First of all, I don't think Scott Miller had anything to do with this format. The oldest games that used this format (at least the oldest ones I know of) are the PC ports of Catacomb and Dangerous Dave. These were created when John Carmack and John Romero were still working for Softdisk, long before they decided to leave and start their own company. These two games were published on a free sampler disk for Softdisk's upcoming monthly game disk called "Gamer's Edge". I'll get back to this in a bit.
Back in 2014, a company called Flatrock Software (which appeared to own the rights to most Softdisk titles, at least at that time) released the full source code for all the Catacomb games and Hovertank. The source code for Catacomb II and Hovertank are the most important ones here, since they use the same sound format and also contain a C header file with a list of names for all the sounds that are used in the game. These header files also contain some sort of signature, probably placed there by the program that was used to edit the sound effects and create the header file. The signature looks like this:
Code: Select all
//
// Sound Editor v?.?? by Lane Roath
//
(The version number varies.)
Now you might ask: "Who is Lane Roath?" Well, according to the INFO.TXT file on the Gamer's Edge sampler, he was Editor at Gamer's Edge. He had also teamed up with John Romero before, under the name "Ideas From The Deep", but that's another story.
So this sound format wasn't designed by Carmack or Romero (nor Scott Miller or anybody else at Apogee). I can't say for sure how or why the creators of Space Chase ended up using the format, but I have a theory:
I remember John Romero talking about how he developed some smaller code libraries for graphics and other things that might help other programmers make their own games. These were published by Softdisk, along with some sample code that demonstrates how to use the code library. One of that sample programs was the original Dangerous Dave (Apple version, I think). Based on that info, I guess that Lane Roath did something similar with his sound editor. If that program was published by Softdisk, then anybody who bought the disk could have used this format in their game.
Edit:
K1n9_Duk3 wrote: ↑Fri Oct 27, 2017 21:08It doesn't do any smooth scrolling
Turns out I was wrong about this.
The game is in fact able to do smooth scrolling, but I've only seen that happen while standing on one of the moving platforms. It's weird to see a game that is technically capable of performing smooth scrolling, but the programmers decided not to use that feature for 90% of the game.