A hugely ginormous chat with Doug Little!

You probably all know him from his achievements back in the day, with Apex Media and Photochrome, not to mention a parallel existence as a Pixel Twin. You will definitely know him latterly if you are a Falcon owner, as his 'Bad Mood' makes the rest of us deliriously happy! In his own words, here he is.

Start of Interview..

Maggie:- Hi Doug, I'm starting with the usual cliched opener I'm afraid. Could you tell me a bit about your life in general, your early days, your passions, jobs, favourite brand of cheese and all that?

Doug:- I grew up in a small village in Scotland, in a fruit-growing area. I spent most of my time outdoors, not much into TV. Later I became fascinated with electronic stuff (mainly taking things apart, not putting them back together!). When the home computer came along, I think my parents figured it was another thing to disassemble so they took some convincing at first...

I first saw a computer in the last year of primary school, when one of the teachers obtained a ZX Spectrum (one!) to share across the whole school. I didn't get much time on that it was busy but somebody in my street had one and I used that a few times. The thing I found most interesting was the mysterious BASIC and its commands.

So I twisted some arms and got a Spectrum for Xmas. It was great. Played some games, but soon got into listings from magazines (C&VG?) peek & poke, and was hacking UDGs before long - trying to recreate 'space invaders' etc. I soon discovered the mysterious 'machine code' which made no sense to me, especially trying to enter it from BASIC and failed to do anything meaningful with it except to invoke the 'Sinclair Research' message in cunning new ways. Anyway I saw that people could make fast games with this 'machine code' and wanted to figure it out.

Around that time, a friend had bought a C64 and impressed/annoyed me with a few games mostly playing SID music. Another friend had obtained a Dragon32 and some of those games were quite good. I was struck by how different everything looked & sounded between the 3 machines. However one day I saw 'Elite' (IIRC on the Dragon but could have been C64), and something happened in my brain which left a lasting mark a 3D universe encoded in a handful of bytes... permanent damage!

So for whatever reason, I got a TRS-80 Colour Computer. I still can't make sense of this decision. Support in my area was poor, graphics and audio were suspect - but it turned out to be fun for low level hacking.

It turned out to be a very good machine for learning machine code. Which I did. The 6809e was easy to grasp once I got hold of the right information (more magazines). I typed in the assembler (a lengthy hex listing from Input Magazine, which permitted zero typos) and used this to make a Tron game and other projects. I had a speech synth cartridge for it which I hacked to play music with the phonemes. I used the analog joystick port to record samples and replay them through the speech synth using YM-like volume changes.

None of this actually required buying any software which was a good thing because there wasn't much to buy :-)

Maggie:- That was an unexpected but interesting last part about the Tandy CoCo. Was there anything at all saved from those very early days or has it all gone to digital dust by now?

Doug:- I don't have anything left from Spectrum or TRS-80 days. I don't think I've seen an audio cassette in decades. I have no idea where any of that stuff went or why I would chuck it but gone it is :)

Maggie:- How did you get into Atari computing, what was there about that hardware or brand name that appealed to you?

Doug:- I got tired of the fact that nobody else could use or even see the stuff I had made for the TRS-80 unless I carried it around. Nobody else had one. It helped me to learn coding, but that was about it. I later learned that it was largely compatible with the Dragon, but never took advantage of that. I wasn't exactly in touch with other TRS-80 users.

By this time, the friend with Dragon had got bored of that and kept showing me some fold-out/poster thing of an imminent new machine called... the 'Amiga'. It looked awesome - too awesome. The contrast vs the other machines which came before was difficult to describe.

I couldn't afford an Amiga and my family wanted me to spend more time outdoors again, and less time on keyboards. So all I could do is suffer that friend and his ever-growing Amiga literature (no machine just lots of printed stuff).

Maggie:- Ha, sounds like a classic fanboy!

Doug:- Finally, another friend pointed out another machine which had roughly - the same sort of spec and a bit cheaper. I was introduced to the Atari 520 ST. I twisted arms again and was soon in the driving seat. My head spun with the potential of the ST.

I didn't have much in the way of software for the ST at first a few iffy games, BASIC (again), and a paint program. I bought Art Studio and started painting sprites. Better games did appear and I was impressed by a few of them, especially some 3D stuff which I had been fascinated with since discovering Elite...

I soon bought STOS as well and did quite a lot with that, including an unfinished game.

