I programmed C64 Uridium with the CBM Macro assembler. My general approach to programming was to use fast zero page instructions for variables and not have clumps of data in with the code, which would mess up ROM versions. There was data to build the maps, likely at the end. Data buffers would have hard-coded addresses somewhere away from the code. One exception would be that I would overwrite the once-off initialisation code with data after it had been started. There were also a few places where I had done some self--modifying code, also a no-no in ROM. Anyway, Mindscape had my C64 code on diskette with a view to creating 16--bit versions. They were able to modify it for other 6502 platforms, clearly. They did not tell us about TLS, we found out a couple of years later. Good spot that I was using SID channel 3 waveform output fr random numbers. I directed all the noise sound effects o channel 3 and when it finished a sound effect I had it silently producing highest speed white noise; free random numbers! The ZX Spectrum decks were all custom made as the scrolling method required that pre-scrolled versions of adjacent character combinations were stored. There was limited RAM for these, new decks were designed to utilise less combinations. The C64 had no such limitation. Did we see any royalties? Can`t say for certain but if any were sent over here via our publisher, they would likely not have found a way out of their debt mountain, and as lower level creditors we`d have got nothing after the bank picked it dry. Familiar story for developers everywhere, I feel.
I remember so well when this game came out. I remember all the magazines making such a big deal about this game. I remember that, up until then, I'd never seen such praise for a C64 game. Probably not after too anyways 🙂
I thought Paradroid was ingenious, Uridium I didn't care for very much: the attacks were just too fast. Uridium is like Defender in that you can control which way you go over the map, also that something comes out of nowhere and kills you with zero chance (I didn't care for Defender, although the graphics & sound effects were fantastic). I preferred scrollers like Scramble, Blue Max / Zaxxon, and River Raid because the enemies weren't so intense, even though you couldn't control the scrolling. The best scrollers with directional control were Time Pilot and Raid Over Bungeling Bay. I think Uridium is the precursor of R-Type, which a lot of people were crazy about but I didn't care for much (too much stuff flying around). The problem with all these games is that barely any of them had remote play functionality, that is to say, play against a friend over a phone modem. Supposedly that was possible with the VICE emulator at some time or other, but I never got it to work unfortunately. I had a buddy one time we were getting really far into Castles of Dr. Creep in two player collaborative, now he lives in another province and we never finished the game. I think the best part of Paradroid was that if you really worked at it you could finally beat the game: same as Impossible Mission, same as Raid Over Bungeling Bay (and all the Access games: Beach Head, Raid Over Moscow, etc). I was never able to beat Spelunker until I played it on VICE and used save-states. I think the best part of Uridium are the ship-flipping animations: it was the quality of animations that made Karateka so good, and other games such as Racing Destruction Set. But it's a small part of Uridium, so ultimately the game was never that compelling as far as my personal interest. What made Scramble so much better were the "darkness" missions, it was the same map but the extra challenge was the limited illumination.
Thanks for the great games! I really loved the fantastic Uridium II on the Amiga! The first level was a bit mediocre with just left and right scrolling (like on the 8bit computers), but when u reached second level u discovered u could scroll also up and down and the motherships were huge, then u could see what a fantastic great game it was! Absurd request: please make Uridium II+ for Amiga (an AGA improved version of Uridium II) as an hobby project, and then make Uridium III (full AGA new Uridium game) in your spare time - also could you make a full Amiga version (not that Atari S(hi)T port) of Paradroid 90? Just absurd requests, but who knows...😂
Halfway through the video I was all like "Well heck, you could just compare the disassembly" and lo and behold, Robin gets an expert in the field to do just that. Brilliant.
I remember for my 'A' Level Art thesis i did a critique of computer generated art in films and games. My research included the Last Starfighter and the Cray supercomputer. This was in 1985/6, and I precidcted in that thesis that this new medium would catch the imagination of people not normally into art and design , which will in turn lead to a raft of new and exciting opportunities. My teacher refused to submit it as he said it was too "technology" focused. I just tell everyone i was ahead of my time.
The NES version of Uridium that became rebranded / repurposed as the Last Starfighter was a US sub-licensing deal - you can read the story in the Fusion Retro Books 'The Graftgold Story', which I highly recommend.
I once used my Super Snapshot cartridge to give myself infinite lives, so that I could see all the levels. They get faster and harder until the point that on the last couple, you'll die pretty much instantly when the fighter ships pass by. You hear the alert, and then your ship explodes. I probably used over 100 lives just on the last two levels alone. I had to freeze the game and save it on those levels so that I could come back to them later, because my hand was starting to cramp.
I didn't play either of these games, but loved the movie. This exposition was little short of incredible, especially that novel approach to software forensics. Such talented people revisiting my youth, who could have seen this coming decades ago. Excellent. I see the author has joined the commentary, talk about a bonus!
Excellent video! I had never played the NES Last Starfighter but as soon as you showed it, I instantly could tell it was Uridium. Awesome work showing that it was indeed a C64 port!! Also did I hear a Lode Runner burn sound when you were showing the assembly code comparison?
