Spectrum Computing

I see you're in this month's Retro Gamer! Hopefully this means some progress is being made, I was a big fan of GG when it appeared on the Crash covertape, despite some janky quirks (getting the gold in the sodding barrow!!) so I'm hugely looking forward to seeing these ironed out :) Screenshots look...

The ship's computer, Achilles, in the excellent Aliens: Neoplasma is most definitely NOT on your side!

The last one looks good. The problem with trying to do a waterfall is you need a fair bit more variety in it than just a few repeated tiles or columns. Added to which, water accelerates and spreads out as it falls - most of the good waterfalls in games rely on static animations of a few frames rath...

As an experiment I tried a couple of things that were relatively easy to implement with a little massaging of the existing code... [...] 2) The other was to simply make firing automatic as someone had suggested given the nature of game pretty much requires firing most of the time. So the controls r...

This just popped up over on t'facebook on the World Of Spectrum group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WorldOfSpectrum.org/posts/3538150119792968/ CEDRIC Community Energy Display and Retrieval of Information and Calculation - A British Gas Educational Publication I was interested to find out about i...

Great post. But surely you meant classic lines such as ... "You're gonna be a bad mother crusher !" " Why me? Why me? " "We used to call the old man funny names (...) Once, I even called him airhead ." " Ladies leave!" :mrgreen: The ITV pre-watershed version ...

Try to upscale video, and upload in 4K resolution. Wise guys said, that YT does weird recompression for videos in small resolutions like from our beloved Speccy. Yeah, I found that out the hard way! Now I use this ffmpeg command to convert Spectaculator .avi output to 720p@50Hz .mkv with letterbox:...

Since I'm using IX & IY to determine the location of the tile graphics, it becomes easy to add animated tiles with almost zero overhead (68 Ts per frame for the pointer calculation & update, I think?!)... so here's an attempt at a top-down, bubbling lava effect (only let down by my crap grap...

Here's a version with a platform added, for our plucky hero to stand on while fighting off whatever else happens to be going on at the time... don't fall off, now! From here it's quite easy to imagine overlaying sprites for descending obstacles to be avoided, enemies and so on. However that's less l...

Something I've been messing around with over the weekend, inspired by things seen in arcade/16-bit console games back in the day. Here's an idea for a vertically-scrolling level background, using columns made from just two background tiles (32 x 16 px each) and scrolling them at different rates. The...

When my folks bought the family 48K+ I was too young to use it on my own... but that didn't matter, as my dad loved Atic Atac and Arcadia, so was on it quite a lot! Eventually we moved house, had a separate dining room and living room, so the Speccy (soon to be replaced by a +2A) was in the dining r...

Not much useful to add, only I share your pain having done this for the vehicles in Rival Gangs... ❤️‍🩹 You've already done the important part, which is to encapsulate the sprite within a circle such that the edges never overflow the bounding box (16 x 16 in both yours and my cases) upon rotation. I...

AndyC wrote: ↑Mon Feb 20, 2023 8:01 pm Actually, I just might. I'll have to have a dig around.

I've bought one of the ones PeterJ posted, but thank you for offering

@presh, https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/295523898724?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=EvSfvD4QTTK&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=8qbn96ajs_c&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY And: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/404169735949?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0...

Does anyone have a copy of this they'd be willing to part with?

Doesn't need to be mint condition & happy to pay a few quid!

R-Tape wrote: ↑Thu Jan 26, 2023 7:59 pm Great work presh. Can I archive this, or do you think you will do more on it*?

Thanks, yes please do... perhaps one day I'll revisit this, but I can't see that happening any time soon unfortunately!

It's still tricky on occasion. Pasmo REPT has an optional loop var symbol, sjasmplus only added that feature in a very recent change that hasn't been been released yet. Pasmo has extremely eccentric operator precedence, so you would have to add brackets in the converted expression code to force oth...

This. Experienced devs treat porting between two tool flavours as trivial, on a similar level to spell checking or grammar checking. They would see a tool that emits magic converted code for them as something like Clippy in MS Word - something opaque that gets in the way of what you aready know how...

It's probably easier to just write a script to port assembly source from one assembler to another. Which is easier to apply to source from other sources etc as well. It's not as if any of the assemblers out their are likely to do anything that drastically different. Yeah, that's the plan. e.g. writ...

Here's my first stab at a web script to optimise multiplication of a constant factor by a variable factor (A = 0 to 255) It uses the maximum possible value of A to switch between 8 & 16 bit processing. Assumes BC, DE & HL are all available, and that the output is 16-bit (i.e. constant × maxi...

The five stages of grief model (or the Kübler-Ross model) is popularly known as a model that describes a series of emotions experienced by people who are grieving over a lack of features in their chosen assembler. The five stages are: denial, anger, writing your own pre-processor, depression and ac...

most people just want to keep it simple and only use a setup that makes sense for them. Indeed... ultimately it's unlikely many people will actually use my code, but the simpler it is to implement in their chosen setup, the more likely they are to at least have a play around with it. That's why I f...

Trying to make Z80 code portable between assemblers is basically a lost cause. That's certainly the impression I'm getting from you lot :lol: I do have one glimmer of hope... I'm already dynamically generating one of the .asm files (to do display & attribute transfer based on the width of the b...

Note that, by default, sjasmplus doesn't recognize directives starting from the beginning of a line, and treats such expressions as labels (though there is an option to override this IIRC). Put at least a single space before using a directive in your code. Ooh, good shout! I didn't know this so you...

I'm working on some display routines which handle scrolling and whatnot. I want to make the code as reusable as possible, so I've used constants to allow values such as the screen dimensions to be specified, e.g. buffer_width_in_cells EQU 24 buffer_width_in_cells EQU 24 This is fine, but means I am ...