I must have obtained Devpac before long having learned 6809 I wouldn't rest without an assembler for the new machine. The whole process of learning 68k seems fuzzy to me now but was probably rapid, bootstrapped from the earlier chip. One of the earliest things I did was create assembly subroutines for STOS programs. This is really how I discovered the TopNotch guys a bit later on, since they were doing the same sort of thing on a bigger scale (Neilly of BSS had co-developed some TopNotch extensions & demo pieces and member of The Gap/Flair).

It was around this time I discovered the audio/visual style of Arcade machines (Nemesis, R-Type) and wanted to reproduce something like that on my ST. I wasn't convinced the ST games which were appearing were 'doing it right' and wanted to have a go.

(When I later saw Xenon for the ST I thought 'yes like that!')

Maggie:- Were there any other games written commercially for the ST that you feel gratified your expectations? Conversely, any major missed opportunities in your view?

Doug:- Dungeon Master and Oids were gaming works of art. They may not have been demo material, but great games. A lot of time spent on those. Bundling the Oids map editor was a great idea. My brother and I would make ridiculous deathtraps to annoy each other with.

Frontier was good if a bit buggy (not surprising it must have been very difficult and slow to construct). Impression of freedom to roam and the game interesting to explore. Curved polys! Combat was a bit iffy. Mercenary games were classics great tech and full of humour. I also liked the Starglider games. Populous & Sim City got quite a bit of time even if they were plodding 'armchair material'. Quite a few shooters, although Xenon and Turrican II got more time than the others. Speedball wrecked a few joysticks in 2 player :)

I don't really remember playing that many games though. I liked to check them out and see what people had managed to do but only a small number were played often.

Before long I discovered others in my town had Atari ST's and would 'network' (on foot!) and share stuff (Nod). It was only then that I encountered... demos.

Woah... so many possibilities, especially in the technical gaps between what games needed to do and what demos.. demo'd.

Maggie:- Ahh, the ever popular topic of the demoscene, and how you came to find it. What demos impressed you the most in the early days and how did the Pixel Twins get together?

Doug:- The Pixel Twins were a few guys who swapped disks by post and did random stuff on ST's mostly slideshows. One (Nod) lived nearby. There were no coders as such. I wanted to make demos and they wanted somebody to do the 68k.

At that time it was the early-mid ST era. TCB/Union were fresh and these made an impression on me. I began to follow the scene after that. Nod kept me fed with the latest demos and news - he knew the PD suppliers etc. I just stuck to coding.

So I made some small Pixel Twins screens. I didn't really know what I was doing. There was no internet as such and of course no emulators to help reverse code for a newcomer - so scraping techniques together was slow and clumsy. Cover disks and PD probably helped.

Before long one of us decided that a big multi-screen demo would be a good idea. It wasn't really - since there were few members contributing code, no interesting ideas on the horizon, and no experience making big demos. But it went ahead anyway. It was a painful experience. I should have just worked on a single demo and spent more time making that decent. :) Still, we got something out and I felt good about it at the time even if it does look a bit crappy now.

I remember working on a lot of ideas with PCM the 3D graphics / raytrace fanatic he could compile a POVRay scene in his head, with great complexity, then go type it in and do a very rough preview in an hour. He'd kick off his ST and run it overnight. In the morning an image sometimes appeared and he either decided it was good, or rejected it and made another one. Sometimes it could take a week before he saw the image...

We'd have a lot of discussions about ways to abuse 3D art/textures via code, how to colour shadows, what shapes would look good in a demo and so on. He wasn't really a pixel painter or a coder exactly but some sort of 'bridge' with feet in both camps and a lot of ideas.

I recently used his skybox script to create cloudscapes for one of my Quake- engine tests. PCM was obsessed with lamp-posts, bollards and iron street furniture. None of us ever figured out why. He raytraced a lot of those things when nobody was looking (I kept some of the evidence! :-)

Maggie:- At what point did you realise that you have marketable commercial skills. Could you tell us a bit more about those days?

Doug:- I don't remember ever thinking about that I just heard that there was a game developer in my city and the guy who owned it was a friend of someone or other... so I visited that company with a small stack of floppy disks. I liked the idea of painting sprites for games. I was told 'we have art covered, but we need programmers'. So I said 'ok, that sounds good too'. A few minutes later I was a junior game developer.

They had lots of STs and Amiga's there. I think it was the first time I saw an Amiga. I also discovered that they didn't like coding on the Amiga directly because it would 'guru' a lot. They put a boot stub floppy in the drive, stood back at a safe distance and sent stuff down a cable from Devpac-ST. Cool! I could learn Amiga hardware without pulling my eyeballs out through my ears.

I don't actually know what it was like to code directly on Amiga since we had that handy piece of insulation (a MegaST 4, which I still have). Maybe it would not have been so bad in practice.