What a fun rabbit hole! I spent the first 10 minutes hoping that you would payoff the fact that the NES game was a port of Uridium, only to get that by a factor of x1000. Great video as always. I never thought about the idea of hacking bytes to create variations of levels. I might have never experienced the outside world at all had I discovered it back in the day. ;)
Watched the Last Starfighter a few months ago. Every couple of years I get a hankering for the film. Your video was a great blast from the past with some surprises. Never knew an NES version was released but loved playing the Star Raiders II. I only recently became aware it was the abandoned Last Starfighter game but that explains why I probably liked that game so much. I'd already started "adulting" in '91 and had moved on to PCs for my work and believe it or not, never owned an NES system. Didn't come back to video game systems until the Playstation 1. Thanks again, Robin. Always look forward to your videos.
That settles it, I'm watching The Last Starfighter this week. :) Thanks for joining us at CRX again this year. Loved the storytelling -- great episode!
I found the DVD at a local flea market one weekend, and I think I've seen the movie twice in my lifetime. Once shortly after it released, probably when it came out on VHS, and then again on one of the movie channels a dozen years later.. I too need to rewatch this one. Maybe this coming holiday season once decorating is over.
Now all that is needed to do is somebody change the C64 version to match up all with all the Nes text and change the main c64 sprite to the Nes version . Thus creating The Last Starfighter on the C64.
13:55 I had that Starfighter joystick!! It was the best joystick in the house. It had a satisfying click to the movements. Wow, I hadn't thought of that in years.
I've always considered the Atari 800 Star Raiders II to be the "official" The Last Starfighter game. Back in the mid 80s I remember playing a game that I thought was titled Star Raiders II but with The Last Starfighter intro. This was on a US military base in Korea by a guy running and renting time to people for a room of 30 Atari 800s with all the latest games of the time on copied floppies and cartridges. I don't remember any of the games having crack intros. I guess even though they thought the movie was a flop, the game was actually quite good for the time and that's why it was released under a different name. Sure, the graphics weren't anything close to what was shown in the movie, but as you explained not even modern arcade machines were capable and rendered animation had to be shown.
I am glad that your table looks like mine ;) I thought I was the only one that had such a "rustic" :P table top. Oh and in 2008/2009 there were talks to do a series to the last starfighter. The TV production house that I was attached to, was trying to get the rights and turn it into a series. Unfortunately it didn't land. I have no further details, as productions there were very compartmentalised, probably to prevent leaks.
I followed Andrew Braybrook coding diaries month by month in the magazine Zzap 64 as he wrote Uridium. Prior to that he had done a coding diary for Paradroid. Which is a fantastic C64 game.
Actually, the Last Starfighter prototype circulated among the Atari 8-Bit community WAY before the Internet. My uncle bought an Atari 130XE in the GDR (East Germany) in the late 1980s and got that game on tape from one of his friends. He, and later I, when I “inherited” this computer after he lost interest in it, played it to death. Only when the Internet became a thing in my life I discovered that we had been playing a prototype all the time. Same with “Hard Hat Willy” which was also a prototype.
I love Uridium. And, I never knew this game existed for the NES. The explanation of the code comparison was very understandable and I'll definitely be subscribing to David's channel.
When I was a child, one of my favorite sci-fi movies was a movie about 7 warriors in space with different spaceships, like the seven samurais in space (edit, found the name: "Battle Beyond the Stars"), really liked that movie, also loved another scifi movie called Enemy Mine, they often broadcasted it on TV when i was a child
I love this movie a lot. I remember renting it when I was a kid. This would have been in the 90's as I think we got a VCR in 1992. I really liked it, but I couldn't find it and eventually forgot about it. One day in the past 10 years I remembered it and got it on blu-ray. I've also bought it on amazon video. And I just finished (more or less a few things to glue in) a 3d printed gunstar. It's the biggest 3d print I have and one of the most expensive. The model was $25 or so. The filament has cost me at least $80 as I've used 3 spools of silver and a lot of blue and black.
The Formation Destruct bonus is based on the number of enemy waves you completely destroy. Ship Destruct bonus is for damaging features on the surface of the ship. I love that you have a boxed copy, and I love that read-along vinyl - there must be other examples out there? Uridium has 16 levels, so The Last Starfighter has one missing - a memory issue? In terms of "different Uridiums", there is Uridium Competition Edition (tuned version with better NTSC support) and Uridium Plus (16 new levels). There was a Christmas double-pack from Hewson of Uridium Competition Edition and Paradroid Competition Edition. That's where the two versions came from.
I got a week in Chicago to take the source code over to Mindscape. We did US NTSC versions of C64 Uridium and Alleykat (released as Demolition Mission), maybe Paradroid too. I don`t recall seeing any sales figures nor royalties from any of the US releases. We didn`t get to sign off on any of the conversions. The Atari ST slow-motion version was especially embarrassing when I finally saw it a last year. They muscled in on Amiga Uridium 2. No idea what paperwork they had. Sub-licences by publishers are brutal.
@@andrewbraybrook6410 A week in Chicago sounds fun, at least you got that. Otherwise, thanks for writing Paradroid - easily one of my favourite games in my youth and one which I still play now and then - and the underrated Grbbley's Day Out.
