Spectrum Computing

Each is as long as a piece of string. Why not pick some games from this list https://skoolkit.ca/links/ and look at the disassembly e.g. here's Luny's disassembly of Marsport which has code flagged in green, data flagged in pink http://luny.co.uk/gargoyle/marsport/maps/all.html Usually you can chang...

The main thing was that my belief that ASM == BIN simply does not apply 100%. On the Z80 it is though which makes it easier to understand. Obviously macros don't count ;) Only things that can affect the timing are interrupts and contention I think? More modern CPUs got way too complicated to unders...

You can just usually add up the TStates though and work out which one is faster. Of course clever optimisations exist but those are based on mathematical identities and stuff. Register allocation is important too obvs since the Z80 is not very orthogonal in terms of instructions (e.g. you can ld (hl...

That's more to do with coprocessors and pipelining and stuff though which the Z80 does not do. Nowadays with pipelining, branch prediction, caches and coprocessors it's way too hard to translate instructions into execution time and the compiler is usually better than humans at it anyway. None of tha...

Lol watching the Knockout video that has to be the worst rendition of a well known tune (eye of the tiger) I have ever heard.

I suppose Survivor can't sue though since it was so terrible it would look bad on them

I don't think snapshot format will affect anything unless you do weird stuff like changing interrupt modes a lot or are trying to accurately simulate peripherals for say timing purposes. Don't worry about it. Probably go with what was recommended (.z80). EDIT: I do detect a slight case of the "...

Well it's either cricket >> tennis >> baseball I guess? A >> B means "A is much greater than B" of course. Could be golf though but it looks like a baseball or a tennis ball. Cricket ball would probably be filled in pixels since they didn't use white balls for 1 day cricket in the 80s?

.tzx files are great also you can record some gameplay and play it back... I often think I have spotted bugs and when looking at the playback I can check whether they were actually bugs or if I was wrong about it being a bug. And if it is a bug it's not that* hard to step into the debugger just befo...

I was reminded of this thread when I watched this which points out some pitfalls of that algorithm (which I was aware of but neglected to mention of course) for testing whether you are inside a shape for which it sounds like took a long long time to debug lol. It's more complicated since it's testin...

I'm sure it will be easy to hack though if you run it in an emulator. You either want to find out where the initial number of moves is read from and change the values or else where it checks whether the moves has exceeded the limit (every time you move I guess - so start out looking for routines rea...

Yup Moon Cresta was excellent too but I'd put it in the later releases category than the earlier decent 16K ones. Penetrator was an excellent Scramble clone too and also early. I think there was a good version of Moon Patrol (or Buggy or something) the one with the craters too. (Let's face it Lunar ...

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...