Maggie:- I just wonder at how much development at a commercial/professional level was done in those days remotely. Even in the 8-bit days. A world away from a geeky kid typing away on a rubber keyboard in their bedroom!

Doug:- In those days we still worked from the office mostly, but on a couple of projects I was working from home for a period to save on the commute! Alan (the art guy) worked from home almost exclusively and visited when we needed to sync up on ideas.

The games at that company (ICE) were written in 68k hundreds of thousands of lines of it, in a single source file. One big blob. The Amiga version was assembled by changing a flag in the source. Having said that, most of the other guys there seemed to prefer doing work for Amiga, probably because it made some things easier.

Maggie:- You were best known to the rest of us in the rather small Atari Falcon owning world as the guru behind Apex Media, could you tell us a bit more?

Doug:- I created Apex mainly because I missed Cyberpaint on the ST, which I had much experience with – preparing graphics for ST & Amiga games (not just prepping images but working closely with the various file formats and performing operations on sprite sequences in bulk). The Falcon was a great machine but I felt stuck without a graphics pipeline I could use.

However once the project was well under way, it branched off in 10 different directions as different people wanted new features and sent me wish lists, comparisons with Amiga paint packages and so on... it grew legs and soon became a 'product'. Despite this I was mostly satisfied that, by the end, it could still process sprites. And we did use it to process all graphics for the Jaguar project 'Livewire' later on.

Maggie:- I remember lots of publicity for Apex 2 back in the day, also things like Apex Audio. How far along did these get before they were canned? Is there anything left to salvage from the remains?

Doug:- I have a working demo here of 'Apex alpha' (Apex 2, although it was announced as v3 since the first Apex had reached v2.4x) which I may not have shown to anyone. It's probably of limited interest since you can't use it for much practical, except to get a feel for what it might have become but I'll post on it sometime when less busy.

Apex Audio was going to be a lego kit for the DSP which would let you combine audio processing steps in realtime, so you could use it either as a remote instrument if the arrangement was not too complex, or as an audio processing tool for offline work making instruments for trackers or whatever. I don't think we properly defined all its use cases and we didn't get very far with it :-) the Jaguar surfaced around that time IIRC.

Maggie:- Were there any fond memories of those halcyon far-off days that you might want to share with us?

Doug:- Running a small company consisting of Atari and gamedev / demoscene oriented people in their 20's was completely insane - in good and bad ways. In the later days of BSS, we were nearly all living in the same hostel-like flat, coding (and/or drinking) most of the night or playing LAN games noisily while others tried to sleep.

e.g. PCM turns up at 4am after a long binge at the pub, wanting a one-way conversation about his music collection while Colin (of TopNotch) was trying to make pancakes to support the networked Doom tourney going on in the living room. One of the other members is temporarily off-world. At the same time, Murphy and I were playing the same coma-inducing sound sample: 'first, you have to know what it is' over and over thousands of times until the Jaguar sound system would finally crash and we could try to debug it, not yet being fully aware of all the Jag hardware bugs, having been awake for 2 days and counting. The latest tracker MOD would be playing in a loop from one of 7 different edits while a dozen cooler fans were whirring, as all available machines were trying to raytrace PCMs scenery tiles, while anyone not already in an altered state was trying to edit a map with tiles rendered the previous night, and were about to change on a whim because the light source wasn't orange enough.

I could only describe it as being stuck in a never ending, but partly wound- down party where people are getting paid to do semi random, sometimes useful things, with people who sometimes were brilliant and inspiring and sometimes you wanted to kill or dismember. It was like that pretty much all of the time. I ran up huge phone bills trying to make sense of everything and still get stuff produced.

Sometimes I feel bad about how little we actually got released, of all the ideas we had but other times I realise its just a miracle we managed to do anything at all.

Maggie:- It sure sounded like a blast, but we now come to a sad but inevitable question, how did you end up leaving the platform, back in the mid-nineties?

Doug:- I think the some of stuff I wrote above is partly a clue :)

IIRC it was becoming clear BSS would not survive with its level of output. It could have - a bit longer - if we had focused more on the right projects, but Atari's days were numbered and we all needed jobs & income. Most of us went back into the game dev universe (writing code or making graphics for PCs).

I think some damage was done by having Atari projects coupled to income, rather than just fun/hobby stuff. I guess that was part of it.

Maggie:- Are you still in touch with any of the other guys from those days, Colin, Eddie, Neil, Dave Encill?

Doug:- I'm still in touch with Neil, although he moved to CA some of the others either left for jobs abroad (Nick Hesketh of BSS went to Crytek years ago) or otherwise vanished. I think Dave Murphy went off to work for Nintendo or Sony later but no idea where he is now.