It's a shame Atari didn't release The Last Starfighter for Atari 8-bit computers. It was leaked of course and I played a lot of it. It's virtually complete, fun, and quite sophisticated for the day. As kids we had a good time trying to work out the rules and commands without the benefit of instructions. It was eventually retooled as Star Raiders II which is almost the same game with a couple of thematic and gameplay changes. I'm glad Atari had the sense to release some version of it because somebody worked very hard on that game. It was definitely not typical licensed shovelware.
It's actually an embroidered patch, and it was given to me by DLH who runs the bombjack dot org website. He had a bunch made up based on an original patch that actual Commodore security staff wore.
A hack to disable tile collisions with the tall parts of this ship would make the game more fun. So many Commodore games were insanely difficult. Spoiling it for the more casual gamers. There was another C64 game that obviously used the Uridium code engine. I want to say it was based off a movie title, and the first ship or level was green, I can't remember though...
So, did they use the ship render engine for the large text scroller for the intros? They are just "ship tiles" that they used to make text out of? The intro text being a level of sorts.
Check out the link in the video description for C64 Uridium maps. On the final level, there's an impassible barricade with text behind it that only a cheater (such as disable sprite collision) could find. So I think scroll text shapes and levels shapes are one in the same. In fact, if you change the level directly in memory in the C64 version, you can fly around the attract mode scroll.
I did two years in JC because of the same, for whatever reason the transfer to university (to finish a bachelor's) was approved when I applied again 3 years later. I was equally bummed at the time.
@@vcv6560 Sorry to hear that. Instead of taking out a college loan, I just roughed it by sleeping on the floor of a walk-in closet for about a year... it was literally living on a shoestring budget.
Uridium on the c64 was released in 1986 at the time, I find it is a better version compared to NES Last Fighter. The c64 version had better graphics, sound affects and music (thanks to the amazing SID chip).
I think this is the first vintage game I've heard of that had support for the Commodore 128's native mode. Does it do anything special? Finding other games that support that mode, and what they do differently in it, might be a good subject for a future video. Also, I've definitely seen footage of this game before, but I can't recall where. Now I'm curious how they got your ship to cast a colored shadow onto the... let's just call them freighters, in the background, that's perfectly masked by their edges. My first thought was that the blackness of space must actually be part of the tiles' foreground, and that the shadow sprite is set to render behind that. But I'm pretty sure that, in high color mode, sprites set to render behind the tiles only overlap the screen's solid background color (#D021), and it's overlapping at least two colors: the solid "fill" and the white highlights.
such as... NES "Conan", which is the C64 port from "Myth" (NES version by Mindscape = same author?!?) NES/FC Castelian/Kyoro Chan Land, which is C64 port from "Tower Toppler"...
I used to have a (cracked) version of Uridium that did not have the sound effect when a new enemy attack formation appears, maybe that is another one of these subtle differences between two Uridium versions.
The Last Starfighter was one of my most favorite movies as a kid. I saw it at my friend's house because they had cable TV, and we watched it probably a half dozen times. It has one of the best pieces of theme music I've ever heard. BTW, Cosmi's "Psychastria" (published by Audiogenic apparently) is a bit of a knockoff of Uridium with the horizontal scrolling and the double-flip ship reversal. I have that one but not Uridium. I wonder how comparable the level designs are to Uridium.
Star Raiders II is *awesome* - I have both it and the prototype Last Starfighter, and there's honestly not a lot of difference between the two, and as an approximation of the game from the movie it's about as close as you could hope for given the hardware.
My favorite horzontal shooter on nes (Well if you can call it one) is Air Fortress Half the levels are Horizontal Shooters like this and half of them are internal levels where Hal Bailman walks/flys and has to find the space station core to blow it up and destroy the station.
I wonder if they did something similar with the Megadrive/Genesis game Universal Soldier, which is actually a port of Turrican II from the Amiga but with some replaced gfx. Both the Megadrive and the Amiga have a Motorola 68000 CPU.
23:36 With a relatively small file, you could just brute-force the search for matching 32-byte segmens. Any software from the same developer is probably going to have lots of matching library code.
Yeah the movie Last Starfighter is awesome, I watched it recently on dvd and remember it was quite scary at parts for what what I first considered a sci-fi kids movie...
The gameplay was tweaked a bit in Uridium+ over the first release. It's a long time since I played the two but if I recall, you didn't have to wait as long to land your ship in Uridium+.
You finding Uridium slightly easier because it's running more slowly? The scrolling text looks slower... though I thought PAL games ran faster on US NTSC machines.
Starfighter, Witwenmacher (widow maker)/Fliegender Sarg (flying coffin), approx. 300 of 900 german starfighter crashed or had other accidents, with more than 100 death pilots. The memories of the game and movie are much better.
The movie had 14 minutes of CGI... Though it wasn't the first atttempts at CGI... but it was the first in a full length movie... That Starfighter joystick is an obvious copy of the TAC-2 joystick...
brilliant share chef!! and wow nice game very iridium look and feel but better and a bt more hard 🙂 but sir i expected a bit better score from you starfighter noob 😛 thank for the video love you man greetings from holland!!!!
