Spectrum Computing

Err - can you perhaps photoshop one more brick into that image and re-post it?

I was amused by the link at the bottom to a piece on "the genesis of Super Mario" - interesting choice of words!!!

Well this bit of the show is obvious: As for The Adventure Game , clearly not entirely obvious, they're still trying to work it out! Looks like it's RED or PENTAGON this week! :lol: Now that's from an early series, before the vortex grid. You had to get across that token board without setting off t...

Well this bit of the show is obvious: https://cdn.mobygames.com/screenshots/16006700-puzznic-zx-spectrum-loading-screen.png I added the arcade version of this to my RetroPie setup and was quite taken aback when I gave it a try recently! :shock: If you've ever wondered why the playing area sometimes...

A friend of mine built two gigantic wooden ones, with the screens driven by Gamecubes emulating GameBoys, linked together to play Tetris!

The Spectrum ROM puts the stack wherever the system variable RAMTOP points, which indicates the memory that the ROM and the BASIC interpreter is free to use. When you do a CLEAR, you move that pointer down, to tell the ROM to leave the memory above it alone (you can still POKE the memory above that ...

ADD HL,SP is particularly annoying, as far as I'm concerned, for being the wrong way round! I've never used EX (SP),HL, and I can't imagine where I would, but if you Google it you I found a post I wrote nearly 7 years ago!!! :lol: When used in the combination POP HL // EX (SP),HL it lets you get th...

It's best done once at the start and not changed again, unless you're doing something unusual. That all depends on how tidy your code is, and if you RETurn from every CALL!!! :lol: You can get away with a lot of mess in a game with, for example, a jump JP directly to your 'You Died' or finally 'Gam...

I agree that using a 3DS with a DS version via the R4 or similar card is suboptimal for the reasons you mention. BUT there is now a native 3DS version with unique features such as border emulation, RZX recording and, most importantly, rollback. The last one alone is IMO worth it. And you don't even...

As far as I know, the only way to do it is to have a .TAP file attached as a tape. It doesn't jump out to any sort of special development environment file-handling, it just looks for the next sequential unit in a tape file, like any other emulator would. I haven't tried loading using ROM calls from ...

I don't recall playing many demos. I probably did play them, I just don't remember! I'm pretty sure I didn't come across any demo on that list that inspired me to rush out and buy the game though! I don't see R-Type on the list though - was that a C+VG Spectrum/C64 dual tape? I can't remember if I p...

I kind of agree with a lot of that list, from a gaming point of view. Apart from the BG3 crap. And maybe Hitman is a bit fanboy. Then again, why post about this result now; did I miss a post about the poll when it happened? :lol: It's one thing to say it's slanted towards more recent games, and a yo...

The artwork was good but I didn't like that rather drab spotted background framing; I much preferred full-page images. I guess it's an attempt at brand-recognition marketing. I always associate that style with re-releases; I wouldn't look at repeated designs like that and immediately think 'Ooh, a s...

Jet Set Willy 2, surely?

(If it's right, I'll hand it over to someone else).

What happens if you enable noise on more that one channel? Is it any louder? Or is it just the same as when it's on one channel? I can see how maybe you could temporarily override the setting of noise pitch for your sound effect, but continue to use noise on your music channel for percussion. Would ...

I do love that loading screen. It makes that big cartoon style look so effortless! I mean, you can clearly see the colours are restricted to the Spectrum's simple palette, but you have to look really hard to find even a hint of the artist struggling with attribute placement.

Yes, an early DS is a good bet. Which model is not quite so easy to decide, as each has strengths and weaknesses. The original DS doesn't have a particularly bright screen, but can play GBA games as well as DS ones, if that's remotely interesting. The DS-Lite is smaller and has brighter screens, but...

I've had a Weedo Tina2 3D printer for a year and a bit now. It's one that has a case surround rather than being an open deck. It's not completely enclosed - the back and front are open, but it keeps the dust out and doesn't knock other things off the table while it works! It's a neat compact design ...

Nirvana doesn't let you do 4x2 attributes. A multicolour-enhanced attribute still takes up the whole 8-pixel width of a character cell, even when it's only 1 or 2 pixels high. It doesn't offer any improvements or smooth stepping to attributes in the horizontal direction. If you look at multicolour ...

Uridium runs at 25fps, so there's no time for multiple screen copies. There are plenty of tricks it could be using, all of them very complicated. The dreadnought designs aren't exact copies of the C64 ones either, so it seems there are limitations to what it can render. And even at it's slowest it'...

by the way, you cannot copy the whole screen in one frame, not even using stack tricks. there is simply not enough tstates. you may be able to build it from several tiles, but copying fullscreen backbuffer and keeping 50 FPS is physically impossible. This is true. This is the first time I got it wo...

You can always use the time after a HALT to draw some more sprites, or maybe paint a scrolling area that the player and other sprites can't cross (maybe a bit of parallax foreground), so long as it's all based on data from the previous frame of your game update. Then once the raster has got past the...

Although it means an additional delay at the start, it's easier to update just behind the raster. If you're ahead, you have to keep ahead, and you just can't do that unless you're only updating a small area of the screen. Otherwise, the raster will catch up and overtake your copy function, leaving a...

Actually moving the data in the screen memory area is nearly always going to flicker, unless you get very, very good at timing exactly what you're updating where on the screen with how the TV picture is redrawn. Most games will draw the game to somewhere else in memory first, with all the scrolling ...

I did code two educational games (well, convert to the Speccy) back in my schooldays for a games shop in Kettering that had its own line in business and educational software, but I question whether a copy was ever produced, let alone sold, and my old tapes were thrown out some time after I'd graduat...