News Acornsoft Licenses Revs to Firebird for C-64

[RSC]

Popular Computing Weekly magazine reported this week that we will see Geoffrey Crammond's Revs racing simulation on other platforms, also announcing the base software will include both Silverstone and Brands Hatch. It should retail for £14.95 on cassette and £17.95 on disc.

Acornsoft Licenses Revs to Firebird for C-64 | Race Sim Central

Popular Computing Weekly magazine reported this week that we will see Geoffrey Crammond’s Revs racing simulation on other platforms, also announcing the base software will include both Silverstone and Brands Hatch. It should retail for £14.95 on cassette and £17.95 on disc. Full text of the news...

racesimcentral.net

 

[shrapnel1977]

https://racesimcentral.net/acornsoft-licenses-revs-to-firebird-for-c-64/

Firebird were the game publishing division of British Telecom:

"We went on to publish Elite for other platforms with British Telecom, which at that point was still a government company. It hadn't yet been privatised. We said "Don't you make Telephones?"

We got what I think was the first ever six-figure advance in the [gaming] industry.... it was fantastic because with Acorn we weren't on anything like as good a deal as we were on with Firebird. [at this point] being a professional game developer became a career path [for me]."

David Braben, speaking in 2015


Acorn dropped the ball really here by not publishing REVs and Elite for other platforms in-house. They did not want to publish anything that was not for their hardware, so they essentially handed the keys to "tons of cash" to BT. The C-64, and ZX Spectrum markets were considerably larger than any Acorn hardware, especially globally.

The following year Acornsoft moved away from publishing games at all to focus on in-house office and productivity software. Most Acornsoft game titles were then licenced to Superior Software.

"I had converted REVS to the Commodore for Acornsoft but they ended up not publishing that version. Acornsoft had a desire to do it but Acorn itself didn't want to, because it was supporting another machine. So they asked Telecomsoft, who had the Firebird label, if they were interested, and that's how it ended up getting published by them.

The first headache [porting REVS to C-64] was that although it had the same processor [as the BBC Micro], in the Commodore 64 it runs at half the speed, so there was a lot of speed to be made up, somehow. In its favour the Commodore had more memory. In the BBC, half the memory is system ROM, whereas in the Commodore 64 you can almost get all 64K for your game. So I could use techniques where I would use more [memory] space to make something work faster, so perhaps a calculation I could store in tables. I think I stored some log tables in there to speed up the maths."

Geoff Crammond, speaking in 2015

 

[Tim Wheatley]

wow, this is cracking info. A little shocked they were probably so secretive and silly that they wouldn't use Crammond's own port!