Initially I'm like this looks like Psycastria!.......oh.....that means it's probably based on Uridium. lol I've played psycastria. I've never played Uridium. BTW it's one of the hardest games I've ever played.
Yes, Psycastria was a clone of Uridium - and in the press at the time of release, Uridium was unfairly compared to Star Force (which scrolled vertically)
Yes, this movie did use the amazing Cray Super Computer. What you did not mention was that this movie was the very first movie to render computer graphics to portray something that was supposed to exist in reality. For example, Centari's car. Also, the soundtrack was composed by the great Bill Conti who composed the music for the Rocky and Karate Kid franchises, and The Right Stuff.
Couple of other C64 games that were converted to NES but retitled are Nebulus (also by Hewson), which was released under a few different names depending on the platform, eg. Tower Topper and Castellian, and Myth: History in the Making which was an excellent game on the C64 and other home computers, but was ported to the NES and renamed Conan: The Mysteries of Time, which unfortunately is a pretty lousy game.
I noticed more than a decade ago, that there were several classic C64 games ported to the NES and some under different names. Uridium / Last Starfighter is one of them, but also Nebulus renamed to Castelian and also a Cybernoid version.
The Last Starfighter is truly one of my favourite '80s movies, if not THE absolute favourite. I'm quite sure this is where my weakness for arcade machines originates from. I didn't know about the link between The Last Starfighter game on the NES and Uridium. I didn't even know that it existed on the NES. So Robin, when you briefly mentioned the relation, while asking me if I could grab some footage, I deliberately avoided inquiring any further. I wanted to save all the reveals for this video... and it was definitely worth the wait. Just brilliant! ❤ - But you do realize what this means, right? - Now I have to get good at Uridium, simply because of the lineage between those two. 😅 - Oh, I did notice another thing: there is no death blossom sequence at the end of each level on the Speccy version either.
I did play this game as a cracked copy on my 8 bit Atari computer back in the day starting with the cool intro like the movie arcade game. At the time, it was visually fantastic! The NES version is garbage simply using the movie title.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
I programmed C64 Uridium with the CBM Macro assembler. My general approach to programming was to use fast zero page instructions for variables and not have clumps of data in with the code, which would mess up ROM versions. There was data to build the maps, likely at the end. Data buffers would have hard-coded addresses somewhere away from the code. One exception would be that I would overwrite the once-off initialisation code with data after it had been started. There were also a few places where I had done some self--modifying code, also a no-no in ROM.
Anyway, Mindscape had my C64 code on diskette with a view to creating 16--bit versions. They were able to modify it for other 6502 platforms, clearly. They did not tell us about TLS, we found out a couple of years later.
Good spot that I was using SID channel 3 waveform output fr random numbers. I directed all the noise sound effects o channel 3 and when it finished a sound effect I had it silently producing highest speed white noise; free random numbers!
The ZX Spectrum decks were all custom made as the scrolling method required that pre-scrolled versions of adjacent character combinations were stored. There was limited RAM for these, new decks were designed to utilise less combinations. The C64 had no such limitation.
Did we see any royalties? Can`t say for certain but if any were sent over here via our publisher, they would likely not have found a way out of their debt mountain, and as lower level creditors we`d have got nothing after the bank picked it dry. Familiar story for developers everywhere, I feel.
Thanks for the "inside" info, and all the great games over the years!
I remember so well when this game came out. I remember all the magazines making such a big deal about this game. I remember that, up until then, I'd never seen such praise for a C64 game. Probably not after too anyways 🙂
Thankyou for the great games and Joy you brought to my youth, Mr. Braybrook❤
I thought Paradroid was ingenious, Uridium I didn't care for very much: the attacks were just too fast. Uridium is like Defender in that you can control which way you go over the map, also that something comes out of nowhere and kills you with zero chance (I didn't care for Defender, although the graphics & sound effects were fantastic). I preferred scrollers like Scramble, Blue Max / Zaxxon, and River Raid because the enemies weren't so intense, even though you couldn't control the scrolling. The best scrollers with directional control were Time Pilot and Raid Over Bungeling Bay. I think Uridium is the precursor of R-Type, which a lot of people were crazy about but I didn't care for much (too much stuff flying around).
The problem with all these games is that barely any of them had remote play functionality, that is to say, play against a friend over a phone modem. Supposedly that was possible with the VICE emulator at some time or other, but I never got it to work unfortunately. I had a buddy one time we were getting really far into Castles of Dr. Creep in two player collaborative, now he lives in another province and we never finished the game.
I think the best part of Paradroid was that if you really worked at it you could finally beat the game: same as Impossible Mission, same as Raid Over Bungeling Bay (and all the Access games: Beach Head, Raid Over Moscow, etc). I was never able to beat Spelunker until I played it on VICE and used save-states.
I think the best part of Uridium are the ship-flipping animations: it was the quality of animations that made Karateka so good, and other games such as Racing Destruction Set. But it's a small part of Uridium, so ultimately the game was never that compelling as far as my personal interest. What made Scramble so much better were the "darkness" missions, it was the same map but the extra challenge was the limited illumination.
