Spectrum Computing

WhatHoSnorkers wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 10:00 pm I met a guy at the 40th Spectrum Birthday who met Toni Baker IRL back in the 80s. She wore a duffel coat I think he said.

Heheh... I was thinking "is that nerd cred?" but no, trainspotters don't wear duffel coats, possibly anoraks.
I think the duffel was military.

Nitrowing wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 12:32 pm https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/undert ... game-ever/

Indeed I chose a bad example, but then why was it Undertale and not Manic Miner? Recency bias.

But the one female member of the Total! staff I'm more likely to remember was Dane McLellan. Apparently she had a massive black coffee addiction and favoured "violent beat'em-ups with lots of gore". I assume she's Scottish, and probably a Weegie. Wouldn't surprise me if she imagined herse...

PeteProdge wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 5:44 pm Kati Hamza, Linda Barker and Jackie Ryan have entered the chat.

Yes? "Extremely rare" doesn't mean zero.

I don't have any evidence but personally would assume a real staffer who was just assigned tips as her remit.

There were plenty of women working on magazines, but but women with any interest in home computing prior to the WWW — particularly technical interest — seem to have been extremely rare.

There are three ZXDB entries for the puzzle game Snare : Speccy version: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4594/ZX-Spectrum/Snare Sam Coupé version: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/28350/SAM_Coupe/Snare A third one with no screenshots, an exclamation mark ("Snare!"), and an earli...

PeteProdge wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 11:39 am There will be a poll for ''Special Edition' Games That Are Like Playable Demos Yet Offer An Experience Fairly Exclusive From The Full Game, once I can come up with a more succinct term!

Promos?

How are Donkey Kong and Miner Willy not on the list at all? Why are deliberately generic characters like Agent 47, Master Chief and frickin' Steve from Minecraft even on the list? Recency bias. It always happens with these "X of all time" polls. Remember Undertale being voted the best gam...

Hero Quest for me. It's a slow, absorbing turn-based game, so even the demo had plenty of lastability. Also they hadn't finalised the character names so they were called stupid things like BOGROL.

5MinuteRetro wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2024 10:35 pm And I'm going to have a pint and a polite brawl in the Baron of Beef

Went out, "had a Curry"...

Have a look at Wikipedia's article on the Sinclair QL character set . What's that strange character at 0xB5, rendered as "Q̬"? The manual calls it a "script mark" but doesn't seem to go any further. Here's a (blurry) screenshot from real hardware that I found. To me it almost loo...

Super basic also has a nice feature where the input command can have a timer. So I tried to use code that was QL specific, as I was just exploring super basic with no sense that a 'game' would come. When I was first learning BASIC as a kid, I knew about INPUT but not INKEY$. I also noticed that the...

No you're thinking of "Punchy" (2023 Marvel remake). If I have a really boring afternoon then I might record the Auf samples just so we can hear them. But not tonight. As I was saying to Dok the other night: I thought Auf was amazing, the little attention to detail, the cute little nationa...

Should this be merged with the Games Where The Main Sprite Changes thread from a few months ago? Or is there a difference between the topics? Good call. There is a difference between changing sprite, and switching character, although it's tedious to outline the difference. It is pretty clear (TO ME...

This does not seem like a "challenge", rather "I want to produce certain patterns obeying certain rules, and I haven't worked out the rules yet"... How big must the repeat be (4x4? 5x5? ...) and what are the real rules? We can't use the same colour within x squares? Emergency rop...

Could you change between protagonists in Hammerfist ? Hammerfist and Gauntlet: scroll up and click the button marked YES, CORRECT, SOMEONE ALREADY SAID THIS, I DIDN'T READ THE DAMN THREAD. I wish you a fine afternoon ''Ke Rulen los Petas'' I would never have thought of, even if Crash had included i...

I have found a game titled Terminus and screenshot says it is the one you mention. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/5189/ZX-Spectrum/Terminus Then i have watched half of video but ... it looks like you play with the same spaceship during all the game. I think this is mainly curiosity. I have r...

Postage is death, NZ is far away, and I was always a software nerd. Don't worry, I only hijack a thread once. Just wanted to say that I very much appreciate you offering kit to the user scene first. The pics show that you cared about it.
But why are you getting rid of it?

Life is short and I might not be following your green-text rules precisely, but I hope this will help: (I will explain more if you need it) Protagonist transformation: of course Knight Lore (you become a werewolf), and similarly Werewolves of London . In Moonwalker you are quite a different characte...

"Money"?
"Burgers"? (I may have dreamed this one)
"Ouch"?
"Link it"...???

And who said them? At least one is female.

I feel like talking about GAC might deserve another thread, or discord. So that we can discuss your game here instead. Should I make a GAC related thread later? (not home today until late in the evening). EDIT. I'm very cautious about talking about GAC. The last time I did something for it, it had ...

Reply to ICreateWorlds_dotNet: Believe it or not, I'm an Englishman who knows James Bond and The Prisoner, but I had no idea that "Space 1999" was a TV series. I thought it was just a new Spectrum game. So it was total guesswork -- I didn't know anything about the characters or skills. I h...

Ah yes, Maya was special... :mrgreen: :lol: When Maya transformed to remove the heavy metal object from the door, I was like "HEY! Maya! I see that you like heavy metal -- how about if you--" She reported me to the (space) cops. I'm very glad. I was a bad male human being and I needed to ...

No, not yet, but I might be able to create a 128k version of GAC. [...] That would be cool (deserves its own thread?). There seem to be CPC and C64 versions (and maybe others?) so I wonder how similar the format is — but we already have decompilation tools. There would be the same size issues on ev...

Goddammit...
I decompiled your game and studied it carefully in the pub, over a beer.
Well, I have a nice map too.

Map is here (unfinished, incomplete): https://cl4.org/_1999.xlsx
I will delete the file later.
When I solve the game, I will produce a proper 100% map. This one is only experimental.