there are two aspects came together in the universal computer. 
1. computing (sorting)
2. control (cases, if then, input)
before this were seperated functions in analoge maschines.

First developing on Atari ST (Assembler) but never published something except a demo for a bbs 1993 (First founded by two brothers). First not released ‘product’. A listing game for Happy Computer. 
Than switched to Macintosh (1995 ). Games in C . And than published over the net (website) or in Maganzines Disc-Magazines as Shareware. Paid first with checkes (almost impossible to get the money for 15$ games), so switched to real money and than to KAGI.com a first worldwide payment service.

Inbetween the author worked produced Flash-Games for advertising and ported a lot of games for Java (Applets) 1996 . 

Afterwards switched to Objective-C on MacOSX with a new name: la1n.ch. 

Konferenz zur Frage der Gamestudies in den deutschsprachigen Ländern D-A-CH in Wuppertal. 

#ch_ludens

Two types of tv-games:

combined boardgame room front (a lot of boardgames) and museum in the back. several introduction into the topic from board games up to flipper history up to computer history. almost everything ist playable. 

Define colors.
Out of x color system!
Bitmaps …. Layers of colors

Is a clone of the arcade puzzle bobble with other graphics. In development the problem was the hexagonelogic. Another was a not initialized Rectangle, who crashed on some macs and on other not. 

Specials:
- there was even a cracked version out there
- the serial of the game was in the serial number collection
- sold for 15$ > made around 3000 sFR with it. 

Years later a guy in the bus asked me: Are you the guy behind imp89, grotic and co?

Tracker were software - used especially on the Amiga. The most of the music was created in this type of music software. And the people behind the swiss games of the 80ies/90ies even created a tracker and the possibility to use the same framework also in games. 

interesting game in the development line of the text adventures of the 80ies and their language pattern. new possible with modern ai. 

GameDevs are gamedeveloppers. The name tells also a lot about the idea behind. The most important thing was the technical difficulties. 

1994 kam nicht nur die PlayStation in Japan auf den Markt, auch World of Games wurde am 1. August 1994 von Michael Wyler und Thomas von Arx in der Wohnung der Mutter von Michael und Christian Wyler gegründet. Somit nahm eine Erfolgsgeschichte ihren Anfang... 

Damals steckte die gesamte Spielebranche in der Schweiz buchstäblich noch in den Kinderschuhen. So hatten auch die Produkte noch den Ruf von "Kinderspielzeug" und wurden nur von Gamern, Nerds und Kindern wahrgenommen. Dennoch nahmen sich Michael Wyler und Thomas von Arx der Herausforderung an, ihr Hobby zum Beruf zu machen. Eine Menge Arbeit stand an und liess die lieb gewonnene Freizeitbeschäftigung entsprechend in den Hintergrund rücken. Der Versand von Videospielen musste mit wenig Manpower gegründet und bekannt gemacht werden.

In den folgenden Jahren wuchs die gesamte Industrie und World of Games profitierte entsprechend davon. Geschickt passte sich das Team den Gegebenheiten perfekt an. So war 1997 der Entscheid, nicht nur ein Ladenlokal zu eröffnen, sondern auch das Internetportal wog.ch zu etablieren, sicher der richtige. Von diesem Zeitpunkt an konnte sich die immer grösser werdende, treue Kundschaft Video-, Brett- und Kartenspiele sowie ersten DVDs bequem von zu Hause aus bestellen, die bereits am nächsten Tag per Post geliefert wurden. 

Zum neuen Jahrtausend kam eine neue Konsolengeneration auf den Markt. Dies war auch der Zeitpunkt zu dem Claudia und Christian Wyler zum WoG-Team stiessen. Der Siegeszug des Mediums war nicht mehr aufzuhalten. Die erfolgreiche PlayStation 2 war vermutlich auch nicht ganz unschuldig, dass die DVD, die von Sony geschickt in die Konsole integriert wurde, der die in Jahre gekommen VHS-Kassette den endgültigen Todesstoss versetzte. 