Thanks for the great games! I really loved the fantastic Uridium II on the Amiga! The first level was a bit mediocre with just left and right scrolling (like on the 8bit computers), but when u reached second level u discovered u could scroll also up and down and the motherships were huge, then u could see what a fantastic great game it was!
Absurd request: please make Uridium II+ for Amiga (an AGA improved version of Uridium II) as an hobby project, and then make Uridium III (full AGA new Uridium game) in your spare time
- also could you make a full Amiga version (not that Atari S(hi)T port) of Paradroid 90?
Just absurd requests, but who knows...😂
Halfway through the video I was all like "Well heck, you could just compare the disassembly" and lo and behold, Robin gets an expert in the field to do just that. Brilliant.
I remember for my 'A' Level Art thesis i did a critique of computer generated art in films and games. My research included the Last Starfighter and the Cray supercomputer. This was in 1985/6, and I precidcted in that thesis that this new medium would catch the imagination of people not normally into art and design , which will in turn lead to a raft of new and exciting opportunities. My teacher refused to submit it as he said it was too "technology" focused. I just tell everyone i was ahead of my time.
The NES version of Uridium that became rebranded / repurposed as the Last Starfighter was a US sub-licensing deal - you can read the story in the Fusion Retro Books 'The Graftgold Story', which I highly recommend.
Thanks, I'll see if I can get a copy of that.
@@8_Bit Also it ias mentioned the wiki page for Uridium.
I once used my Super Snapshot cartridge to give myself infinite lives, so that I could see all the levels. They get faster and harder until the point that on the last couple, you'll die pretty much instantly when the fighter ships pass by. You hear the alert, and then your ship explodes. I probably used over 100 lives just on the last two levels alone. I had to freeze the game and save it on those levels so that I could come back to them later, because my hand was starting to cramp.
I didn't play either of these games, but loved the movie. This exposition was little short of incredible, especially that novel approach to software forensics. Such talented people revisiting my youth, who could have seen this coming decades ago. Excellent. I see the author has joined the commentary, talk about a bonus!
Excellent video! I had never played the NES Last Starfighter but as soon as you showed it, I instantly could tell it was Uridium. Awesome work showing that it was indeed a C64 port!!
Also did I hear a Lode Runner burn sound when you were showing the assembly code comparison?
That sound effect was from the Spectrum version of Uridium but I do hear the Lode Runner similarity :)
What a fun rabbit hole! I spent the first 10 minutes hoping that you would payoff the fact that the NES game was a port of Uridium, only to get that by a factor of x1000. Great video as always. I never thought about the idea of hacking bytes to create variations of levels. I might have never experienced the outside world at all had I discovered it back in the day. ;)
Watched the Last Starfighter a few months ago. Every couple of years I get a hankering for the film. Your video was a great blast from the past with some surprises. Never knew an NES version was released but loved playing the Star Raiders II. I only recently became aware it was the abandoned Last Starfighter game but that explains why I probably liked that game so much. I'd already started "adulting" in '91 and had moved on to PCs for my work and believe it or not, never owned an NES system. Didn't come back to video game systems until the Playstation 1. Thanks again, Robin. Always look forward to your videos.
That settles it, I'm watching The Last Starfighter this week. :) Thanks for joining us at CRX again this year. Loved the storytelling -- great episode!
Thanks again for the huge help with this video!
I have to now, too. It's been waaaaay too long since the last time I saw it.
I found the DVD at a local flea market one weekend, and I think I've seen the movie twice in my lifetime. Once shortly after it released, probably when it came out on VHS, and then again on one of the movie channels a dozen years later.. I too need to rewatch this one. Maybe this coming holiday season once decorating is over.
Uridium was one of the games on the C64 DTV, a plug-and-play gaming device that Robin worked on.
Yes, and it was also on at least some variations of TheC64.
@@8_BitWHAT. I didn’t know that!
Now all that is needed to do is somebody change the C64 version to match up all with all the Nes text and change the main c64 sprite to the Nes version . Thus creating The Last Starfighter on the C64.
13:55 I had that Starfighter joystick!! It was the best joystick in the house. It had a satisfying click to the movements. Wow, I hadn't thought of that in years.
They did something similar with Turrican II by making it a Universal Soldier game on Gameboy and Genesis
I have not seen The Last Starfighter. You've given me something fun to watch one of these evenings by the looks of it :)
Paradroid (before Uridium) was / is one of my favourite C64 / Amiga games
I can't believe how much the picture book added to this video ahahaha!
I've always considered the Atari 800 Star Raiders II to be the "official" The Last Starfighter game. Back in the mid 80s I remember playing a game that I thought was titled Star Raiders II but with The Last Starfighter intro. This was on a US military base in Korea by a guy running and renting time to people for a room of 30 Atari 800s with all the latest games of the time on copied floppies and cartridges. I don't remember any of the games having crack intros. I guess even though they thought the movie was a flop, the game was actually quite good for the time and that's why it was released under a different name. Sure, the graphics weren't anything close to what was shown in the movie, but as you explained not even modern arcade machines were capable and rendered animation had to be shown.
