Interview: Kevin Seghetti

Interesting take by Kevin Seghetti on what happened.. And I thank Kevin from the bottom of my heart for this version of things even if it all did not happen the way he recalls. For 30 years I went around with the pain of betrayal and the consequences of events. I had put my entire life into this project and was devastated by what happened.

I first became involved with Punk/RazorSoft through Jeff Spangenberg sometime in 1990. He wanted to develop a ROM emulator for the Genesis which could be used for developing games. I helped breadboard some test circuits, and then he had Joe Peter design and lay out a circuit board. I also started on a sound driver for the Genesis around that time. The details are fuzzy, but for some reason, Joe didn't finish the board layout, and another friend of mine, Scott Statton, was brought in to finish [it].



http://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Interview:Kevin_Seghetti

I never talked to Kevin about anything very much. The few times we met were always at some meeting and such. I think he is mistaken as I was present in all the meetings until then and I never saw anyone ask Kevin to do anything like that. It all probably happened after I was outed to see if kevin was capable of making anything. And if not, I would have got a call about mistakes and schedules and being busy and so much to do etc etc etc... But as we saw, after spending considerable effort, they went with a very simple interface with few functionality in the end as they just could not get my stuff to work let alone understand it.

But I can see why jeff would hire Scott who was the one I had hired previously to do the computer file layout to manufacture the emulator hardware.. So scott had my design and schematic diagrams. Although I used the same manufacturer that scott recommended so I am surprised he never told anyone I already produced and built the system. I even paid him for the work.

Since he would have got a commision from recommending me to the factory making the circuit boards and even 10% commision would have been like $500.

I basically breadboarded the system and wrote the real time interface for the debugger and used already available software for the compiler and wrote some libraries for uploading and freezing the code to step through to find bugs etc.. Only the sound libraries were missing since the system downloaded the code to a sound processing Z80 cpu inside the slave. And as the sound already came in the format to run, it did not need anything special.

Seems Kevin also figured out I used PALs for the development system as he learnt what I had done and tried to reverse engineer the logic circuits and tried to debug the hardware that Scott had screwed up. Which I had figured out was done ass backwards so you needed to connect them in reverse order to get to work. But only someone who designed the original circuit would know that by already knowing the logic of the circuit.

It is quite funny that it took them an year to figure out they had screwed up the circuits and tried to debug it and fix something that scott had screwed up. Even though they had my blueprints and design/logic diagrams I had already given scott to create the mask files.
No wonder they looked like a deer in headlights when I went into punk to pick up some graphics files for IDG.

This is the interesting part that has disappeared..

"Around then, Jeff brokered a deal with RazorSoft to start Punk, and office space was acquired in Mountain View."

See it was I who who found these investors.. and instead of me going to meet with them, Jeff did and like magic, disappeared.. Since if I had any contact with them, they would have realised I was the one who had a product, already had like 5 released products with major publishers and who had talked with them before. There would not have been any Punk if I had not found those investors and this entire story would have been a moot point. RazorSoft probably did not realise I was not there until much later since the entire thing seemed to be a con.
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So some of this story is out of sequence. I had the development system already done when I met the investors, then jeff got them to fund his company pushed me out and he started punk and tried to create a new development system from my original design which scott had..


"During that same time, Scott was debugging the Genesis development boards (called the "red board" because Scott spec'ed a red solder mask for fun). I assisted somewhat in this endeavor."

Ah so Scott basically took my design and specs and made it his own...

Then one day, Jeff and I had a disagreement about what I should be working on (I was helping Scott, and he thought I should be working on Rampart), and he kicked me out of Punk. Seems like it was around Valentine's Day, around Feb. 14th, 1991.

I can see why Scott would have trouble with my design even if he had the complete schematic design and blueprint. I knew I could never rely on others to do a proper job. Scott basically twisted the 2 sides of the 2 parts of the development system and you had to connect them backwards. I had inserted a lot of reduncies and backups for this very scenario.  Not only did I have to reverse the connectors to the 2 pieces, I also had to use programmable PAL chips for the signals as the wires would have ended up in the wrong orders. So I also had to reverse the polarity of the circuits. 



What is also interesting is that I was the one who worked on Sylvester & Tweety in Cagey Capers but it was taking so long. We were under very strict guidelines. No violence, we could not do most anything. Basically we could just chase each other around and that's it. I was getting really bored with it as it never went anywhere because of design criteria and the designers could not come up with any ideas to get around all the stipulations and still make it fun. I wonder how Kevin finished it since TecMagic kept complaining about every little detail until they fired all of us in the end.

It is also interesting that I also interviewed at PF Magic twice and told them I was interested in working on Ballz.  But it seemed I was not a good fit. But it seems, instead of doing the game inhouse they had contracted it out to Kevin.

It is also interesting that Kevin tried to sell his development system to TekMagic.. While I was working there and using my own development system to work on Sylvester & Tweety.  So I probably was the reason they did not buy it since I did not need it.

TekMagic was the publisher for Sega Japan in the UK. So there was problems with Sega america as they both were competing with each other for the parent company. The quality for the UK was far lower so they had to do major rework for releasing stuff in the US and some stuff was never released in the UK. When I was interviewing at Sega of america, I found them very stuffy, small offices with lots of junk filled up the room it was suffocating. They asked me what I had done and the last project was doing crackdown on the PC and released by TekMagic and that was enough for them to show me the door.

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Developer Resources was a company I founded with a friend of mine to build development systems for the Genesis and the SNES. Rampart was actually a contract through RazorSoft (Tengen contracted RazorSoft, who contracted me). But I started Developer Resources during the Rampart port.

Trivia: I didn't use an official development system for Rampart. Instead I just plugged a Sega Dev RAM card into the cart slot, and replaced the boot ROM with some custom code that would download via the 3rd joystick port (on the back) from my Amiga. So I could't trace the code, just download and watch it crash. For the wall closure algorithm I ended up having to code a simple debugger on the SMS which just displayed the register state and went forward when the joystick button was pressed. That was the hardest part of that game.


Anyhow, a full compile took something like 20 minutes. I found out AFTER the project was finished that those machines could run at 2 clock speeds: 8Mhz and 10Mhz, and for some stupid reason the default was 8Mhz. So all of those 20 minute compiles could have been 15 minutes. Grrr.

http://www.smspower.org/forums/7964-F16FightingFalconMonopolyRampartDevelopment

This is interesting.. Why would someone who could not figure out how to switch into Turbo mode on a PC think they can reverse engineer something done by someone else?

So they basically wasted most of the time trying to get it to work and ended up giving up on it. My dev system used RAM to download and run the code via the SCSI port and had real time debugging.