A film-making star is born. Former Gordano School pupil Sophie Alicia Shaw picked up the award for the Best Film Made By Over 13s at the star-studded. To preview and buy music from A Star Is Born by Barbra Streisand & Kris Kristofferson, download iTunes now. A Star Is Born: Making Amy. Free Featurette! This deeply moving portrait of 6- time Grammy winner Amy Winehouse uses powerful first- hand footage to bring Amy’s story to life, showcasing both her incredible talent and her tragic demise. At the end of 'A Star Is Born' the camera stays on her for one unbroken. But this isn't a movie about a star who.Today, in the wake of Nintendo's mini- revival of Starfox with Shigeru Miyamoto's Wii U experiment, we bring you Damien Mc. Ferran's making of the SNES original. The article was originally published in June last year. British engineering ingenuity and Japanese design savvy elegantly combined to create what is arguably one of the most technically outstanding releases of the 1. Nintendo's impressive library of software. Star Fox - or Starwing as it was retitled in Europe thanks to the existence of a German company called Star. Vox - marked Nintendo's first tentative steps into the realm of 3. D, a world it had - up to that point - been curiously reluctant to explore. This exploratory thrust wouldn't have been possible without the involvement of Argonaut Software, a small UK- based studio with big ideas famous for its impressive home computer title Starglider. How Argonaut and Nintendo came to be partners is a remarkable story of technical wizardry and rule- breaking. When you're a tiny team operating out of someone's house, you don't just waltz into the HQ of a multi- million dollar industry leader. It takes something special to get on the radar, and Argonaut got Nintendo's attention in the most brazen way imaginable - it defeated the copyright protection mechanism on the popular Game Boy console. Starglider was inspired by San's love of Star Wars. If anyone wanted to produce a game without Nintendo's permission, they would be claiming to use the word 'Nintendo' without a licensed trademark, and therefore Nintendo would be in a position to sue them for trademark infringement. We figured out that with just a resistor and capacitor - around 1 cent's worth of components - we could find out how to beat the protection. The system read the word 'Nintendo' twice - once to print it on the screen at the boot up, and a second time to check if it was correct before starting the game cartridge. That was a fatal mistake, because the first time they read 'Nintendo' we got it to return 'Argonaut', so that was what dropped down the screen. On the second check, our resistor and capacitor powered up so the correct word 'Nintendo' was in there, and the game booted up perfectly. He roped in Wayne Shirk and Tony Harman to see the demo and they were extremely impressed with what we could do, and our enthusiasm. I told them we wanted to work with them and had a talented team in London, and that we were good at 3. D games. They told me they wanted to do three games with us, and explained their desire for us to teach them our 3. D technology. I spent a lot of time with Nintendo management dreaming up what we could do. The business and relationship side took a lot of work and can't be underestimated; Nintendo wanted to feel comfortable working with an outside - and gaijin - company.
I had to show them that we could not only deliver the goods, but that they could trust us, too. Combined with the eight or nine hour time difference, that's not a great environment to develop a game in. Dylan Cuthbert, Giles Goddard and myself were sent to Nintendo ostensibly just for four weeks, but after the four weeks were up we were asked to return for three more months, and that turned into another three months and so on, pretty much until the game was complete. When I joined the project, the Argonaut staff were still in London and a lot of communication was happening over fax. However, this time around it would be Nintendo designing the characters, story and core gameplay, with Argonaut's staffers working on the tech side of things. Shigeru Miyamoto and his team produced and designed the game and we did the technical stuff - Argonaut was also responsible for the hardware and software design of the Super FX chip, of course. A custom RISC processor designed entirely by Argonaut's engineers, it granted the SNES fearsome polygon- pushing power - for the time, at least. Star Fox Programmer Dylan Cuthbert - now the head of Pixel. Junk studio Q- Games - explains how Argonaut's involvement went beyond just software and technical support. On a side note, Cuthbert's Game Boy demo would morph into 1. Japan- only Game Boy title X, which has the distinction of being the first 3. D game on a portable system, and recently received a sequel (fittingly coded by Q- Games) called X- Scape on DSi. Ware. Jez knew a guy - which was Ben Cheese - from his work on the abandoned Konix Multisystem and called him there and then in the corner of the meeting room with about thirty Nintendo guys sitting across from us, including Miyamoto, Gunpei Yokoi, Takehiro Izushi, Yasuhiro Minagawa, Genyo Takeda and many other luminaries. It was a pretty remarkable moment, made even more remarkable by the fact that at the time Argonaut was kind of living pay- cheque to pay- cheque; I seem to recall that there