I am glad that your table looks like mine ;) I thought I was the only one that had such a "rustic" :P table top.
Oh and in 2008/2009 there were talks to do a series to the last starfighter. The TV production house that I was attached to, was trying to get the rights and turn it into a series. Unfortunately it didn't land. I have no further details, as productions there were very compartmentalised, probably to prevent leaks.
Uridium still has big playback value. Great vid
I followed Andrew Braybrook coding diaries month by month in the magazine Zzap 64 as he wrote Uridium. Prior to that he had done a coding diary for Paradroid. Which is a fantastic C64 game.
Actually, the Last Starfighter prototype circulated among the Atari 8-Bit community WAY before the Internet. My uncle bought an Atari 130XE in the GDR (East Germany) in the late 1980s and got that game on tape from one of his friends. He, and later I, when I “inherited” this computer after he lost interest in it, played it to death. Only when the Internet became a thing in my life I discovered that we had been playing a prototype all the time.
Same with “Hard Hat Willy” which was also a prototype.
I was hoping someone in the comments would chime in on what that VUL high score was a reference to…
I love Uridium. And, I never knew this game existed for the NES. The explanation of the code comparison was very understandable and I'll definitely be subscribing to David's channel.
When I was a child, one of my favorite sci-fi movies was a movie about 7 warriors in space with different spaceships, like the seven samurais in space (edit, found the name: "Battle Beyond the Stars"), really liked that movie, also loved another scifi movie called Enemy Mine, they often broadcasted it on TV when i was a child
I love Uridium (and Paradroid), so anything on those is great. Nice to see my C64 maps being used 🙂
Very interesting Video, as allways, thx a lot for your great work.
I love this movie a lot. I remember renting it when I was a kid. This would have been in the 90's as I think we got a VCR in 1992. I really liked it, but I couldn't find it and eventually forgot about it. One day in the past 10 years I remembered it and got it on blu-ray. I've also bought it on amazon video. And I just finished (more or less a few things to glue in) a 3d printed gunstar. It's the biggest 3d print I have and one of the most expensive. The model was $25 or so. The filament has cost me at least $80 as I've used 3 spools of silver and a lot of blue and black.
The Formation Destruct bonus is based on the number of enemy waves you completely destroy. Ship Destruct bonus is for damaging features on the surface of the ship. I love that you have a boxed copy, and I love that read-along vinyl - there must be other examples out there? Uridium has 16 levels, so The Last Starfighter has one missing - a memory issue?
In terms of "different Uridiums", there is Uridium Competition Edition (tuned version with better NTSC support) and Uridium Plus (16 new levels). There was a Christmas double-pack from Hewson of Uridium Competition Edition and Paradroid Competition Edition. That's where the two versions came from.
@merman1974 Was Uridium+ not just the same as the Competition Edition from the Paradroid & Uridium double pack?
Hope Braybrook earned some royalties for that.
I got a week in Chicago to take the source code over to Mindscape. We did US NTSC versions of C64 Uridium and Alleykat (released as Demolition Mission), maybe Paradroid too. I don`t recall seeing any sales figures nor royalties from any of the US releases. We didn`t get to sign off on any of the conversions. The Atari ST slow-motion version was especially embarrassing when I finally saw it a last year. They muscled in on Amiga Uridium 2. No idea what paperwork they had. Sub-licences by publishers are brutal.
@@andrewbraybrook6410 A week in Chicago sounds fun, at least you got that. Otherwise, thanks for writing Paradroid - easily one of my favourite games in my youth and one which I still play now and then - and the underrated Grbbley's Day Out.
It's a shame Atari didn't release The Last Starfighter for Atari 8-bit computers. It was leaked of course and I played a lot of it. It's virtually complete, fun, and quite sophisticated for the day. As kids we had a good time trying to work out the rules and commands without the benefit of instructions. It was eventually retooled as Star Raiders II which is almost the same game with a couple of thematic and gameplay changes. I'm glad Atari had the sense to release some version of it because somebody worked very hard on that game. It was definitely not typical licensed shovelware.
Very cool. I had the TRON record and storybook.
This was super interesting. Great video!
Nice bit of digital archeology
Hey, it's the digital archeology guy himself -- you've got a fun channel Martin, good stuff. :)
@DavidYoud thank you kindly :)
You will know when it is time to turn the page... How many times have I heard that? Enough that I matched the tempo and intonation perfectly.
Hey great video man! Also where did you get that Commodore Security sticker at? I’d like to add one to my car.
It's actually an embroidered patch, and it was given to me by DLH who runs the bombjack dot org website. He had a bunch made up based on an original patch that actual Commodore security staff wore.
Can I get some love for the 1964 film The Starfighters? MST3K did it in season 6.
... But do you have the CD of the original cast recording of The Last Starfigher: A New Musical?
Just me?
Okay...
A hack to disable tile collisions with the tall parts of this ship would make the game more fun. So many Commodore games were insanely difficult. Spoiling it for the more casual gamers. There was another C64 game that obviously used the Uridium code engine. I want to say it was based off a movie title, and the first ship or level was green, I can't remember though...
