I have heard that Ocean had a library of routines that used throughout their later advanced games, that was really nicely organised and easy to use.

Has anyone seen/has it?

I think Lasse has the ocean multiplexer on his site covert bitops.

http://cadaver.homeftp.net/rants/sprite.htm

The ODK doesn't seem to have been preserved anywhere, I went hunting for it a while ago, asking people who worked with it etc, nothing.

Seems the archives start at the PsyQ "systems" where the SNES And Saturn tools are around etc.

That's a shame. Maybe it will surface somewhere eventually.

Paul Hughes did make his Freeload source available (which was also modified for their cartridge releases).

http://www.pauliehughes.com/page3/page3.html
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That was a great read, cheers.

Good point!

Although the guy is saying that he is only making this code available because he had written the original loader before he joined Ocean, therefore he owned it. But it wouldn't hurt to ask!

Nobody asked I don't bite

Nice to see my old multiplexors are still living on - was interesting reading the analysis of it. Both the fast shell sort and stack based insertion sorts were my doing - they were pretty much used in every C64 game we put out from Mario Bros onwards!

We didn't have a C64 library of routines at Ocean per-se - but there was some sharing of code - Terra Cresta begat Slapfight for example. Navy Seals was used as a start point to do Total Recall (in four weeks!)

I did keep a bunch of common routines - the loader, mutiplexor, music drivers, scroll routines, text prints, visual effects and the like which got passed around as they evolved but there wasn't an official library as such.

I've got quite a bit of old source code from my Ocean days - obviously copyright and ownership is an issue, but I wrote a whole bunch of stuff post-Ocean that I could possibly resurrect if there's interest for it.

Count me in as an interested party. I always find enlightening looking at how many things were solved in a constrained environment as it was the C64. Please, go ahead. Information wants to be free.

yep, interested here
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Okey doke, I'll have a scour through my archives at the weekend. Anything specific that people are looking for?

As a starter for ten, I'll dig out my last iteration of the multiplexor and put the source up on my website - there's a few variations - in New Zealand story for example, it only sorted six sprites in the multiplex so that two sprites used for hires overlays were guaranteed to have the highest priority, but that stuff is trivial to implement if you require it.

I believe Armalyte used something similar to the stack based insertion sort that myself, Andy Braybrook, Gary Liddon and John Twiddy were banding around back in the day. I think Ste Ruddy's Bionic Commandos used the stack based code too - we had many a brainstorm about multiplexors on the train journeys to and from work

Most of the Ocean titles went with the original fast sort.

Anyhoo, I'll see what I can dig up...