Spectrum Computing

Just to bookend this thread from before the world went crazy... I was flicking through the new Crash Annual other day when I saw a familiar sight... https://i.postimg.cc/7GQhzYnZ/IMG-20201209-104234.jpg I can't tell you how chuffed I was to see this! I remember reading Crash Christmas specials back ...

The actual trap withdraw speed is fine, it's just that the player movement is a little twitchy/gluey so it's hard to get it right with the required precision. (Maybe partly down to having 48K sound rather than 128?) I can do the coin-op blindfold but it took me about 100 lives to escape the first l...

OM actual G he's only gone and done it. Wowsers. Would love to see it get polished up a bit in time by yourself or someone else (the diamond cave is much too easy and the monster pool is extremely hard to escape from), but that's just a phenomenal feat for a first game, from scratch to release in a...

Well, I think I'm pretty much done! https://youtu.be/YQeyKqAeEaY?t=127 If you scoot back to the beginning of the video, you can see the loading screen in all it's colour clashing glory. Progress: - Added difficulty curve, which hopefully tops out at level 12 (I don't know, I can't get past level 5!)...

Cool! Thanks

Well, the way you make a tape file seems extremely convoluted, but then I’m not here to criticize your development tools. Perhaps, you could share your resulting file with us so we could take a closer look at? Maybe you’ve overlooked something else entirely? Also, have you considered writing a simp...

No peripherals - in fact, I've only tried loading it in an emulator with simulated loading, so I guess it could be an emulator thing, but it doesn't happen with other taps.

Should add that it happens with or without the poke.

Thought I'd piggy back a question on this thread, rather than start another... I'm trying to insert a loading screen in my game's tap file... I've followed the instructions given on page one, and it has mostly worked. I created a game tap file from sjasmplus (with savetap "filename.tap"), ...

https://youtu.be/bGaTIW9EbIc Progress: - Added falling missiles - Added pit monster - Added pit trap - Added robots - Added shooting - Added options screen - Added joystick support - Added some placeholder (and awful) sound effects - Performance improvements Busy week! Actually, most of this week wa...

That's looking very nice! I notice there's a tunnel that leads up behind the Zonker. Is there some way you can disable it or slow it down? In the arcade, that tunnel is where the enemy robots deploy. They kind of pile in behind the zonker and drop down. I've never tried getting up there, funnily en...

https://youtu.be/3IpPztRz470 Progress... - Added scoring - Added high score table - Added level completion - Added tank shooting - Also fixed a load of bugs Phew! The tank shooting turned out to be not as awful as I thought it would be. Once I had some functions sorted out to check if chars were emp...

Mercifully, it runs on a Next... so if I get it finished in time, I might be able to get a piece of that Christmas Spectrum sales pie!

Meanwhile... https://youtu.be/SMa1pU0skS8 Latest developments: - Added collision between rocks and player - Added lives, a life summary screen, game over screen - Added collection of gems Best of all, I revisited my buffer to screen code. Based on an idea up thread, I rewrote my buffer copy to only ...

Ivanzx wrote: ↑Thu Feb 20, 2020 7:47 pm Following closely this project, sounds like an interesting game to convert

By the way, I foun out that there was a conversion for the Spectrum, as a type-in!!

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 6&id=15150

I wish I'd known about this a few weeks ago

Lethargeek wrote: ↑Sun Feb 16, 2020 7:20 pm If most of the screen area doesn't change, it is faster to copy the 'dirty' tiles only (those marked drawing into the buffer)

Yeah, that's a good idea. Will have a think about doing it like that instead.

Latest developments: - Added high score table underneath play area (per arcade) - Added alternate title screen with instructions (per arcade) - Added rock falling - Added gems, and made diamond and gems twinkle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25QxbigCTM4 I'm starting to run into places where I need ...

Looks great! (though we might have to remove "16k" from the list of supported models before we send it to the printers!)

This time, I ran into my first head scratcher - how to reproduce the digging mechanic. Initially, I toyed with the idea of doing the movement and the digging as character-based. This would have made things so much easier, especially with colour clash, with figuring out what you can dig, what you can...

In terms of performance, which would be preferred? push/pop af or ex af? http://clrhome.org/table/ Okay, beginner level question... what is a t-state? Is it just a clock cycle? So for a 3.5Mz processor, there would be (counts fingers) about 70,000 t-states per frame at 50 fps? And checking if your ...

Ha, that's mad 😄 I just suggested a port of The Pit late last year, and even mocked up a slightly adjusted screen layout to account for the missing lines: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=27734#p27734 Yours looks fabulous. Not sure about the snap-scroll but it's early days 🙂 T...

I decided to go with the push screen scrolling, which I think works quite well. No, i see here flip happening at the same point when moving up and down, this is wrong. There must be a gap, so when you take a step back after the flip, the screen doesn't revert back immediately. Right now, when movin...

More progress. A spaceship and a "zonker" appear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgaukjNnqs8 I've also added in all the rocks from the first level. Which now means I'll need to implement the digging mechanism to be able to get around the whole level. It'll be enouragement to face it, I su...

RMartins wrote: ↑Mon Feb 10, 2020 3:53 pm Also, avoid keeping data on the A register, since this is the most used register of them all.
You can do (EX AF, AF') if you really need to, but reserve this only for the lower level detail (leaf functions and/or loops).

In terms of performance, which would be preferred? push/pop af or ex af?

Yeah, I do have the latest version, but still get crashes. I raised an issue about it on the github page, and the author suggested trying a beta version of ZESarUX, but that didn't help either.

To be honest, even with the crashes, it is still enormously useful.

I feel as though I'm making progress with this... I'm feeling a lot more confident now that I've moved to more a structured codebase rather than some monolithic nightmare. Applying good programming practice like modular functions and plenty of commenting has helped enormously in this regard. I'm als...