In June 2005 we had the honour and privilege to conduct an e-mail interview with Michael McLean, the man who designed and coded the menu interface, i.e. everything that is not the arcade action itself, for Emlyn Hughes International. Here is our interview:

Hi Michael! How are you doing? Could you please introduce yourself to us?

I am probably a lot different to what you expect, I was not a games enthusiast or full time programmer and am still not. I am a semi-retired electronics engineer from London and am very old (58 :-)).

I have a BSc (Hons) degree in Electronics from Southampton University (on the south coast) which I left in 1968. At that time they only had one computer and that used valves and was programmed with punched cards.

In fact I had no interest in computers until about 10 years later. I have never studied Computer Science or taken any courses in programming, I just taught myself.

I spent most of my working life as a design engineer in industry, mainly designing electronic temperature controllers, timers etc.

What was your first computer? How and why did you become involved with computers?

The first "computer" I actually used was a Fairchild F8 microprocessor development system in 1978. This had about 1K of RAM, was programmed by using switches to set each individual bit and used cassettes for storage.

About a year later we got a Commodore PET (8K & built-in tape deck). I think the first game I ever played was "Pontoon" (Blackjack or 21), a Commodore game supplied on cassette. The first computer I owned was a 32K PET with large keyboard which I bought in about 1979 for which I later bought a 2031 5 1/4" disk drive, which I still have somewhere.

Other machines I have owned or still own are Amiga 1000, Amiga 2000, Amiga 1200 and a AMD Athlon 64 PC with 500M RAM, 200G hard drive , DVD and CD writers , 7.1 surround speakers running Windows XP, Linux and an Amiga 1200 emulated with WinUAE. I have 1M broadband using Firefox and Thunderbird. I also use an HP printer/scanner/copier. The PC is the only one I ever use now and I have stored a few hundred CDs on it in wma format..

I have also had on loan from ASL a BBC micro, an Acorn Electron and a Commodore Plus4 which were used to convert the cricket game to other formats. I still have a 64 and a 128 on loan, the EHIS code was written on the 128 in 64 mode.

How did you become involved with the Commodore 64 scene? We would also like to know your opinion about the C64.

Through Peter Calver. I had written some utilities in 6502 machine code on my PET and contacted him at Supersoft to see if he would want to market them. He already had similar programs but asked me if I would be interested in writing a cricket game. I said I would try and he sent me a C64 a 1570 drive and a Commodore football game on cartridge called something like "International Soccer", to show me the sort of standard required. The 64 was later replaced by a 128 which is still working, but has not been used for years.

I think the C64 was probably the best machine of its type at the time. There were several other competing machines at the time like the Atari, the Dragon, The Texas Instruments T99(?), the Exidy Sorcerer? and a few more, but the C64 became the biggest selling computer in history (ignoring PC clones), which must prove something.

What was your work previous to the Emlyn Hughes International Soccer (EHIS) project?

If by work you mean programming, then it was writing my Cricket game "Graham Gooch`s Test Cricket" which in it's various versions (some programmed I believe by G Blighe) became ASL's biggest seller (approx 50,000 copies sold). You probably haven`t heard of it, but it is a sport roughly like Baseball, but not very. I wrote all the code (using a C64 and Mikro 64 Assembler) and most of the sprites, but Andy Calver also designed a few.

I met Peter Calver a few times at the Supersoft offices in Canning Rd, Harrow and once met Graham Blighe who was there to see if Peter could use him as a programmer. I was never employed by Supersoft or ASL but was paid in royalties or commission of a certain amount per copy sold.

How did you become a member of the EHIS design team?

After I had finished the cricket game I was approached some time later by Peter Calver and asked if I would be interested in helping write a football game. Someone else (G B) would do the difficult part and I would just do the more straightforward part dealing with fixtures, scores, tables, etc etc.

It wasn't really like a team as we all worked separately from home and I rarely communicated with G Blighe. The project was co-ordinated by P Calver who was in frequent contact with me either by phone or letter or the occasional personal visit (sometimes with Andy).

Apart from it being a lot of fun, we find EHIS to be, technically, a remarkable piece of software. Graham Blighe shared with us some technical details and challenges that he had to solve for his part. He also spoke highly about the GUI, an opinion that we share, especially so considering the time of its creation. Who came up with the design, and was it influenced by something? We would appreciate receiving your comments about its technical aspects, too.

I think it was my idea to use a menu system rather than any other method of selecting options. There were several reasons, e.g. menus dissapear when finished with and leave the screen blank and free of clutter. Also similar selection options can be kept together which is more convenient for the user and means that possibly only the menu containing the options being changed need be opened.

I had not seen any other football games (apart from the Commodore one) so I did not know how they selected the game options, so I thought I would try to copy the menu system of the Amiga. I had just bought an Amiga 1000 out of some of the royalties from my cricket game and thought it might be an interesting way of doing things as the rest of the project looked like being fairly boring book keeping.

There were several types of menus tried before we settled on the final one. I think the first one was an almost straight copy, the menu would open when the fire button was pressed with the pointer at the top of the screen. The fire button would be kept depressed while the pointer was moved to the desired option and the selection was made by releasing the fire button.

