Spectrum Computing

West Bank was like a mobile game on the Spectrum. It was simple but very addictive. The three games from Dinamic which I played the most were Fernando Martin, West Bank and Phantomas 2. I also played some Navy Moves, Freddy Hardest and Game Over but they were very hard and not so fun. Dinamic had so...

We're talking about keeping alive an old computer in the future. In some years developers related to the ZX will be more difficult to find. We will only have their sources or better pre-made deb files or other. A correctly build AppImage will be our best chance to run an old abandoned ZX emulator a...

ok. This topic is not a debate about Windows/Linux. It's about making linux users (not admins) life easier and allowing them to run something without installation (modifying their system). Both windows and linux can be destroyed or made unusable in many ways*. That's why I'm mainly use DebianDog an...

Okay, wise guy. What would you suggest?!! Because I personally suggest learning how to use Godot. I know one person here is working on a cross-platform tool with that. That same person also has more experience in software development than you probably ever will. As matter of fact, you're just being...

Hooray, now I have 50 different copies of an outdated library with some horrible security bug on my system all going unpatched because the authors of the apps haven't released new builds. This is clearly an amazing improvement over shared libraries. Truly this is finally The Year of the Linux Deskt...

I'm not dissing it, I use it almost every day for things it is good at. I'm also painfully aware of its shortcomings. Cross platform libraries do exist but they're by no means a panacea. And ultimately supporting more platforms means more testing,. When you're tools are already niche, and Spectrum ...

It's not though, it's just reality. Linux is infinitely customizable, which is great if that's what you want. But it's terrible from a developer perspective where you can't entirely rely on anything being available - even really basic stuff like how the audio stack works. Appimages try to fix that ...

The problem with Linux is, and has always been, the myriad of different distributions all of which are almost the same but not quite. It makes the platform an enormous headache to support with rapidly diminishing returns for each different variants you try and cover. When you're doing something lik...

20% for code seems right to me. You can load .SNA or .TAP files into an image viewer and get an idea of what's code and what's graphics and data. I used Irfanview to generate these images and added my own guesses about what was data and code. Irfanview lets you import any file as raw data so I set ...

jpnz wrote: ↑Wed May 08, 2024 4:23 pm I posted about that tip a while back - it's not quite right

I'm not very good at finding things in the forum it seems. I supposed someone would have guessed the key combination to see the message at the end of the game, as mentioned in the message.

Couldn't this info be added to ZXDB?

This hidden message reveals information about the development of Predator. I couldn't find anything in this site so I thought I could post it. https://tcrf.net/Predator_(ZX_Spectrum) PREDATOR - (c) 1987/8 20th Century Fox. This program was written in an incredible two months in Leeds and the last we...

TomD wrote: ↑Wed May 08, 2024 10:58 am Some details on why here

viewtopic.php?t=8297

Thanks, I wasn't able to find it. It's indeed sad that such iconic titles are distribution denied.

I think they used to be available. The availability field says "available" but still there are no files to download. It says denied.

What's up with the availability? Is there a way to know the reason they're denied?

Also an azimut alignment issue.

So the recommended speed is 12.5fps? Probably I didn't get the message right. I was precisely asking for responsiveness at 25fps but everything else moving at a more moderate pace which would make sense. At 25fps, when a movement key is pressed the sprite starts moving in the screen around 1/25s lat...

Fantastic!

Would it be possible to have the game run at 25fps but with the characters moving at a moderate/adequate speed with the timers readjusted to make the game still fair?

The intention would be to have the minimum lag, highest fluidity, and a balanced movement speed and timing difficulty.

Anything that is 2 opcodes like your border colour example and is used more than once is probably better as a macro. Sometimes it's worth commenting stuff that isn't obvious on a first scan through the code e.g. inc a ; does not affect carry flag! inc hl ; does not affect flags! Both of those can b...

Code has usually been the smallest portion of a game by far. Even if it doubled in size it would still be a very small part. Most of the increase in size comes from graphics and audio, making the code size an even smaller percentage even when the code may have grown in size. The size of the code can...

Since the Z80 is kinda asymmetric though it does help to know about the implementation details. HL can do more stuff than DE and BC is best used as a loop counter for example, so you try and write your routines to take advantage of that. It's not like these days where every register is the same. HL...

Interesting I’ve been writing what each line does but actually the block is much better. Do you have any rules around the size of a block? You've already got a lot of good answers, I'll just add mine. I wouldn't worry about the size of the block as long as you can think of it as a task without the ...

Thinking in functional blocks that do one thing is always useful. You can comment what each block does and which registers hold what at the block entry. Same for output registers if there are any. This way you think in abstractions, you don't need to remember every instruction and what every registe...

I guess you're trying to implement vertical attribute scrolling but your code is pretty incomprehensible. It's been also some time since I've written assembler routines for the Spectrum but this could be a starting point without any optimisations. ; Scroll up ld bc, 0x2e0 ; size of the attribute map...

DVDfever wrote: ↑Mon Jan 29, 2024 3:09 pm I see there's a v.1.1 of this. Not sure what the difference is off-hand, but it's still fun

Here's a changelog: https://marco-leal-zx.itch.io/zx-pacman ... -available

I guess the persistent dot bug will be fixed. Sometimes a dot will be eaten but still be visible.

This looks like a worthy successor of OTLA. It can use compression, it's maintained and works on Windows and Linux.

I haven't tried it yet but I thought it deserved a mention.

https://github.com/oxidaan/zqloader

Perhaps it is stupid question, but I will ask anyway. I read some articles about ZX Microdive and I noticed that microdrive used two tracks for data. So I wonder, in general, could home computers use stereo recording to double data density (and halve loading times) ? And is it really as simple as a...