Spectrum Computing

Yup Amen to that. Do as little as possible in the emulator except test and debug (debugging is only really possible if you program in ASM or are very familiar with the tools you use to produce the program - which usually means you wrote the tool yourself in ASM). Debugging ZX BASIC using a debugger ...

It's a press 1, 2, 3 game like whackamole really based on an arcade game.

It's fun though.

Yup that's correct I was surprised when my random choice had Morkin (regular poster here) and Rorthron (not so regular poster here I think) as the authors

I thought Morkin may have given it away too easily at least he played ball though and kept mum

Either should be fine I guess? If what you are using just outputs raw binary file though (so an assembler, or a compiled language that outputs pure machine code output) I just save it as a .bin file and use the load binary file of the emulator to load it at the correct address. So I assemble my sour...

Well you know what they say about clues, some are deeply hidden and some are hidden in plain sight

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/1 ... /Galaxians



EDIT: I assume they called it Galaxians so as not to attract attention from Namco's legal department lol

It's weird that 3 of the best arcade conversions on the speccy came out really early and were 16K... Pheenix, Orbiter and Galaxians. Orbiter was probably the worst of those 3 but it was the best defender game for a good while. EDIT: And then we had a lot of dross like Ocean's original Kong and Hunch...

Well I was right then it is definitely not that

I've never heard of Smudge and The Moonees so no idea if it is or not

EDIT: Looking at a screenshot of that though I would say definitely not.

You didn't know what Sokoban was??? There's been about a bazillion versions on many platforms. And that also means you've probably never played NetHack either!!! That has a few Sokoban levels in it (which are pretty hard IIRC) along one of the branching level paths. Nethack is another contender for ...

This may jog your memory (from loading screen)

Looks good with the colour banding but I think I would have them single colour if I tried it so they could be closer together (12 pixels apart in Y say, and 16 apart in the X direction), then you could get all 6 rows in without using too much vertical space (72 pixels). Swooping aliens would need to...

I was thinking drawing each column rather than each row with a bitflag for "skip drawing this galaxian" since all columns have the same animation frame (apart from the ones at the very top which don't animate at all?) and it looks to me like they don't update every column each frame. 12x8 ...

Right I should have read the thread before being unable to vote then ;) Obviously the full price covertape poll will be rigged if Chaos wins and then Lords of Midnight supporters wearing Viking Utarg Helmets will descend on the Spectrum Computing headquarters and run amok. EDIT: X-COM was better tha...

I was playing Batty when my Spectrum broke so I guess I will vote for that lol ;) Didn't one magazine have Lords Of Midnight as a cover tape at some point? That would probably have been my vote if it was available since it's probably the best game for the Spectrum (in your face Chaos fans!!!). Not s...

I forgot to say I am familiar with the works of Ozric Tentacles having seen them live twice, 2nd time I started a crowd chant of "Ozric, Ozric Tentacles" when waiting for the encore to the tune of "Go West" by The Pet Shop Boys which was a popular football fan chant tune at the t...

Not sure if it's widely known, I tried to do a random search but it asked for 3 letters minimum so I typed in 3 letters from first word I saw on a website. The word was "believe" I think. I just picked the first one that looked like it had nice graphics (totally not derivative or anything ...

My code might not work on all assemblers thinking about it tbl_rows DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 0*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 1*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 2*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 3*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 4*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 5*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 6*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 7*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 8*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 9*8 DWXYTOSCRADDR 0, 10*8 ...

It's the loading screen for Knockout

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... m/Knockout

I know of someone who will probably get this one very quickly

Yeah he does. EDIT: Or something like it anyway... ROM routine needs more setup I expect? And it will be slow. As I said I wouldn't recommend doing that ;) You need to unplot the blank pixels as well really. It will have the chug. See my complicated code for an example of shifting on the fly to draw...

I only played West Bank that was good though.

MAPSNATCH surely has to win some award for best game title

Yeah exactly that. It's super easy to write an 8x8 draw a sprite aligned to a character cell which is what that engine seems to be doing. Also the collision detection is easy as well! You can get an 8x8 sprite moving under keyboard control easily and it will be so fast you need to either slow it dow...

Why not do cp 'A' ; cp 'A' :geek: which works on every assembler I have used (although you still developing on the speccy?) EDIT: Obvs that will work you're literally using cp '=' and stuff already ;) EDIT2: All assemblers I have used also support stuff like cp 'Z'+1 although that may not be support...

Galaxian obviously has too much going on at once to run at 50fps on a Speccy unless you can cheat and only update a few alien positions per frame (maybe it does that not seen a video of it recently, not sure if Galaxian had sprite hardware or not? I know it also used a Z80 though). I was going to tr...

I watched a couple of them, they are good. I was thinking it probably would be a good idea to implement the movement at the arcade res and have lookup tables for row/column to output the sprites, you probably only need a lookup table for the row and the column transform unless I'm missing some compl...