Konami development tools revealed

Paragon (1625)

06-06-2012, 08:19

Hi,

A recurrent question concerns the tools Konami used to develop their MSX games. AFAIK, no one ever had any idea what they were using. I read yesterday this interview of a former programmer who worked on MG2 : http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/metalgear/toshinarioka.htm

And this is the interesting part :

Quote:

Which leads us on to the technical side of creating MG2. "The programming language was assembler. The computer we used was Hewlett-Packard 64000 hardware. An old machine," laughs Oka-san, thinking back.

A quick search reveals that the HP 64000 was a dedicated development tool which could emulate any microcomputer at the time : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_64000

Interesting stuff !

B-)

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By Huey

Prophet (2694)

06-06-2012, 08:38

Cool. Can't imagine how difficult it must have been to code without modern day tools.

By Wolverine_nl

Paragon (1160)

06-06-2012, 14:34

I read the whole interview, these guys were exceptional. So now we know that they did crossdevelop to create their products.

By KdL

Paragon (1451)

06-06-2012, 18:03

oh my god!!! with this one? http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?sw=365

By wolf_

Ambassador_ (10109)

06-06-2012, 17:50

Well, that looks like an ugly brute!

By Maggoo

Paragon (1217)

06-06-2012, 18:47

I always throught that Konami had some super cool tools to develop for the MSX but that HP thingy doesn't look nearly as cool as what I had in mind

By Akiguchi

Hero (623)

06-06-2012, 19:42

Well, some things are best left unseen!

By mais1976

Master (172)

06-06-2012, 21:47

Hmmm, i guess so... I always imagined, that the tools they were using would look like 'really cool', when i was a kid programming in basic, but it was a big ugly machine.

By Wolverine_nl

Paragon (1160)

07-06-2012, 14:36

They probably also used some visual designing tools for the characters and other graphics, the guy who was interviewed was a programmer for functionality and such, other people made the graphics (non-functional) and sound/music(there was another interview about how the music was made for MG2 somewhere on the net).
Maybe he was used to working on the hp 64000, cause it was platformcompatible so porting was easier?

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

07-06-2012, 16:32

I made additional researches on the HP 64000 system. It was indeed used to emulate hardware and prototyping micro computers. It only emulated the main micro processor and RAM, but had about a dozen internal slots that could be used for interface purposes.

It means that Konami probably developed a internal card which had the VDP on it, and a separate video connection.

Furthermore, the HP 64000 could work in network, while sharing a HDD and a printer. It was probably easier for the team work on a game project.

By sd_snatcher

Prophet (3659)

07-06-2012, 16:54

Fantastic! And that explains why all Konami megarom games always seemed to be designed for a machine with a faster Z80 processor, thus run on 3.57MHz MSX machines skipping frames constantly: The 64252A Z80 emulator pod had only two possible speeds:

1) 3.6MHz without waitstates
2) 4MHz with waitstates when accessing the memory

Wouldn't this fact also nullify the arguments stating that "turbo MSX's aren't really compatible"? Since our best games were coded/tested on a machine with completely different characteristics and everything went just fine.