Games That Weren't 64

Pete Dabbs speaks about the almost done work on Darius +...

"Speaking of impossible to convert games, when I worked at ESP (yeah, those pesky Search for Sharla people hehe) we went to (I think it was) The Edge (who were in covent garden, and the car got clamped while we were there grrr) to see them about doing an arcade conversion they'd just got the rights for (can't remember what it was now, some horizontaly scrolling shooter) and they'd just seen some compunet demos using side borders and they INSISTED that we HAD to have the whole screen scrolling into the borders and sprite multiplexing etc etc, bearing in mind that at this time nobody had done side border stuff with a character screen still being displayed and the fact that this is only possible using a certain number of sprites per line AND the fact that you've now lost most of your raster time AND no no no no!! (hehe).

When I told them this was impossible the boss of the place started a big rant and said he'd get someone else to do it instead because he'd seen demos with things in the side borders (don't you love non-technical people trying to tell you that things can be done).

Needless to say this game never came out HA!"

Pete Dabbs.