Those were the days, and we didn't even know it.
So, did they use the ship render engine for the large text scroller for the intros? They are just "ship tiles" that they used to make text out of? The intro text being a level of sorts.
Check out the link in the video description for C64 Uridium maps. On the final level, there's an impassible barricade with text behind it that only a cheater (such as disable sprite collision) could find. So I think scroll text shapes and levels shapes are one in the same. In fact, if you change the level directly in memory in the C64 version, you can fly around the attract mode scroll.
47:42 "Look at this - my college loan has been turned down... I'll never get out of here!" 😆
I did two years in JC because of the same, for whatever reason the transfer to university (to finish a bachelor's) was approved when I applied again 3 years later. I was equally bummed at the time.
@@vcv6560 Sorry to hear that. Instead of taking out a college loan, I just roughed it by sleeping on the floor of a walk-in closet for about a year... it was literally living on a shoestring budget.
This was fantastic, never knew about this, or even connected it
Is there a video of how they did the graphics on the Cray? Cray 2 XMP I believe
Uridium on the c64 was released in 1986 at the time, I find it is a better version compared to NES Last Fighter. The c64 version had better graphics, sound affects and music (thanks to the amazing SID chip).
I think this is the first vintage game I've heard of that had support for the Commodore 128's native mode. Does it do anything special? Finding other games that support that mode, and what they do differently in it, might be a good subject for a future video.
Also, I've definitely seen footage of this game before, but I can't recall where. Now I'm curious how they got your ship to cast a colored shadow onto the... let's just call them freighters, in the background, that's perfectly masked by their edges. My first thought was that the blackness of space must actually be part of the tiles' foreground, and that the shadow sprite is set to render behind that. But I'm pretty sure that, in high color mode, sprites set to render behind the tiles only overlap the screen's solid background color (#D021), and it's overlapping at least two colors: the solid "fill" and the white highlights.
Alleykat and Paradroid by Andrew Braybrook also have C128 support.
Investigation of the protection resulting in reset would be a great video!
I vote for this, too 🙂
What a great movie!!! I must have watched it a hundred times. The CGI was so amazing at the time…and so was Catherine Mary Stewart! 😊
Ah, she's a Canadian. The pieces are starting to fit together... ;)
such as...
NES "Conan", which is the C64 port from "Myth" (NES version by Mindscape = same author?!?)
NES/FC Castelian/Kyoro Chan Land, which is C64 port from "Tower Toppler"...
So its basicly Uridium, but without the cool Soundtrack. What a rippoff!
I used to have a (cracked) version of Uridium that did not have the sound effect when a new enemy attack formation appears, maybe that is another one of these subtle differences between two Uridium versions.
The Last Starfighter was one of my most favorite movies as a kid. I saw it at my friend's house because they had cable TV, and we watched it probably a half dozen times. It has one of the best pieces of theme music I've ever heard. BTW, Cosmi's "Psychastria" (published by Audiogenic apparently) is a bit of a knockoff of Uridium with the horizontal scrolling and the double-flip ship reversal. I have that one but not Uridium. I wonder how comparable the level designs are to Uridium.
I've had another game with very similar gameplay and a ship that turns around in the same way, Psycastria.
Tough luck, sucka!
BTW I remember a different game with this name "The last starfighter". It was my very favourite game on ATARI 800XL.
Since tiles is already used by the 8x8 pieces maybe you could use a modern term in game dev which is prefab - for those ship sections.
First time seeing this/these games (clearly ported Uridium as Last Starfighter) and my first impression was the ship looks like a stylized guitar.
I wonder if other games like Ultima 4 on Master System are similar.
Star Raiders II is *awesome* - I have both it and the prototype Last Starfighter, and there's honestly not a lot of difference between the two, and as an approximation of the game from the movie it's about as close as you could hope for given the hardware.
This was interesting. I remember these. Thank you for this extensive explanation, and the ghidra thingy was next level info.🤗😏
Great movie. I've been saying for years now that there should be a modern remake of it.
My favorite horzontal shooter on nes (Well if you can call it one) is Air Fortress Half the levels are Horizontal Shooters like this and half of them are internal levels where Hal Bailman walks/flys and has to find the space station core to blow it up and destroy the station.
Super interesting!
I wonder if they did something similar with the Megadrive/Genesis game Universal Soldier, which is actually a port of Turrican II from the Amiga but with some replaced gfx. Both the Megadrive and the Amiga have a Motorola 68000 CPU.
23:36 With a relatively small file, you could just brute-force the search for matching 32-byte segmens.
Any software from the same developer is probably going to have lots of matching library code.
This storyline feels very familiar. I think I read a book along these lines back when I was a kid.
Maybe Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett?
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.
Yeah the movie Last Starfighter is awesome, I watched it recently on dvd and remember it was quite scary at parts for what what I first considered a sci-fi kids movie...
The explosion sprite when your ship crashes looks a lot like the explosion in Paradroid. Perhaps even ghe sound effect.