I think there were also sub-menus on some items which could be selected by moving the pointer to the right onto them then releasing the fire button to make the selection. I can't remember why this was not used, it was probably felt that it was more convenient when using a joystick to have the menus remain open until deliberately closed rather than having to keep the button pressed all the time.

I can't remember much about the code as I never looked at it again once it was finished.

I can remember that the code for the actual game had to be stored in RAM under one of the chips and swapped with the music code when it had finished playing so that the actual program could run as there was not enough memory for them both. Also the code for playing the music had to be rewritten to be compatible with our interrupt system, the actual music data was, I believe, used unmodified. I am making the source code etc available so that anyone interested can inspect it for themselves.

How long did you work on the code?

I can't remember exactly but several months, much of the start of which was spent experimenting with different types of menu and different ways of selecting the game options.

What equipment and software did you use when writing the game's GUI? Could you describe to us the way you used them?

The equipment used was a Commodore 128, a 1570 drive, an 8 pin dot matrix printer, a Supersoft Mikro 64 6502 Assembler cartridge and a Phillips TV/Monitor type 1114. Also sometimes utilities like Zoom to modify the object code and Turbo Disk to speed the assembly.

The same machine was used for both writing the code and testing it. The source code was written in several separate files each dealing with a different aspect of the program. The Mikro assembler produced "Basic-like" source code with line numbers, remarks etc which could be edited, loaded and saved like a normal Basic program. Once a routine had been written it would be assembled and any errors corrected until it assembled correctly. The machine code produced would be saved to another disk for testing either then or later.

The main source programs were interdependant and had to be assembled using the Mikro "LNK" instruction. The other smaller programs could be assembled separately which was faster and more convenient. The disk containing the machine code had a small Basic loader program which would load the various pieces of code to the correct locations and start up the menu system for testing. If any changes that were needed only required a few bytes to be altered then this would possibly done directly to the machine code with the Zoom monitor rather than doing a time consuming re-assemble.

Any small changes would be given to P Calver by phone and he would modify the code he had to see if it worked and to keep up to date. If there were large changes or important new parts of the program added, then I would send him a disk by post, there were no emails etc then.

What else do you remember from the time you were working on EHIS? Are there any anecdotes or behind-the-scenes information that you would like to share with us?

No much really as I was working alone at home all the time and saw nobody apart from the Calvers.

What did you think about the quality of the resulting game, and its success probabilities, before releasing?

To be honest I was too busy with my part of the program to pay much attention to the football part and only used it for testing, using the shortest game duration possible. I sometimes watched a c vs c game out of interest. I had no experience of other similar football games apart from the cartridge one so I had nothing to compare it with. Sales probabilities were not my concern as I would be payed a fixed amount.

Did you ever actually play EHIS? And if you did, was it just to evaluate the result of your and your colleagues' work, or did you sometimes play it just for fun?

See above.

I did play it a few times but was never any good and never bothered with selecting players or teams, or with leagues etc . I was never a keen games player and was more interested in programming etc. Once it was finished I put away my 8-bit stuff and concentrated on the Amiga.

Do you enjoy playing computer/video games in general? If you do, which are your favourites?

I have played many games over the years but find the latest ones tend to be too complicated and take too long to get into. Some I have played are Civilization, Populous, The Sims, Sim City, Zool, Turrican, ChessMaster, Lotus Challenge, Tiger Woods PGA Tour etc. Also card games like Freecell, Solitaire etc.

What about real soccer? Hate it or love it?

I watch it on TV sometimes but never play or go to matches. You may not realise that Chelsea were once sponsored by Commodore and wore their name and logo on their shirts.

How did your working day usually look like, back in the C64 days?

The computer system was setup in my bedroom. I would work on the progam whenever I had some spare between having meals, watching television, going shopping etc. I would probably do most work at night when there was more time and fewer interruptions.

Where did your life head after completing your work with EHIS? What did you do afterwards?

I did no more paid programming after EHIS. The 8 bit games market was declining and the newer games were being written by large teams working full time rather than individuals working from home.

I started teaching myself C with the idea of possibly getting a job using it but nothing came of it.

What do you consider as the highlights of your career?

Programming was a paid hobby not a career. Apart from EHIS, "Graham Gooch's Test Cricket" in all its various versions, it earned me enough money to live on for many years.

Was there a game, or a software project in general, you would really have wanted to work on?

Not really.

Do you still own a Commodore 64? And if you do, do you still use it?

I still have a 64 and 128 on loan from ASL but had not used either until a few days ago, apart for playing some text adventure games (Zork etc) a few years ago.

What are you up to, these days?

I am not working anymore and no longer do any programming. I used to play around with C on the Amiga with the SAS C compiler and HiSoft 680xx assembler but lost all my work when my hard disk crashed and haven't bothered to take it up again.

Did it surprise you to find an EHIS community on the Net? How did you find us, and what was your first impression from the site and our league?

Yes, I thought 8 bit games had died out years ago. I found it completely by accident while entering my name into Google to see if anything came up. Then I was surprised to find you were looking for me so I responded. I was very impressed by the site, you seem to know more about the the game than anyone else apart from the programmers themselves. I had no idea it was possible to play online.

Thanks a lot Michael!