Videogame development throughout the 80's by Splash Wave

[Pokun]

Yeah I'm acquainted with the line-editing nature of Apple II. I guess it's a left-over thing from Apple I which used shift-registers instead of VRAM for the built-in I/O terminal. Apple II do use RAM for video but the input buffer is still 1-dimensional for whatever reason.

Sakaguchi was well informed about Nasir's games so I guess he either must have had an Apple II at home or knew someone that had. Or maybe they actually played games at the office in their free time. Since their jobs were game development, I suppose buying and playing other companies' games in the office in order to know what their rivals were doing and see how the current game market looked like could be justified as being part of their work to their superiors. And for that they would need to keep a variety of computers and video game consoles in the office.

[Oziphantom]

Yeah I'm acquainted with the line-editing nature of Apple II. I guess it's a left-over thing from Apple I which used shift-registers instead of VRAM for the built-in I/O terminal. Apple II do use RAM for video but the input buffer is still 1-dimensional for whatever reason.

The TRS-80 also had single command line entry. that is how computers worked back then, "terminals" still work that way now. Commodore had a full screen editor for the PET, and then by the C128 had a dedicated 4K ROM for the editor. But a single command line means your code is a lot simpler and hence a lot smaller, it doesn't have to deal with scanning the memory array to work out what the start of the command etc. CP/M, DOS, UNIX, BSD, LINUX etc all use this method.

Sakaguchi was well informed about Nasir's games so I guess he either must have had an Apple II at home or knew someone that had. Or maybe they actually played games at the office in their free time. Since their jobs were game development, I suppose buying and playing other companies' games in the office in order to know what their rivals were doing and see how the current game market looked like could be justified as being part of their work to their superiors. And for that they would need to keep a variety of computers and video game consoles in the office.

Every games company does this, Sony kept a complete set of all releases in each studio, so complete PS1/2/3/4/5 game sets. So when we wanted to check what other games did, or keep up with the latest ideas or just pull a bunch of contemporaries to see what new things we needed to try, the library was just sitting there for us to pull and go into the games room and have a look. Of cause there were SNES, SATURN, 3D0, Amigas et al as well just not with complete libraries.

[Pokun]

Yeah I'm acquainted with the line-editing nature of Apple II. I guess it's a left-over thing from Apple I which used shift-registers instead of VRAM for the built-in I/O terminal. Apple II do use RAM for video but the input buffer is still 1-dimensional for whatever reason.

The TRS-80 also had single command line entry. that is how computers worked back then, "terminals" still work that way now. Commodore had a full screen editor for the PET, and then by the C128 had a dedicated 4K ROM for the editor. But a single command line means your code is a lot simpler and hence a lot smaller, it doesn't have to deal with scanning the memory array to work out what the start of the command etc. CP/M, DOS, UNIX, BSD, LINUX etc all use this method.

Right, terminal systems for Windows/DOS, CP/M and *nix has always been 1-dimensional. But Apple II have this weird way to edit a line where pressing the left arrow key deletes characters from the buffer and pressing right re-enters them into it (instead of just moving the cursor).

Sakaguchi was well informed about Nasir's games so I guess he either must have had an Apple II at home or knew someone that had. Or maybe they actually played games at the office in their free time. Since their jobs were game development, I suppose buying and playing other companies' games in the office in order to know what their rivals were doing and see how the current game market looked like could be justified as being part of their work to their superiors. And for that they would need to keep a variety of computers and video game consoles in the office.

Every games company does this, Sony kept a complete set of all releases in each studio, so complete PS1/2/3/4/5 game sets. So when we wanted to check what other games did, or keep up with the latest ideas or just pull a bunch of contemporaries to see what new things we needed to try, the library was just sitting there for us to pull and go into the games room and have a look. Of cause there were SNES, SATURN, 3D0, Amigas et al as well just not with complete libraries.

I see, though I think Square was quite small at the time so I'd imagine they had limited libraries and game systems.

[Oziphantom]

Yeah I'm acquainted with the line-editing nature of Apple II. I guess it's a left-over thing from Apple I which used shift-registers instead of VRAM for the built-in I/O terminal. Apple II do use RAM for video but the input buffer is still 1-dimensional for whatever reason.

The TRS-80 also had single command line entry. that is how computers worked back then, "terminals" still work that way now. Commodore had a full screen editor for the PET, and then by the C128 had a dedicated 4K ROM for the editor. But a single command line means your code is a lot simpler and hence a lot smaller, it doesn't have to deal with scanning the memory array to work out what the start of the command etc. CP/M, DOS, UNIX, BSD, LINUX etc all use this method.

Right, terminal systems for Windows/DOS, CP/M and *nix has always been 1-dimensional. But Apple II have this weird way to edit a line where pressing the left arrow key deletes characters from the buffer and pressing right re-enters them into it (instead of just moving the cursor).

again rather standard for the terminals of the 60s/70s, when you are using a teletype to talk to the computer you can't actually go backwards and forwards, you press the delete key and its prints the [del] and then you have to count how many back you have gone and then look at your printed line, then start typing again.
Also this way the cursor pos counts as the "command length", you also don't have Insert mode vs overwrite mode, I think MS-DOS even still worked this way, for a long while. I think it was fixed maybe Win95 version?? been a while since I've used it. Modern Windows 11 has half of the functionality still. if you start at an empty line and press right, it will type the first character of the last command in the buffer. Just now when you press left it won't delete it, it will go into insert mode, until you go right again to the end, at which point it will keep typing characters from the previous command, only the previous command won't have had any insert performed and will copy the char from that position again.