Die immer grösseren Budgets der Entwickler wirkten sich zusätzlich positiv auf die Spielindustrie aus und liessen Spiele entstehen, die sich immer mehr mit teuren Hollywood-Blockbustern messen konnten. Spiele wurden erwachsen und mit ihnen auch die Spieler. World of Games überstand ebenfalls die Pubertät.

Dank einerseits Mund-zu-Mund-Propaganda, andererseits dem beliebten Internetportal sowie der Fachkenntnisse der Involvierten wuchs die Anzahl Mitarbeitender stetig an. Die Geschäftsräume mussten etliche Male erweitert oder gar gewechselt werden, um der wachsenden Nachfrage gerecht zu werden. Mit knapp 40 Angestellten hat WoG heute Dimensionen erreicht, von denen die beiden Gründer kaum zu träumen wagten!

Früher reichte eine kleine Ecke mit einem Tischchen zum Versenden der Ware aus. Heute stehen vier grosse Packtische bereit, um die vielen Pakete rechtzeitig versandbereit zu machen. Zu Beginn diente ein einfaches Regal als Lager. Heute kaum vorstellbar, denn WoG könnte in diesem Punkt nahezu mit einem schwedischen Möbelgiganten mithalten.

Was einst nur in Kinderzimmern zu finden war, hat den Weg in jede gute Stube gefunden. Schon längst vermögen es die Konsolen von Sony und Microsoft mehr als nur mit Games zu unterhalten. Die neueren Modelle sind inzwischen regelrechte Multimedia-Player. Internet, Blu-ray, Full-HD, Media-Player, Bewegungssteuerung, Digital- und Online-Gaming: all das steht für die Evolution der Videospielkonsolen.

WoG hat sich ebenso weiterentwickelt. Im Gleichzug mit den Konsolen wurde auch das Sortiment immer multimedialer. Zu dem erweiterten Spielwarensortiment haben sich Bücher dazugesellt. Das rund um die Uhr verfügbare Angebot von digitalen Games lässt World of Games in Zeiten von Streaming und Downloads nicht alt aussehen. 

2019 war es soweit: Das Ladengeschäft konnte ebenfalls die Strassenseite wechseln und neu in Unterentfelden auf der fünffachen Fläche Kundschaft empfangen. Auf dieser riesigen Spielwiese wurde Platz für die Neuzugänge im Sortiment geschaffen. Brettspiele, Figuren und weitere Spielwaren können ansprechend präsentiert werden. Auch Bücher, Comics und Mangas finden Raum im Laden und runden die Gestaltung optimal ab.

Die 27 Jahre vergingen wie im Flug – wir freuen uns auf viele weitere!

Media are infact also memory libraries and of course public libraries. Of course the are also the opposite of oral history in the most of the caeses. 

It is a sad fact that the 6502 used in the Commodore64 and other home computers of the 80s is widely believed to have a poor code density when it comes to compiled or wider than eight bit code. The C standard requires computations to be made with ints which work best if they have the same size as a pointer.

The 6502 also has a very small stack of 256 bytes which cannot be easily addressed and thus cannot be used for local variables. Therefore a second stack for variables has to be maintained, resulting in costly indexing operations. The 6502 is also pretty poor when it comes to indexed operations, it has no index with constant offset addressing mode, and requires the y register to be used for indexing.

common books

OLIVER Being a pixel guy – the tools were remarkable. We did not have devkit like the Katakis tools or something specified for creating game graphics. I used the editor that came with the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit for sprites, which turned out extremely practical. The Ronny-sprite was created with an C64 editor called Mob-Profi, which provided overlayed hires and multicolour-sprites. The pictures in the intro and end sequence were pixeled in Koala Painter with a joystick, but everything else was more like hacking. I edited the charset with a font editor. The level backgrounds were tile-based maps, so a friend of mine coded one tool for combining 2×2 chars to tiles including the colour – and a second tool for assembling the levelmap like a puzzle game. As setup I had a C128 and Amiga 500 side by side. By the way – there was a TV and a monitor connected to the C128 at the same time, because of the the different video quality and I wanted to be sure that the graphics  looked right on both display types. With our modern mouse or stylus driven tools and those workflow-trimmed programs it is hard to believe that we got things done at all back in the day when we were even lacking fundamentals such as UNDO functionality. However, I have to say that you had full control over the technical specs of the graphics and as a graphic designer you started to think like a coder.