The gameplay was tweaked a bit in Uridium+ over the first release. It's a long time since I played the two but if I recall, you didn't have to wait as long to land your ship in Uridium+.
Yes, I believe you can immediately land if you wish.
I wondered why I never saw the arcade game. I would have put a lot of quarters in it at the time.
Last Starfighter was a great movie!
You finding Uridium slightly easier because it's running more slowly? The scrolling text looks slower... though I thought PAL games ran faster on US NTSC machines.
well I don't see LJN, it might have a chance. lol
I played the fan game you mentioned
I think Uridium has the best tune in a computer game ever. But I prefer the slower, original PAL version.
So obviously I now have to stop the video and go and re-watch the last Star fighter
Surprised they couldn't get anywhere close to the movie graphics.
Starfighter, Witwenmacher (widow maker)/Fliegender Sarg (flying coffin), approx. 300 of 900 german starfighter crashed or had other accidents, with more than 100 death pilots. The memories of the game and movie are much better.
Did Andrew Braybrook / Hewson sue them ? Ironic if not considering how litigious large corps are esp. Nintendo.
The movie had 14 minutes of CGI...
Though it wasn't the first atttempts at CGI... but it was the first in a full length movie...
That Starfighter joystick is an obvious copy of the TAC-2 joystick...
I think the first movie to have large amounts of computer-generated scenery was Star Trek The Wrath of Khan
brilliant share chef!! and wow nice game very iridium look and feel but better and a bt more hard 🙂 but sir i expected a bit better score from you starfighter noob 😛 thank for the video love you man greetings from holland!!!!
This game is similar to Zanac on NES,but you flying from down to up.
Fantastic! ❤
I was never as good with any joystick after the starfighter and slik stik, they were so much better than analogue and microswitches
Why just ask Andrew when you can disassemble code :D
It's nice to have independent confirmation :)
Lasse/Cadaver might have grest insight regarding the reuse of C64 code on NES based on his releases on both platforms, like the Metal Warrior.
Initially I'm like this looks like Psycastria!.......oh.....that means it's probably based on Uridium. lol I've played psycastria. I've never played Uridium. BTW it's one of the hardest games I've ever played.
Yes, Psycastria was a clone of Uridium - and in the press at the time of release, Uridium was unfairly compared to Star Force (which scrolled vertically)
Fascinating! Nice detective work!
Yes, this movie did use the amazing Cray Super Computer. What you did not mention was that this movie was the very first movie to render computer graphics to portray something that was supposed to exist in reality. For example, Centari's car.
Also, the soundtrack was composed by the great Bill Conti who composed the music for the Rocky and Karate Kid franchises, and The Right Stuff.
Heuristics = informed guesses, but guesses nonetheless 😁
Couple of other C64 games that were converted to NES but retitled are Nebulus (also by Hewson), which was released under a few different names depending on the platform, eg. Tower Topper and Castellian, and Myth: History in the Making which was an excellent game on the C64 and other home computers, but was ported to the NES and renamed Conan: The Mysteries of Time, which unfortunately is a pretty lousy game.
Naughty naughty, that's definitely been ripped off from Uridium, Andrew Braybrook should had sued them for copyright infringement.
Do you have proof that it was definitely ripped off rather than licensed?
It couldn't have been made more clear in the video that it was licensed from Graftgold/Hewson. No 'naughty naughty' here at all.
I noticed more than a decade ago, that there were several classic C64 games ported to the NES and some under different names. Uridium / Last Starfighter is one of them, but also Nebulus renamed to Castelian and also a Cybernoid version.
And Myth was changed to Conan for the NES
Hah. I didn't catch on right away that it was the audio book at the end until I heard the chimes 🙂
Piratebay, here I come
"40 decimal bytes" what the heck is a decimal byte? You mean BCD?
I interpreted it as "40 (decimal) bytes" to clarify that "40" was in decimal, not hexadecimal.
ie. "decimal" is modifying the "40", not "bytes".
The Last Starfighter is truly one of my favourite '80s movies, if not THE absolute favourite. I'm quite sure this is where my weakness for arcade machines originates from. I didn't know about the link between The Last Starfighter game on the NES and Uridium. I didn't even know that it existed on the NES. So Robin, when you briefly mentioned the relation, while asking me if I could grab some footage, I deliberately avoided inquiring any further. I wanted to save all the reveals for this video... and it was definitely worth the wait.
Just brilliant! ❤
- But you do realize what this means, right? - Now I have to get good at Uridium, simply because of the lineage between those two. 😅
- Oh, I did notice another thing: there is no death blossom sequence at the end of each level on the Speccy version either.
It's gonna be a sparklin' day! Sparklin'! Robin released a new video!
(TLS is also one of my favorites, for exactly the same reasons.) 🙂
Boy Uridium was hard, but the title music was great. I was more of a W.A.R. fan.
I didn't get into WAR, but I've listened to the music lots of times.
I did play this game as a cracked copy on my 8 bit Atari computer back in the day starting with the cool intro like the movie arcade game. At the time, it was visually fantastic! The NES version is garbage simply using the movie title.
Make Darren drink more water. Holy hairpieces his mouth is dry.