Again its another simplification and cost saving endeavour. The problem with Apple was it was Woz in a garage. Didn't even have a car. He had to hand assemble all the source code. And each PROM with a mistake which was a cost he couldn't afford, and then each byte saved on the machine lowered its cost. While Commodore was a massive company with a bunch of employees and their own chip foundry. So if Peddle needed a system to do X, he just tell one of his chip designers to go make one and let him know when they were done. Does 8K ROM cost more than 4K sure, does it cost enough more that they cared about it, nope add the feature win the war, it costs another penny to make it oh well. Want to make some code, well that is what the assembler on the VAX mini computer is for, go use that, we haven't got time for hand assembly..

Sakaguchi was well informed about Nasir's games so I guess he either must have had an Apple II at home or knew someone that had. Or maybe they actually played games at the office in their free time. Since their jobs were game development, I suppose buying and playing other companies' games in the office in order to know what their rivals were doing and see how the current game market looked like could be justified as being part of their work to their superiors. And for that they would need to keep a variety of computers and video game consoles in the office.

Every games company does this, Sony kept a complete set of all releases in each studio, so complete PS1/2/3/4/5 game sets. So when we wanted to check what other games did, or keep up with the latest ideas or just pull a bunch of contemporaries to see what new things we needed to try, the library was just sitting there for us to pull and go into the games room and have a look. Of cause there were SNES, SATURN, 3D0, Amigas et al as well just not with complete libraries.

I see, though I think Square was quite small at the time so I'd imagine they had limited libraries and game systems.

Well before FF1 sure they won't have had complete game sets. But back then everybody made games because they were game enthusiasts, so they would all have bough the latest games and bought them in to show to everybody and then share the disk around the office. To which they would have had the Sharp X1, PC 88, 98, FM-7 and MSX in the office as they developed games for them. By the time they got to FF3 they probably had complete RPG sets for the consoles and PCs though.

[Pokun]

Also this way the cursor pos counts as the "command length", you also don't have Insert mode vs overwrite mode, I think MS-DOS even still worked this way, for a long while. I think it was fixed maybe Win95 version?? been a while since I've used it.

Huh I could swear that at least DOS v6.22 had insert/overwrite modes and probably DOS 5, but now I'm not 100% sure.

[creaothceann]

Also this way the cursor pos counts as the "command length", you also don't have Insert mode vs overwrite mode, I think MS-DOS even still worked this way, for a long while. I think it was fixed maybe Win95 version?? been a while since I've used it.

Huh I could swear that at least DOS v6.22 had insert/overwrite modes and probably DOS 5, but now I'm not 100% sure.

Perhaps via doskey?

[Oziphantom]

The TRS-80 also had single command line entry. that is how computers worked back then, "terminals" still work that way now. Commodore had a full screen editor for the PET, and then by the C128 had a dedicated 4K ROM for the editor. But a single command line means your code is a lot simpler and hence a lot smaller, it doesn't have to deal with scanning the memory array to work out what the start of the command etc. CP/M, DOS, UNIX, BSD, LINUX etc all use this method.

Right, terminal systems for Windows/DOS, CP/M and *nix has always been 1-dimensional. But Apple II have this weird way to edit a line where pressing the left arrow key deletes characters from the buffer and pressing right re-enters them into it (instead of just moving the cursor).

again rather standard for the terminals of the 60s/70s, when you are using a teletype to talk to the computer you can't actually go backwards and forwards, you press the delete key and its prints the [del] and then you have to count how many back you have gone and then look at your printed line, then start typing again.
Also this way the cursor pos counts as the "command length", you also don't have Insert mode vs overwrite mode, I think MS-DOS even still worked this way, for a long while. I think it was fixed maybe Win95 version?? been a while since I've used it. Modern Windows 11 has half of the functionality still. if you start at an empty line and press right, it will type the first character of the last command in the buffer. Just now when you press left it won't delete it, it will go into insert mode, until you go right again to the end, at which point it will keep typing characters from the previous command, only the previous command won't have had any insert performed and will copy the char from that position again.

Oh another thing I just remembered. The Apple ][ and Apple ][+ keyboards don't have Delete, Backspace or Up and Down arrows. So you have to use Left arrow as delete basically. Del, Up and Down were added on the //e, Backspace still hasn't been added to this day.

[Pokun]

Yeah and this is directly inherited from Apple I which was designed for a generic ASCII keyboard available at the time (Wozniak used one by Datanetics) which lacked those keys. It also got this repeat key required for manual key repeat. I guess it was a common key layout at the time for glass terminals and teletypes.
Though those keys were added on Apple IIe they only work with new software that supports them, and the internal ROM wasn't updated for using them.

Also this way the cursor pos counts as the "command length", you also don't have Insert mode vs overwrite mode, I think MS-DOS even still worked this way, for a long while. I think it was fixed maybe Win95 version?? been a while since I've used it.

Huh I could swear that at least DOS v6.22 had insert/overwrite modes and probably DOS 5, but now I'm not 100% sure.

Perhaps via doskey?

No, maybe I'm thinking of EDIT or something.

[SNESPlayer]

Also forgot but here I'll mention Nihon Falcom and a video by BowlofLentils, one of the most important Japanese game companies of this era https://youtube.com/watch?v=JIcbJn-RylQ

Surprisingly lasted longer than most Japanese companies of its era too. Most of their games were published for NEC platforms or similar (with the occasional dabble on console, at least during the 80's)