were around twelve of us in a house in North London, and working out ways to persuade Jez to sign our pay- cheques each month was a running meme. We showed it to them and said this was pretty much the best 3. D their console could produce, and that they hadn't designed the SNES with 3. D games in mind. Then I suggested that if they wanted better, they should let us design a 3. D chip for them. We had never designed a 3. D chip before, but we had done some hardware so it wasn't a completely bullshit idea. I promised them that we could design a chip that would accelerate the 3. D graphics by ten times what their wimpy CPU could do. Nintendo liked the idea of souping up their hardware - there was even talk of putting it inside the USA version of the SNES, which hadn't been released at that point - but in the end it had to go into the cartridge to keep the initial cost of the console low. It'd have been awesome if it was as standard on every SNES, so it's a shame that didn't happen. To do this, San needed the best talent the UK industry could offer at that time. Cheese sadly passed away in 2. UK- based team that designed and built the chip - was considerable. No one did it that way around! Instead of designing a 3. D chip, we actually designed a full RISC microprocessor that had math and pixel rendering functions, and the rest was run in software. It was the world's first Graphics Processing Unit, and we have the patents to prove it. At the time that it came out, it was also the world's best- selling RISC microprocessor until ARM became standardised in every cellphone and took the market by storm. D was commonplace on formats like the Amiga and Atari ST, but on consoles it was a much rarer sight - hence the astonishing impact Star Fox had on the SNES- owning public. And in some areas - like 3. D math - it was more like a hundred times faster. Super FX was not only capable of 3. D math and vector graphics, but it was also able to do sprite rotation and scaling - something that Nintendo really wanted for their own games, like Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Thankfully, being a Brit inside Nintendo's development heart wasn't as tricky as problem as you might imagine. Miyamoto, Katsuya Eguchi and Yoichi Yamada spoke better English than we spoke Japanese, so that seemed to be the language of choice. He had ideas and liked to play, refine and evolve. He especially liked to iterate - he did a lot of trial and error. It really felt like he would be flying by the seat of his pants much the time. It was occasionally frustrating, because you couldn't schedule the project in advance. You couldn't know how much effort or man- hours were required for any specific feature or element because he didn't really plan in any great detail. He seemed to do everything by what feels right, which means it has to be pretty much fully built before he could evaluate how much fun it was - and then he'd tell you to change this or change that, and so on. He works in a pretty similar way to Peter Molyneux: a game's not done until it's done and I couldn't really tell you in advance when that will be, and if you make me tell you I will take a guess and it will be wrong and I'll miss the deadline by a few years! Nintendo had a good idea what make up the team needed in terms of directors, level designers, graphic artists, sound designers and so on. Pretty much from day one we knew who and what the team was going to be and there was always a sense that progress was being made. I think the European studios produced good games but maybe a bit more haphazardly; it took a few more years before we reached that same level of project management. In fact, at the time I don't think we appreciated how much of a big deal it was. The reason you don't see more gaijin working there is that, like most big Japanese companies, they basically only hire graduates straight out of Japanese universities. However, while the deal exponentially increased Argonaut's standing within the development community, for San this period holds bittersweet memories. We had the benefit of being the only outside company that was working with them for a while, and we were paid our costs, plus a royalty. Nintendo kept telling us to stay small and keep working exclusively for them, but they weren't paying us the serious cash that they were paying other partners. Our agreement with Nintendo was mostly a royalty deal that relied on sales. When we wanted to branch out and do other games, they wouldn't let us until the end of our contract. We mocked up a prototype using Yoshi. It was essentially the world's first 3. D platform game and was obviously a big risk - Nintendo had never let an outside company use their characters before, and weren't about to, either. This is the moment the deal fell apart. We later made that game into Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the Play. Station, Saturn and PC, which became our biggest ever game in terms of sales and also in royalties, since we owned the IP. I also feel they undervalued us; we could have done so much more. He also said that we would make enough royalties from our existing deal to make up for it. That felt hollow to me, as I'm of the opinion that Nintendo ended our agreement without fully realising it.
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January 2017
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