Otherwise, I hardly remember details of the project. At least for the first month, Mario and I were working alongside each other. The intro and the end sequence were finished first. Then it was very intense and determined by crunchtime, the process was sort of first-in-first-out. The progress in code was tied to incoming graphics. Markus composed the new tunes at home far away and we had some issues with the delivery. Nevertheless the whole soundtrack reached us in time and its implementation went smoothly. Still there was no free time at all. In the final weeks weeks it became a kind of competition – like, who needs the least sleep! I also remember that the editing of the levels was pretty chaotic. Three of us worked in shifts and it took much longer than planned.

Oh I almost forgot about the  communication with Virgin. That was the horror for me because I hardly spoke any English back then. David Bishop and I talked English and German mixed, which worked surprisingly well.

The game development process was splittet into different type of productions. Each part had its own tools like coding / assembler, images > paint tools and of course music with the trackers. 

The next time the user will boot the disk the virus gets loaded into RAM and step 1 takes place. On reset the horizonal beam position gets evaluated. If the beam position is smaller than a certain number the screen turns black and a message in white letters appears.

Subject:
'Re: VIC-II colors'
From: Robert 'Bob' Yannes
To: Philip
'Pepto' Timmermann
Date: 27.09.1999
I was involved with the development of the VIC-II, however the actual implementation of the design, including the Color
Palette, was done by someone else. I have forwarded your message to him, but it is up to him if he wants to respond.
I can tell you that the design was based on the principle that adding a sine wave of a particular frequency and amplitude
to an inverted version of the same sine wave at a different amplitude produces a phase-shifted sine wave of the same
frequency. The amount of phase shift is directly proportional to the amplitudes of the two sine waves.
The VIC-II used the 14.31818 MHz master clock input (4 times the NTSC color burst frequency of 3.579545 MHz) to produce
quadrature square-wave clocks. These clock signals were then integrated into triangle waves sing analog integrators. The
triangle waves were then integrated again into sine waves (actually rounded triangle waves, but good enough for this
application). This produced a 3.579545 MHz sine wave,
inverse sine wave, cosine wave and inverse cosine wave.
An analog summer was used to create the phase-shifts in the Chroma signal by adding together the appropiate two waveforms
at the appropiate amplitudes. The Color Palette data went to a look-up table that specified the amplitude of the waves by
selecting different resistors in the gain path of the summer. The end result was that we could create any hue we wanted by
looking at the NTSC color wheel to determine the phase-shift and then picking the appropiate resistor values to produce
that phase-shift.
Color Saturation was controlled by scaling the gain of the summer. When we picked the resistor values to determine the
output phase-shift, we also scaled them to produce the desired output amplitude. Luminance was controlled using a simple
voltage divider which switched different pull-down resistors into the open-drain output. We could create any Luminance we
wanted by choosing the desired resistor value.
I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue,
saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors
were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor
values,
rather than having a completely unique set for each color
I believe that Commodore actually got a patent on this technique. It was certainly superior to the Apple or Atari approach
at the time, as they ended up with whatever colors that came out--ours allowed the designer to freely select Hue,
Saturation and Luminance.
Since all of this was based on selecting different resistor values and resistance varied from chip lot to chip lot, there
was variation from one Commodore 64 to another. It wasn't as bad as it could have been though, since all of the Chrominance
selection was based on resistor ratios, which could be kept constant even if the actual resistor values varied. Luminance
was more of a problem. A trimmer resistor should really have been used to pull up the output. This would have allowed the
Luminance to be adjusted for consistency from unit to unit, however Commodore didn't care enough about consistency to
bother with adjusting each unit
Robert
'Bob'
Yannes

The swiss gamedesign was influenced and even founded by the cracker scene coming from the C64 to Amiga and the other tree was the Atari ST. Around 25 own Games and Ports were created and published from 1985-1997. There was even an own publisher Linel. 

