Spectrum Computing

As remarkable as something like Starstrike 2 is, it's just about possible because it's in space, there are no backgrounds. As has been said above, as soon as you want to have backgrounds and fast moving foreground sprites, all done in software, you are going to end up running under 10 frames per sec...

Pac-Land is a fun game, the PC-Engine version is great, but on the Spectrum I really prefer the golden age single screen games because I know it's possible to really do them justice. You can certainly expect more of them from me!

it's funny you should mention Galaxian - it's certainly something I've considered, because even though the official conversion is pretty good, it could be a bit smoother and faster, especially if it has AY sound effects. That being said, I have a pretty long 'to do' list, so it probably won't be for...

Thanks for the feedback, always appreciated. The option to redefine the start key is there because it's actually the joystick fire button as well and is used in game for pausing the game too. The idea being that people play these games on emulators in a number of ways and you can be on the couch or ...

I guess it could clash if you chose 'R' to as the 'start' key, I guess I could disallow that. Seems an unlikely choice though!

Well, nothing, you can use R if you want, because in the menu you aren't moving Pacman so it won't clash.

just to add, one alternative would be to use something like Shiru's AYFX player, and to create simple tunes which are sound effects, and play them using some kind of a timer.

Another update

Incredible, this is so good! After all these decades of (great) Spectrum Pac-man games, it finally feels like the definitive version has arrived. Makes me wonder if you might tackle some other classic titles. Thanks! This is actually my fifth 'golden age' arcade conversion after converting Turtles,...

some more updates

thanks guys I certainly wouldn't be working on accuracy to this degree and not be aware of the ghost delay. First you get things working, then you add the embellishments. You'll note that the ghost score is not added to the score too - that's because all of that will be coded together. Obviously the...

hey guys I realise that probably the last thing the Spectrum world needs is another clone of Pacman but I've been trying to make one I can be proud of for most of my adult life so I'm not about to give up now! It does feature a very close recreation of the arcade maze, including the correct number o...

Was aiming just to pip Lee's score, and ended up with... 195600 ... Your turn, Andre :mrgreen: Wow, well played Sir. Andre was helping me to work on the difficulty curve and I thought I'd set the maximum level to 'almost impossible'. Looks like I will have to look at that hardcore mode I was planni...

oh, and a little bit of tech stuff. The pills and maze walls are laid out in such a way that facilitates fast drawing and by shifting everything down a little, allows the fruit to be multicoloured. I had originally planned for this game to use a multicolour trick to give the ghosts white eyes but in...

here's a few little tips: The fruits are set so that they appear only after a certain number of dots are eaten, and they will only appear when you are closer to the edges of the screen. This was a design choice to stop people lurking in the centre, more risk more reward. The other way to score big p...

Nice to see you guys getting a high score game going. Andre is the master though, he has a ridiculous score of about 80,000 or more. Mad skills!

Thank Gabriele, I did indeed work really hard on not cutting any corners, which is really important when you have minimal gameplay.

Nice work! I've seen this trick used quite extensively in the demo scene over the years but not much in games, well done.

neat

Yes, I thought it would be interesting to take the concept but apply the gameplay and feel of Pacman more closely, especially as I already had the assets. It's coming along quite well.

Ah yes, my wife still says 'Glory to Arstotzka!' whenever we go through customs.

Likely because there's no pink or brown, so it's often used for skin tone.

sorry, reading that back, I don't think I was especially clear - any game code would have to be done when the raster beam was in the border, thus making it quite limited - although you could potentially use the top two thirds for the game and have quite a few more cycles to play with.

p.s the screen does update at 50hz. It uses an attribute buffer of 1536 bytes, with each byte containing two 3-bit colour values. Whatever you write to that buffer will be displayed on screen. But given that anything you do would have to be in the border, it's quite limiting.