Spectrum Computing

Sad news indeed, such a great talent. RIP

There's definitely some logic to that but I know a few folk who would've bought the 128k version for few quid but aren't interested in paying $8 for both. I daresay they could've made more by charging a tenner for the next version & a couple of quid for the 128k. That's just the result of setti...

You need to think about it as a series of small steps and what is happening to the memory on each pass of the loop. So you need to copy each byte to the byte before it, but will already need to have saved a copy of the first byte since it needs to be POKEd as the last byte. And thus the code will lo...

I can't wrap my head round why they've bundled the 128k game in with the Next for 8 quid. Surely they'd be better selling them separately. I daresay a lot of folk won't be interested in the Next version & will be put off getting it. Presumably to cover the cost of developing both versions, to s...

Adding that many variations of instructions soon leads to the problem of needing excessive amounts of instruction encodings and thus slower instructions overall. The Z80 already suffers in that regard, with the Indexed instructions rarely being worth the cost. The Gameboy CPU did it better in many r...

Well I'm going for Pathetic Pablo Bros, something about it just appeals and I loved the idea of tutorials for game development in the magazine (even though it was clearly too little by that point) #2 place can go to Advanced Lawnmower Simulator - purely for the absolute ludicrousness of actually mak...

PeterJ wrote: ↑Sun May 26, 2024 9:31 am Agreed about random search. It's currently broken, and we don't have anyone who can fix it (any volunteers?).

What's it written in?

Version of Notepad I use does not have multilevel undo (although it seems to wait a bit before committing the text to the buffer, so if you type a few characters it undoes them all). Redo is same key as Undo (Ctrl-Z). I'm using Win10. Maybe they changed it for Win11? Notepad is just a bog-standard ...

ParadigmShifter wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2024 8:13 pm What annoys me is stuff like notepad where you only have a 1 level undo!

Notepad has multi level undo. Still doesn't have a redo though, which is a mildly annoying.

Nah, it's the same as Bionic Commando and Marsmare (and Bugaboo), here they use "push scroll" with a slightly different meaning. Marsmare and Spectral Interlude are classic push scrolls. You reach the edge of the screen and the game stops while the scroll happens and then continues again....

I'd call Anarchy a flip screen game (albeit with a certain amount of overlap between "screens"). To be what is typically meant by "push scrolling" it should actually appear to scroll and the game should stop playing whilst it does.

Using the second interpretation of "push scroll" pointed by Lee Bee, then Turrican (the first game) could be a good example, I think. Ps: I loved that game, despite the tape multiload. I wouldn't really call that push scrolling, it just has a camera that moves independently of the main ch...

I'm not sure the are any good examples of it, it's a really clunky mechanism for dealing with camera movement. While there are a handful of games where it maybe doesn't interfere too much, almost all of them would be vastly improved by a more fluid camera movement (which doesn't necessarily mean con...

Probably. I've just had my mind in XML mode all day...

Presumably you're talking about selecting multiple squares in the room to edit (perhaps by holding shift), so you can then change the colour or tile graphic of every square at once? Not only is this a good idea, I'd say it was absolutely essential. Otherwise you've no way to quickly compare how you...

One option for quickly applying tile attribute changes would be to allow multi select. Use tri-state check boxes for attributes not currently consistent but allow toggling one between on/off to apply to all. Another (or an alternative) would be to allow them to be viewed grouped by a given attribute...

I almost can't believe nobody has posted this already:

I totally appreciate that some users might want the ability to connect rooms in non-linear/non-adjacent ways. But surely the vast majority of your users will want linear passage between adjacent rooms on the map, without having to set up exit points. Not necessarily, think about things like the pip...

Difficult to rate when every single one is something you regretted bothering to load the one time you did. I'll go with Shadow of the Beast though, since the actual game wasn't any better than a demo and you do at least get to see all the cool over world effects (albeit rendered in SpeccyVision) tha...

It's not that hard to do in any language. It's probably harder to design a logical way of conveying to the player when it's worth pressing the button though. Much easier on modern systems where you can cheaply overlay button prompt images (especially if you had the good sense to colour the buttons!)

You don't seem to know much about development. There are libraries which handle everything for you, just like there are on Windows. You just use them and include them in your app. Seriously, it's the same as on Windows. Why wasting time dissing an OS you clearly don't care about? I'm not dissing it...

That's a poor excuse while trying to put a bad reputation on Linux. Just package all the libraries your application needs, like Windows apps have been doing for ages, and it will work in all distributions. It will probably work with less issues than Windows. It's not though, it's just reality. Linu...

Taking away all the limits gives ultimate freedom but it can be crippling because you can become overwhelmed by the amount of work required. It's like being expected to write a multi-hour symphonic masterpiece for an entire orchestra, rather than a short looping chiptune. But code size is a totally ...

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 like...

The thing is, 48K is simply not nearly enough memory to do much with. So games that need lots of logic, say strategy games like Gods, Chaos or Stonkers will have minimalist graphics simply as a result of running low on space. Whereas games like Dizzy will maximise graphics usage, at the expense of s...