The Black Moon Monthly Column - New

Post by **Bas** » Fri Feb 24, 2006 10:42 pm

Nice link thomas! ...they paid royalties to Magnavox in order to legally manufacture and sell PONG systems... The suit against Seeburg and Bally went forward and marks the very first law suit in the history of the video game industry. The Sanders/Magnavox team won this suit as well as later law suits in the Court of Appeals. Much money changed hands. Additional patent infringement lawsuits vs. Mattel, Activision, Nintendo and several arcade game manufacturer went to trial over the next decade. All of these lawsuits were won by the Sanders/Magnavox team and , along with income from many patent licenses, brought in a total of close to a hundred million dollars over that period of time

Post by **Bas** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 6:49 pm

Enjoy the new April Edition here

(Press Ctrl+F5 if the old one is cached in your memory)

To continue the line of stories about the last generation CD-i games, the title ‘The Lost Ride’ brings back lots of memories.... click click click!

It's starting to look like a magazine this time

Post by **Devin** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 9:58 pm

That's a great new layout Bas! The use of images really brings it to life as well, nice work.

It's really amazing what we've now learnt about The Lost Ride and its developer. Come quite a long way from these early beginnings to SONYS pinup studio for the PS3 in Killzone 2. Although Merijn attempted to explain the NeoGeo link to me on several occassions I rather presumed he meant the SNK Neo-Geo (kickme!) and never even considered a seperate company! Thanks for the insight Bas, i've been unconfused

MPEG Branching in itself is a very interesting technology, Merijn conducted some research in this field a few years ago where he turned up a proposal to create a virtual city racer game and get this, they wanted to make a CD-i linkup cable. Think Halo on XBOX except in a racing game and with CD-i players! If Bas is willing i'm sure we could put our collective heads together and research this topic with more vigour.

Merijn · Post by **Merijn** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 12:56 am

Nice one Bas!
Gotta admit that I never thought of NeoGeo in that way, I presumed the same thing as Devin, with SNK Neo Geo being involved.. although I never understood that link at all.. good to see that covered!

Yeah that racing game would be a great thing to explore. It was to be a sort of cops and robbers style game (Think of Need for Speed Hot Persuit) meets Dead End meets Xbox Live .. or something along those lines... If you ever feel like exploring Id be happy to assist!

Post by **Devin** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:05 am

I'd like to explore how far this idea actually got. Although i'm fairly convinced it didn't get past the drawing board maybe a few tests were run on the CD-i to CD-i link cable idea which would be an interesting story to uncover.

Post by **Bas** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 9:19 pm

Hello everyone, again. It's that time of the month again. And before you all go clicking the appropiate link - Hold your breath as it is not there yet!

With some new updates in the pipeline the different stories will fall into a puzzle which is really the beauty of this 'job'. This month we share some thoughts with a very young cd-i developer who was only around 20 years old when he developed 'his' cd-i project. It's a true third party title again being in development for more than three years! Realizing he did it all by himself marks this as a very special product. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? You'll see...

Post by **Devin** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 10:46 pm

The only solo project I know of would be Rise of the Robots conversion! OUtside of that could it be something to do with Zenith?

Post by **Bas** » Wed Apr 26, 2006 11:49 am

I think more cd-i games are developed by mainly just one person than you know of. Zenith was coded by one person, Micro Machines was...

But hey, devin, people start asking questions if we are from the same team

ofcourse you already know

cdifan · Post by **cdifan** » Wed Apr 26, 2006 4:11 pm

It depends on what you mean by "developed", of course. Does it include graphics design? Level design? Music? The manual text? Or even the manual graphics?

Even if we're just talking about programming, do the underlying libraries count? What about tools? I'm talking about in-house stuff here, of course; if you can/could buy it commercially it's outside the equation as far as I'm concerned; only a maniac would build his own C compiler

If you don't count tools and libraries, many titles were probably programmed by a single person. If you do count them, the number probably drops quite dramatically...

Post by **Bas** » Wed Apr 26, 2006 6:03 pm

ok, that was a tricky sentence. With a conversion of a title this may be a different case then. You're using material which has already been created. The conversion was done by one person, or so I am told. Maybe many conversions are handled by a single person, i don't know. I am interested, though

Post by **Bas** » Fri May 05, 2006 7:37 pm

Yo - That's right, one week too late. Shame on me. The good news though is that you can enjoy the new read right now by clicking this link:

Enjoy the new May Edition here

(Press Ctrl+F5 if the old one is cached in your memory)

When only recently we talked with the original CD-i coder of Creature Shock a lot of interesting facts about this game showed up. click click click!

Post by **Devin** » Fri May 05, 2006 8:08 pm

These really do just keep getting better and better Bas, nice work!

Post by **Bas** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 9:37 am

Oh my.

I'm happy my deadlines are only virtual otherwise I would get the sack on this

- This is just to tell you I'm giving it the final touch and hopefully it will be up tonight. Yay!

Post by **Bas** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 4:21 pm

Enjoy the new June Edition here

(Press Ctrl+F5 if the old one is cached in your memory)

Today something happened out of my control. While I'm collecting different stories the same time to diverse the column as much as possible, the website Le Monde du CD-i published an article about the same subject I had done some research in for one of the coming months. Now, I felt like it was old stuff if I would publish it much later so I changed the format a little to form the blog and published it for June. The story I planned for this month will just slip to July

It still reads a little rough, some minor changes are planned as soon as I have some time.

Enjoy & Comment!

Post by **Devin** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 8:51 pm

Talk about timing!

I was thinking about this with the XBOX 360 just recently, already the design has been copied into a SKY HD (High Definition) Box. It's a complete rip off! Doubt we can read too much into the design similarities between the CD-i remote and the Nintendo Wii design. We're all built the same way so especially with a controller, familiarity is bound to ring true through the various iterations of similar hardware/function. I'd argue that basic console controllers have only had two distinct generations, those that cater for 2D video games so consider the 16-BIT platforms and before, the Master System, NES, SNES, Genesis/Megadrive all share the same basic concept. Then comes the 3D experience and i'd hazard a guess that the Saturns controller for "Nights" was the first that set the standard for all future designs to date.

It's an interesting angle to cover Bas and rather unexpected in a good way! Look forward to more of your research.

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The Black Moon Monthly Column - New

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