Amusement Factory History

In early 1989, on São José do Rio Preto city, the first MSX programs and adventures developed by Daniel Caetano were distributed among his friends and relatives. Working together with Luis Fernando Seixas, several applications and proofs of concept were developed, evolving to the development of an education software which won the second prize at Colégio Anglo ’Science Fair in 1991.

In 1992 the "group" moved to São Paulo and under the name DJ Programs the IBM-PC development started. Initially the main target was supporting the emerging computer emulators (CJS MSX Emulator and fMSX). Several MSX support initiatives were coordinated using BBSs (SP-Online/STI BBS), as well as the development of applications to easy the use of emulators. One special creation at this time was STI BBS Universal Loader (SBUL) which evolved to a full-blown MS-DOS graphical user interface dubbed The Emulator’s Shell (TES). SBUL was probably the first ever "emulator front-end".

In 1998 the "group" was renamed to Fudeba Software and the MSX development was reinvigorated. At the same time, MSX cross-plataform development tools were built for MS-DOS and IBM-OS/2. Several products like MSX Disassembly (MSXDASM) and Breeze Shell were developed in this time frame, as well as the first Spectrum "re-convertions" to MSX (like Shinobi). The biggest project of this cycle was the MSX Snatcher translation to English and Portugese, alongside with the MSX/Z80 Assembly Course.

This cycle ended with several initiatives on videogame development and mobile devices software programming; we were pioneer in this area in Brazil. The first colaborative work was as part of rNewWare team (Ar Frio S.A. group), creating a GameBoy Advance Development Framework in partnership with Ricardo Bittencourt and A&L Software. Among the products developed during this partnership were a proof-of-concept game and a GBA Web Browser called PenBrowser.

The partnership with rNewWare opened some doors, including the oportunity to be part of Z80 Multimídia Ltda. team. The Z80 company was founded by Reinaldo Quaresma Azevedo, based on Campinas/SP and supported by SoftEx and Infogrames. This partnership was responsible for several cellphone and GBA games and development frameworks based on SDL, as well as the creation of development systems for GBA games such as TilEd and several concept-games (like a variant of TetriNet).

The year of 2006 marked the end of commercial partnerships and the group main focus shifted to non-profit retrogaming development. To reflect this "status", once more the group name has changed: Amusement Factory Software.

After that, a large amount of products were released, like Knightmare MSX2 version (Knightmare Gold), cassette to disk adaptations (Altered Beast, Knight Ghost), as well as several ZX Spectrum to MSX ports (Ghosts’n Goblins, SimCity).

Take a look at Products and Projecs sections and learn a little more about what Amusement Factory has made public along its 20 years history.

Daniel Caetano
Amusement Factory