Let's bring together the memories and artefacts from those times. 

where it successfully established itself primarily in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the German-speaking parts of Europe.

Memory is changing all the time. We tend to create memory as a system (perhaps because we can than save space and energy).

Hah, I might not be the best to explain Amiga history, but I’ll do my best :) Fish disks were the main way to distribute public domain, open source, shareware etc. before the internet was wide-spread. People would send Fred Fish software, and he’d compile them into individual disks that people would copy. Magazines would have lots of companies that would allow you to order copies of these disks etc. He ended up creating over a 1000 disks this way. When cd-roms became a thing, you could order the whole collection on those. Those were strange times :)

Aminet was the most famous ftp-archive for amiga software. It was run by the same guy that made Brainfuck, Urban Müller. Rather than chronologically like fish disks, it was organized by topic, with readme’s for every file. You could upload to a staging area, and he’d put them in place. Much like fish disks, companies would print cd-roms with the latest from aminet for those not hooked up to the internets (or on 56k modems, which was most people).

create a simple software to collect artefacts etc.

wheel plants and co. 

look at development with bitorrent, crypto-x and social media

Very emblematic use of technical possibilities

at the end the vectors won. everything is now vector based in games (as an opengl or directx scene .-) more about this in the simple demo sinZ on pouet last year. therefore step back, step into the beginning 80ies with assembler and the vector console vectrex. and of course vecZ is a shootemup the most complicated (timing, a lot of action etc.) thing in those times.

Apple of course invented the personal computer with the Apple 2. IBM a long time thought - no market and with the privatisation of the computermarket. IBM brought 1981 their Personal Computer. 1985 Apple brought (after LISA) GUI on the market. IBM lost against the Compatibles and the rest ist history. 

The long history of computing (technically) show the problems. First they tried to solve complex (math.) problems as special automates. 

 

Es gibt eine Menge ineinandergreifender, komplexer Faktoren. Da ist zum einen die Professionalisierung dieser Disziplin. In den Anfängen haben es Frauen viel leichter, sich durchzusetzen und einen Platz in Disziplinen und Bereichen zu finden, in denen es keinen etablierten Präzedenzfall, keinen Kanon, keine Institution und keine Ausbildungsanforderungen gibt. Informatik war neu, es gab keine Handbücher, keine Institutionen, keine Berufsverbände. Man wurde Programmierer, weil man ein Händchen dafür hatte. Man war gut im Eignungstest, hat sich Schachrätsel angesehen, war gut in Mathe, war Sekretärin oder Stenografin – das war es. Und es gab einen großen Bedarf an Programmiertalenten. Als die Branche in den Fünfziger- und Sechzigerjahren explodierte, war es für eine Frau relativ einfach, dort einzusteigen. Als das Programmieren von den Sechziger- bis zu den Achtzigerjahren immer mehr zu einer professionellen Disziplin wurde, kamen bestimmte Ausbildungsanforderungen hinzu, die es für Frauen in diesem Bereich schwieriger machten. Es war nicht so einfach, einen Hochschulabschluss in Informatik zu erlangen, wenn die Frauen Familie hatten

In den Anfängen haben es Frauen viel leichter, sich durchzusetzen und einen Platz in Disziplinen und Bereichen zu finden, in denen es keinen etablierten Präzedenzfall, keinen Kanon, keine Institution und keine Ausbildungsanforderungen gibt. Informatik war neu, es gab keine Handbücher, keine Institutionen, keine Berufsverbände. Man wurde Programmierer, weil man ein Händchen dafür hatte.