FUTURE PLANS

The programming - or engineering - area is on the first floor of the large Rare headquarters. The first room is Tim Stamper's graphics office, equipped with several computers, two large drawing boards-one bearing a giant game logo being prepared in expanded pixel form with a title we are not allowed to mention - a video area with studio lights to help with digitising complex three-dimensional shapes and a closed rack containing all the past, famous Ultimate packaging illustrations.

It was in Tim's graphics area that Cameron photographed screens of three of the games Rare has already finished for Japan, one as long as two years ago. For some 40 minutes ha crouched under a long black shroud stretching from camera to monitor (intended to keep stray light off the screen), while Chris knelt in front of the sat, ducking his head out of the camera's way, playing the games.

Along a corridor there are several rooms off: a general office, the play room - equipped with much coin-op cabinet paraphernalia - the music room and a string of further software development areas.

The main development room, large and airy, has desks, computers and monitors around the edge where the software engineers all work. Different types of Nintendo machines lie everywhere as well as stacks of cartridges, cards and Nintendo disks. As we arrived, a new package of games had just been delivered from Japan as well as Rare's first PC Engine - the latest machine in the range and all the rage in the homeland. The package was ripped open and its contents eagerly loaded. Rare also receives several of the Japanese Nintendo magazines (see panel), and despite the indecipherable Japanese pictographic script, these appeared to be as much in demand as either CRASH or THE GAMES MACHINE.

In talking to several of the engineers, a strange thought occurred. While they are obviously aware of the scene around them, it is as though they see it through a dark glass, I was often asked questions about the latest games in the manner of interested people from the Moon-they'd heard about them, possibly even seen and played them, but knew nothing much about how they were doing. Rare is like a time capsule, its people on a nodding acquaintance with their ne ghbours, but the r eyes a fixed on a distant goal no-one around them can see. When I asked Tim if he had any contact with other software houses, he said: 'Yes, a lot of contact with the Japanese.' But what about British software companies? 'Zero,' was the shot reply, 'I don't think they even know who we are.' In this sense, there is no doubt that the Stampers are training their people to think Japanese. It doesn't seem to be such a big difference when you look at the games themselves, but it is undoubtedly a very crucial difference, and one on which most of Rare Ltd's resources are being gambled. COIN-OPS FOR ALL The development room is dominated by a veritable tower block of stacked, plastic component boxes, full of chips, capacitors, mini-PCBs and other electronic oddments - a reminder that this company has a vested interest in developing hardware as well as software. In the room next door, we were showed their proud achievement of 18 months of hard work - the new coin-op arcade beard, working on this day for our benefit. Named - they always have a name - the Razz Board, and based around the Z80 processor with a lot of hardware assist, it is extraordinarily fast. They had set up a running demo consisting 33 large, full-colour knights bouncing around the screen so fast you could hardly make. out the individual shapes. But these were not moving sprites. Each shape, as it passed behind another, was being cleared and redrawn. We were told the board was moving 1,300,000 bytes around per second.

Meaningful electronic litter: a corner of the main software development room where even the Amstrad PC's get vitamins. A stylish cream and maroon coloured Nintendo console can be seen just to the right of centre. Rare modifies its consoles so they can run American, Brittish and Japanese cartridges. It may look modest, but the Razz Board, built around a Z80 processor, is astonishingly fast and powerful.

 

'That is an intelligent drawing up of characters,' Chris said, 'which most machines- like the Amiga - say, 'Oh, they can do a million '. But that's just a dumb fill, and this is actually 64 colours in full separation. I think it will enable us to start competing with the big Japanese and American coin-slot companies now. The first time we've been in this position to go up against them, and I feel we have a piece of hardware that will allow us to do that. I think it's going to knock spots off Mastertronic and the Amiga coin system. I mean, this is redrawing this every 50th of a second.' The Razz Board is available to anyone who wants to go into writing games for the coin-op industry. Rare provides the board/hardware, graphics and sound utilities. And the sound quality is intended to be very powerful, fee. Using Yamaha synth chips, there are 14 available voices altogether, with three of them being top of the range quality. Prototypes should be ready any day now, and as Tim told me, they have had a bit of interest in the board from et her British companies. 'Companies that would like a piece of hardware like this but can't devote 18 months to develop il. I mean it's cost a fortune to develop, but as you see it's all fully working.' 'Then there's the graphics editor. It's our own software image editor. It's rather an unusual method which we've patented, and I'm sure an awful lot of arcade companies will want to use it because it's so memory- efficient, and we can move such a large amount of memory around quickly.' People with a desire and matching ability to design coin-op games should probably be getting in touch with Rare right now.

Too fast for the camera to capture, 1,300,000 bytes go bouncing round the screen every second to create 33 leaping knights.