minute" syndrome :) (I've been meaning to find the full version of this for years.)
And it's also really impressive that this was reverse engineered like this... heh.
Btw, the original bytecode system was all Forth, wasn't it?
The VM trick is old hat. Even Infocom used it to allow their games to be playable across a range of micros. Oh and they developed their games on a PDP.
Still, that it was done by one single person, such an immense game, before the Internet. I could pull it off now, (hi google), then, not in a million years.
Also Infocom games were text, much simpler things.
Speaking as someone who's spent a lot of time reading the Zork source code and the Z-machine spec that allowed it to be ported to an huge variety of ancient platforms (http://gunkies.org/wiki/Zork), I have to say, your dismissive attitude is wildly inaccurate.
Both the game and its VM platform were incredibly intricate works of genius.
There is a "surprising" number of one-man shows in the early gaming world.
Also, even though the net didn't exist books did. Not was Another World his first game.
And do not belittle the Infocom games, they had perhaps the best parser of any text adventure. And they were able to cram those games into 8-bit micros.
"Since Interplay wouldn’t pay for a SuperFX chip, I found a way to do it with static RAM on the cart and DMA which got me a great frame rate. Interplay wouldn’t pay for the static RAM either, so I ended up using Fast ROM and a MVN instruction. Interplay wouldn’t pay for a 3.6 Mhz ROM either. So, frustrated, I shoved my block move code into the DMA registers and use it as RAM running at 3.6 Mhz. It worked. I got fast block moves on slow cartridges and made a game using polygons working on a 65816 with pure software rendering."
The style of graphics is superficially similar to early Super FX games, but the cartridge is just a basic ROM+CIC board with an 8-megabit ROM. Based on the fact that it has considerable "load time", I think it basically chopped up the game into working sets and pre-rendered any missing frames when transitioning between them, possibly with some extra streaming code for cutscenes.
This brings back such good memories of playing this for this first time on my Amiga 2000.
The article offers a wonderful breakdown of the fairly astonishing amount of invention that went into development. Especially given that it was primarily the work of a solo developer.
I also enjoyed the observation that the Amiga's hardware-level support for a laserdisc peripheral (which was never released) was repurposed for the rotoscoping work used to develop the incredibly smooth character animations that still look AAA, even today.
Oh my, that game is art. I believed that was the future of games. Instead we got decades of murky textures stretched lazily over too few polygons to look good, too many to look abstract and evoke imagination.
Played the remastered version of Another World a couple months ago, after ages of staying in my list of "pending classics". Good game, controls weren't much of a problem to me (unveilable how much people complain about this, I felt them okayish), very cool aesthetics. Took me like two hours to finish. A HUGE shame that Steam doesn't include the original soundtrack in the game but they don't warn you in the game's description.
Also, THE most disappointing ending, ever. Yeah I know there was a sequel, not made by the original author and only released on Sega CD. That doesn't change the feeling it left on me... I want my three-act structure, had a Setup, had a Confrontation, now I want my Resolution! :)
To be honest, it was a mismatch of expectations we have based on prior knowledge of a medium, and what the game had actually to offer. Just like you know that after being 45 min into a movie you're reasonably not even close to its ending, it didn't even cross my mind that what I was seeing was the game finale.
I sat down there, looking at the screen like a fool, not understanding that the game had ended. I won't deny it, I wanted to bring Lester back home, through many more adventures! :)
There was something really magical about that game the first time I tried it. It gave you no direction, no instructions, the world was hostile and ready to blast you away at the smallest mistake. This is going to sound cliche' in 2018, but it was somewhat Dark Soulsesque in its nature.
> For a long time, saying a game was French was a shorthand way for an Anglo to say that it was, well, kind of weird, off-kilter in a way that made it hard to judge whether the game or the player was at fault.
Pff. This is only true for about 0.1% of French games, most of the other ones were typical generic games you'd find everywhere else and not particularly original at all. It's like judging Japanese movies by taking Kurosawa's movies as representative.
The point is that the boring run-of-the-mill stuff doesn’t get exported.
Western film audiences got to form a highly positive opinion of Japanese movies from the works of Ozu, Kurosawa, Oshima.
Similarly American gamers in the Amiga era got a handful of the most original French games and formed their opinion of “Frenchness in gaming” based on those.
I think it is like when people in the USA say that all BBC shows are of such high quality compared to all the garbage we have here. We only get the best of the best from those countries so we think everything from them is amazing.
First had this for DOS, was blown away that even just the intro could fit and run off a floppy disk. Also the first game I played that got my 486SX's PC speaker to create grainy but decent sounding music and SFX!
while the thing did fit on a 5" 1.2MB floppy and ran fine on my 286, i do recall bringing this to a friend on multiple 360KB 5" floppies, and being amazed to discover it ran, albeit with serious framedrop, on his 4.77 Mhz PC XT computer after unarchiving the game to his 5MB HDD.
Ha, good times!
Missing from the article were the amazing “manoir de mortevielle” and “maupiti island”. First games with speech synthesis. All the character sounded like Stephen Hawking but they were great!
There is also runtime for modern platforms using SDL, reverse engineered from DOS binary: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/