Conversion Kings: Uridium
Graftgold’s Commodore 64 hit Uridium couldn’t be converted to the ZX Spectrum – even the firm’s founder Steve Turner agreed. But as Steve tells Retro Gamer, a quick look at Dominic Robinson’s Spectrum Uridium demo completely changed his mind
Discover how Dominic Robinson created his impressive Spectrum take of the C64 hit
The UK’S top two home computers during the Eighties – the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 – had very different hardware, which made it challenging to convert games that played to one system’s strengths to its rival. But in the case of Graftgold’s Uridium, the firm’s chart-topper had been so intrinsically designed around the C64’s inner workings that a conversion to the Spectrum was dismissed out of hand.
Graftgold’s founder Steve Turner also took this view, but then a demo forced both him and his publisher Hewson Consultants to revaluate their positions. “Andrew Hewson had asked me about converting Uridium to the Spectrum, and I’d just said that it wasn’t worth spending the time on with the techniques that I had at the time,” Steve concedes. “Then later on he happened to mention Dominic Robinson’s demo, although he didn’t think he could make it into a game. But I was just blown away by it – demo or not. I thought, ‘Wow! This is something else.’ I hadn’t ever seen that sort of thing on the Spectrum.”
Although initially doubtful, Hewson’s boss was convinced by Steve of the merits of Dominic’s demo, and this led to the firm employing the young developer. “I said then and there, ‘Sign him up; this guy is worth his salt!’” Steve enthuses. “Because I knew Uridium well, and I knew that there wasn’t actually a lot of ‘game’ code in it; it was quite straightforward. So I knew Dominic could probably turn his demo into Uridium, and I think that when Hewson talked to him further everyone there was so impressed that they got him in-house.”
The challenges facing Dominic on starting his job weren’t insignificant, however, as his demo’s Dreadnoughts took up a lot of space. “I’m pretty sure all Dominic had in his Uridium demo was the sideways scrolling, and we had to encourage him to make it into the game,” Steve remembers. “First of all, he thought there was no way that it could be done. The Dreadnoughts were quite big, and he had to have them eight times in [the] memory, so they completely filled the Spectrum.”
But in keeping with the novel approach that he had taken when producing his Uridium demo, Dominic solved his full-blown version’s memory problems by dispensing with conventional coding wisdom. “It was a question of making his demo more compressed so that he could squash the other code in,” Steve notes, “and then he had to write that code in as small a portion as he could. Dominic had to virtually turn programming on its head to do it, and that took someone really clever, who was not only conceiving ideas, but was also working in such a different way.”
Dominic’s approach to squeezing Uridium into a Spectrum equated to coding without a safety net and employing tricks that other developers wouldn’t consider. “Dominic didn’t seem to distinguish between data and code; his graphics actually had the code to put them on the screen wrapped around them,” Steve reveals. “He also used a
‘dirty cell’ mechanism, where once he had done the background he kept the bits that the manta and the enemy craft were flying over – because the ships disturbed the background, and he then plotted the ships over the bits that he had kept.”
Naturally, Steve and Uridium’s original creator Andrew Braybrook were keen to assess Dominic’s ZX Spectrum version on its completion, but given Steve’s early involvement, their approval was all but guaranteed. “Dominic understood that the critical thing was the framerate, so I don’t think Andrew and I really had anything detrimental to say about it at all,” Steve recalls. “I was very pleased with it. I think Andrew hadn’t expected much from it because it was for the Spectrum, but he was pleasantly surprised about the way that it handled.”
But not satisfied with achieving the seemingly impossible, Dominic and his design partner – John Cumming – spent a weekend producing a second set of Dreadnoughts that could be unlocked with a code. “There was just a ‘bit’ that had to be flicked to turn the hidden levels on,” Steve recalls. “I suppose they added them because Dominic was so proud to have some memory left over. He had just managed to get so much compression in there, which was brilliant really, and he didn’t need much memory for them, because they used existing graphics.”
However, rather than immediately telling his boss – Andrew Hewson – about this Easter egg, Dominic kept his hidden fleet secret until just before the game’s release. “Perhaps he thought that he would get into trouble for doing something that he wasn’t
meant to do, because he was on the payroll by that time,” Steve theorises. “But it’s strange, because I would have thought Hewson would have announced the hidden levels straightaway.”
But while Dominic and John had found room to fit in extra Dreadnoughts, they didn’t have space for the original’s post-level Dreadnought destructions. “I think it was purely a matter of trying to squash it all in; Dominic had to be really drastic with what he included,” Steve points out. “The Dreadnought flyovers would have been cheap to do, and someone of Dominic’s brilliance could have somehow destroyed the Dreadnought graphics as they scrolled along. Although they would have taken extra coding, and I know it was really crammed in there in the end, so he may have had them in at one time and had to take them out.”
Another feature of the C64 Uridium was also left out of the ZX Spectrum version, specifically the original’s fruit machine-inspired bonus game, although in reviewing Dominic’s conversion Steve is happy to let this minor omission slide. “The bonus game would have needed different graphics, so that likely became a candidate to cut to give Dominic more memory,” Steve reasons. “But I was quite happy, because it was purely a little bit of relaxation at the end of a level, and I was just amazed that he and John could get Uridium in the machine at all.”