Maggie:- What did you do after that? I recall previously hearing about some games developing history on post-16 bit platforms.

Doug:- I worked for a lot of different game companies, mostly producing technology (engines) for their games. Either 3D engines or toolchains for those engines.

In a couple of cases - on consoles - I produced an engine for a single game (i.e. It was intended for multiple games but was used in only one). This was the approximate lifespan of new technology on the consoles and I also found this pretty annoying. You could either be one member of a large team and not have much control, or you could do everything yourself and take too long about it, and maybe manage a single release before having to start again.

I almost had a stress breakdown while building a PS2 engine on my own, and also had a minor head injury/concussion during the project which just made the situation much worse. The game did make a commercial release in the end but I realised that burnout was close and needed to find something else.

While all the PC & console work was interesting, it was more fun in the earlier days.

Maggie:- It sounds like you got out just in time. Having left all of that madness behind you, what do you do for a living these days?

Doug:- I'm currently heading R&D for a code understanding / translation technology which gets used for different purposes including obfuscation, crypto and code analysis. Yes, it's a world away from Atari or game dev :)

Maggie:- Hmm, that sounds almost like one of those jobs, were I to press for more information about it, some dark-suited gentlemen wearing wraparound sunglasses would drop by for a relaxed informal chat, and my fingernails!

Anyway, coming back to recent times, what got you back into the ST and Falcon?

Doug:- Partly because somebody reminded me, showed me there was still a small Atari community. Partly because I remembered it was fun. Partly because I still had some Atari gear stored away!

Maggie:- Some of us never left - grin!

So moving on to Bad Mood, massive undertaking or what! How much is there still to go before that one is done?

Doug:- BadMooD took a long time :) It could have been done in a fraction of the time and half or less of the effort but it developed in an insane way split across different decades. But I think it was worth finishing even if it will be viewed by some as another port - there is still enough inside making it unique. I did get some nice feedback from people telling me that it is fun to play so that is the best possible result.

There is not much left to do. There were many other things I had planned (new front end/intro, fixes to the music, improved textures), but they were overtaken by work on the newer engine. I'll probably still do some of it (music/gfx tweaks) but they wont be so extensive. I'll probably do a Doom II release at some point if I find time, especially if I can optimise it a bit more.

There is probably limited interest in further releases anyway, beyond fixes and tweaks - and better to spend time on something new.

Maggie:- There were a number of promising Atari projects apart from Bad Mood, which were abandoned in the mid-nineties. Are any more of these due to be dusted off and started anew?

Doug:- There are some I might return to, but I also started to think of some new ideas and these are perhaps better to focus on. I don't know how much time I will have to play, so will have to choose...

The older projects involve 3D graphics and some stuff learned during my game development years, which I either didn't get to do or were interrupted or cut short. I think some of them are still worth revisiting.

As for the Atari projects it's unlikely I have any code from back then that I would revisit or is worth saving. Anything I try to do now will be new, or at least based on stuff I didn't try yet on Atari.

Maggie:- And are there any brand new projects that you're looking forward to realising on the ST/Falcon?

Doug:- I have been developing a new technique for the Falcon, while working on the Q2 project. It was started some time ago but hasn't had enough effort on it to 'break' it yet. I should know soon if it will work or not...

There are a few demo related ideas but better to make them work before talking about them :)

Part of my interest is directed towards a game but I also realise that few people will put in time to play a new game for an old machine, I'd need to think twice about that. And the kind of game I'd want to make would require an attention span longer than a gnat's eyelash this also may not be popular with today's mobile culture. :)

Maggie:- You might get more interest in a new game for an old machine than you think. What were you thinking of doing and on what platform?

Doug:- Some kind of procedural explorable thing :-)

Years ago I was working on a type of game which is content-rich but can still be practically built by a single person or a small team. It's less interesting now than it was back then for a bunch of different reasons, but it would still be fun to try on the right platform.

Part of my interest is of course in producing demos. This may be the sensible option!

Maggie:- A similar question to the one immediately above, do you have any type of 'thing' in mind for a future demo?

Doug:- I doubt that I'll be 'porting' any more games or engines from PC. I'm not really interested in the subject of porting per se the Doom / Quake engine stuff was a specific rendering-related itch that bugged me for a long time because what Carmack did, almost from scratch on his own, blew my mind.

