Former Melbourne House Developer Surfaces with Original 5.25" Disks, Unreleased Titles and Great Stories
G'day all,
A mate of mine, Tony, started his career as a developer at Melbourne House back in the day. Over a beer a while back, he casually mentioned he still had a box of original 5.25" disks from his time there. I have a USB-attached 1541 so I offered to image them.
What's on the disks is brilliant. There are unreleased titles, internal development builds and a game called "Aussie Games" which is exactly as Australian as it sounds. There are some great stories behind the development of the software and Tony's career at MH more broadly.
On top of that, Tony has recently taken delivery of a C64 Ultimate and is building a brand new C64 game called Slipway. Some of the technical decisions he's made are pretty interesting:
- Single player
- Twin SID implementation for 8 channel sound (5 instrument, 1 percussion for soundtrack plus 1 music and 1 FX channel in-game)
- Custom tooling to import and convert MIDI files to 6502 assembly
- A purpose-built character and landscape editor for level design
- Leveraging the Ultimate 64's extended RAM architecture
He's built several multi-channel soundtracks already using the MIDI pipeline. It won't run on a stock C64 given the U64-specific features, but it's not a commercial project. It's a passion build from someone who cut his teeth at one of Australia's most important software houses.
Happy to share more detail and put Tony in touch with anyone interested in the Melbourne House stories or the Slipway development. Would love to see some Australian retro computing history get the coverage it deserves.