Spectrum Computing

I recently played the game again on the zx-uno and I can only say that it is excellent! At the same time, it was very useful for testing different Spectrum cores, which will help us to improve their accuracy. Thank you kindly, sir! And I’m happy that it helped with improving the accuracy of emulati...

Gosh, I completely forgot about Spectron . At first I even thought you confused me for someone else, because looking at the code I couldn’t believe it was my work. But I looked through my notes (thank goodness I’d kept them!), and sure enough—the code was there. I had a few instances written out (wi...

This is a very strange game. Apart from the ROM check, the game works properly only with the issue 2 keyboard. Otherwise, the sound is messed up and the game crashes on start. Indeed. I made a fix for that, too. It would be interesting to know, if there are any other games that require exclusively ...

Rasputin (48K): the Softlock loader decrypts data against the ROM, so will only work on the original 48K machine.

Yes. Soldier of Fortune checks for the letter S in the copyright message in a specific location and either enables of disables the AY special effects. Another game that checks for that is Little Puff . (Although it ignores both the 128K and the +2 and only uses the AY on the +2A/+3.) I made a bug-fi...

Small unsolicited feedback :P: I noticed that the missiles won't cause any damage to the ground buildings and the bombs won't damage the planes. I think it would be a bit more realistic if they would cause some damage :D. Any feedback is always welcome! You’re not the first one to suggest this. At ...

Tapir has two panes and a Compare Tapes command. It marks the differing blocks purple. It doesn’t show you the actual different bytes, that’s something most standard hex editors do.

And then, I thought, how about if I try a little hack? What if I update my I/O port read logic to return random numbers between 0x00 and 0xff when a read is attempted from an unassigned/non-existing I/O port number? One line of code later the helicopter started purring like a kitten. Much to my sur...

Indeed, writing to ROM is sometimes used for screen address calculations (primarily, when an object goes off the top of the screen area). This greatly simplifies things and speeds up calculations. I think I used that technique in one of the earlier versions of Yankee for the missiles (the code may s...

p13z wrote: ↑Sat Jun 25, 2022 9:07 pm Totally thought this was going to be something saucy from the title

Still could be: “Insert new entry.”

Hmm. The +2 already has a composite output on pin 1 of the DIN 8 socket. Try that pin directly (and the ground, obviously, which is pin 2).

There are genuinely people who think computer games are trivial and of a lower intellectual level, like Fred Harris on the BBC's Micro Live show, who sneered at the very idea of using a computer for gaming. Yes, and then there was this inventor guy, (forget his name, I think it rhymed with éclair )...

Ah, I see. I primarily use Fuse, and it does a very decent job at emulating scan lines. Looks very realistic (when compared to a real Trinitron CRT).

Those are CRT TV scan lines. Some emulators allow you to turn them on, which I personally like and use.

Anybody mention Pete Cooke as lead programmer already? His 3D work is amazing.

PeteProdge wrote: ↑Sun Jun 19, 2022 11:10 am Fourth is Zythum, with 2 votes.

Which is outrageous!

TMD2003 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 17, 2022 5:41 pm
Figure 3 - Pixel Coordinate Depth-First Flood Fill

Hmm. Crashes midway for me. (Haven’t looked into it yet.)

There are very few things that can go wrong with it. It’s basically a transformer (two coils wrapped around a core) to lower the voltage, a bridge rectifier (essentially, four diodes) to turn AC into DC, and a couple of capacitors to smooth things out. There’s also a fuse in the plug for protection....

Well, it’s pretty fast already. And I’m sure the few instances of SMC help a lot in this regard! Looks like it could also do with a couple of blanked-out vertical lines in the corners of the walls, to stop the adjacent textures merging together. I could maybe manage that with larger textures, such t...

One of the Seymour games?

bluespikey wrote: ↑Fri Jun 17, 2022 9:03 am wasn't the autofire simply a constant ON signal?

I don’t think so. There was some simple electronic circuitry inside, so it was probably actually closing and opening the contacts at a specific rate:

Nether Earth.

Evil Genius wrote: ↑Sat Jun 11, 2022 3:21 pm Just FF'ed through the vid but didn't see Thanatos or Dark Sceptre there

Thanatos is the second one in the vid.

Perhaps it was a very old version. I use negative numbers and offsets all the time with no issues. I used win32 build :x Well, can’t comment on that, but the macOS build gives me the correct values with this simple test code: ld ix,label+1 ld a,(ix-1) ld bc,-32 ret label db 0,1,2,3 This ends up wit...

g0blinish wrote: ↑Wed Jun 08, 2022 8:33 am

Ast A. Moore wrote: ↑Thu Jun 02, 2022 9:39 pmzasm

when I was working on a game for Jupiter ace, I ran into one peculiarity: the assembler did not understand negative numbers.
ld a,(ix-1) turns to ld a,(ix+1)
ld bc,-32 to ld bc,32

Perhaps it was a very old version. I use negative numbers and offsets all the time with no issues.