I knew the F030 might achieve this kind of rendering but couldn't work out the details of how it should be done. Now that I have figured that out I can put it to bed. :)

There are still plenty of things to try. I haven't put enough new code together yet to make a proper attempt but I'm getting there. If anything comes of that, you can be sure it will be putting serious pressure on a Falcon. I will try not to cheat but no promises ;)

Maggie:- I'm not so sure if anything can be considered in demos as 'cheating' these days, apart from the 'realtime vs non-realtime thing'. Even cheaty effects require a fair bit of coding ability to get them on to a screen in the first place!

But back to topic. Are we reaching the limits on the Falcon with your Quake 2 engine? Or is there still more to be squeezed?

Doug:- We could be reaching -my- limits on the Falcon :-) I can't speak for anyone else.

Throughout the project I had the feeling that I was getting stuck / cornered and would have to give up. After returning from a holiday or a bunch of work deadlines, I'd realise that my last solution was crap and I could improve it and this just kept happening. It's still happening. I don't see why it can't continue so long as its interesting for somebody with time. That's what drove the whole ST/Amiga scene for years.

I think the techniques I used in that last engine can be improved upon so it's definitely not the last word but I may be doing something else by then. I might tweak it further but I'll be focusing on something new.

Maggie:- Atari ST/STE, Falcon 030, CT60, which of these platforms has the most untapped potential? It's a broad question, but you've got very broad coding hands!

Doug:- The ST line has near-ideal demo platform characteristics (fixed spec, clear constraints, a constant-time device, learning curve not too steep, exploitable hardware glitches, long history of demos etc.) so things will continue to appear, even if it's been around forever. Will completely new stuff appear to surprise us? Don't know.

The CT6x clearly has the most untapped potential re: usable power... but expectations are set at a level which is unclear for me anyway. But then I haven't even configured mine properly yet so I can't really comment :)

The F030 I think has the most 'surprise potential' remaining. It's not an ideal demo platform, but it is still a bit of an untapped unknown with a long enough history to set expectations for new releases.

The untapped aspect may be a result of all those accelerators (not limited to CT6x) which appeared quite early in its history and before very long, disrupted the initial drive to explore the original base spec. I myself was influenced by this race for speed upgrades.

Perhaps the 16MHz Falcon will start a new life because there is no longer a rush to upgrade the machine / keep up with other platforms? OTOH, they are getting to be a bit rare these days...

Maggie:- But they can be switched down to base mode usually, also there is Hatari, which is slowly getting better as an emulator for the Falcon.

Moving swiftly on, Which figures in the Atari scene do you respect the most?

Doug:- I'll avoid the temptation to greet and keep it general :)

Those who are still using their creativity and stretching their skills, in whatever area interests them.

I think demos got made for many different reasons but creativity made performance coding interesting for non-coders (as well as keeping other coders on their toes) and this theme continues.

I still like to see effects where it isn't obvious how it's done just by looking at it :)

Maggie:- People can and have also gone from being ex-members of the Atari scene, managed to find a little more spare time, regain motivation and came back. Never say never again!

Doug:- Yep I think most of the people who move in and out do keep active with interesting stuff, Atari or otherwise.

I am still amazed at the older discoveries like overscan and syncscroll... the sound variety that was achieved from the basic YM, and some of the weird uses that were figured out for the blitter.

I respect the ones who write up their work and techniques and share it and/or their source with others who want to learn.

I also respect those who make/maintain tools to let others do their thing.

I think though that I always had a particular respect for the musicians - because while I conquered code and occasionally managed some art as well, I was always a bit envious of those who could compose good music on any of these machines particularly ST. I still try now and again, but damn it is not easy :) so that's my fuzzy answer.

Maggie:- So musicians will get the love. Same as it ever was!

Doug:- I guess so, but great music always travelled best with matching pixels and coded effects. :)

Maggie:- And who in the wider development/demoscene creative community do you respect?

Doug:- 80's-90's games? Braben & Bell / Woakes / Bell & Jaros.

90's-00's PC game tech? Carmack & Abrash / Silverman / Naylor

10's-- game tech? Dunno. :) I'm getting old.

PC demoscene? Smash, iq/rgba, Trixter come to mind, for totally different reasons. But there are plenty - I couldn't really name all the people who do interesting stuff.

Maggie:- We're at the end of the interview now, so here's the last question. Do you have any final thoughts for the readers of Maggie?

Doug:- Brush off your Assembler/Compiler/Painter/Tracker or Chip soft, and get busy.

Maggie:- Well we won't disagree with that sentiment! Thanks for all your time and these awesome answers Doug. And see you in a new kickass production sometime soon.

Maggie 25th Anniversary issue, in collaboration with Doug Little, June/July 2015.

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