Spectrum Computing

Are you looking for help with AGD, or are you intending the game to be written in assembly and looking for help with that?

I forgot to upload these earlier, but here are the missing programs from the Sinclair Programs September 1985 issue. I did make a minor adjustment to one of the programs - the explosion subroutine was missing from 'Seaside Bomb', so I added instead a single RETURN statement on line 350. Also, I didn...

Allowing for a more lenient definition, you could also include titles such as:
Psycho Soldier
Super Centipede
Super Cycle
Zip-Zap

It seems the links to the tributes on WOS have not been converted over, and now link to nonexistent pages. For example, see Ian Weatherburn. Additionally, only an archive of his Wikipedia page (which is linked to from ZXDB) can be viewed, since it has now been deleted.

Not an amazing score by any means, but from memory it was 1430.

I think the Booty minigame being activated by the Currah μSpeech was not actually intentional. An explanation was posted here: https://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/ ... ion/57304/

Do these count? The game features a whole set of alternate levels (in fact, the same levels found in the later release Uridium Plus). To access them: You need to press 1, 2, or 3 to bring up the player control options, then hold down keys QWERT simultaneously. Release these keys and press X. (Pressi...

Definitely an improvement. The normal difficulty makes the gameplay much more accessible without being boring. That said, I can now finally manage the first stage on hard difficulty.

I wonder where Nomad went to. He made an incredible number of knowledgeable and interesting posts in a short period of time, and then he just stopped posting all of a sudden. The assembly chess program he was working on had a thread that grew to be quite legendary in size. And yeah, I do miss MrPixe...

I finished the remaining programs for the September 1985 issue, but I noticed that the listings had a lot of superfluous whitespace around certain keywords (such as AT and INKEY$). Should I be copying these to match the listings as they appear in the magazine? Was this just an artefact of the printe...

I think those DATA statements are supposed to be: 1220 DATA 6,1,197,33,15,0,17,20, 0,229,205,181,3,225,17,16,0,167, 237,90,125,254,255,32,237,193,16 ,230,201: REM first sound 1230 DATA 0,6,1,197,33,0,3,17,1, 0,229,205,181,3,225,17,16,0,167, 237,82,32,240,193,16,233,201: REM second sound which corres...

Is anyone doing the final issue of Sinclair Programs (September 1985)? Or is that one available?

Oh, nice! I like it! Great-sounding solo, and I like the sound of the kit as well. (Were you using a virtual kit, or live drums?) Just in case you weren't aware, this is the original song that I based the tune on. I also used it to obtain some samples for the demo.

So the program is basically complete (at least for now). It currently has: PM synthesis across three tone channels A chorus/octave effect Oscillator sync User-defined instruments Sample playback Ornaments and pitch bends Bank switching Runtime configurable output device (AY, SpecDrum, etc.) A cool n...

I can't speak from experience, but I think it would still be more performant to use the standard Spectrum screen layout for a backbuffer, as long as you're just drawing row-by-row up or down the screen. INC H is always going to be faster than LD A, L: ADD A, 32: LD L, A, and with the default Spectru...

Interesting article. It's not true however that the rest of the ROM code is identical; I think the author missed some changes. For example, the checks for parentheses at PRINT_4 and IN_ITEM_1 are entirely missing in the prototype ROM. I don't know if these checks affect anything or if they were remo...

Nice work! Looks like a buffer would be a good next step to add, as the output does appear to be a little flickery. Alternatively, if you're going to have a lot happening on screen, it might be faster to clear whole portions of the display rather than undrawing each individual line. I'm wondering wh...

I played the new version and I like all the little touches that have been added. I found it to be quite challenging, although I did manage to destroy multiple missile bases (something I struggled to accomplish in the earlier versions). A major obstacle I experienced with the previous version is that...

Einar Saukas wrote: ↑Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:46 pm

akeley wrote: ↑Thu Apr 02, 2020 7:49 pm There are a few RLs for Spectrum:

Descending Dungeons
Devil's Castle
Escape From Cnossus
MysticTower
Ossuary
Rogue
Spectral Dungeons

I will create a new tag in ZXDB to group these games!

Any others?

I guess these would count:
Rogue (a different one)
Vradark's Sphere

Interesting. I was able to speed up the first version slightly by combining the three rotation subroutines into one, and declaring some variables at the start of the program. This was the new subroutine I used (borrowed from here ): 1000 REM rotate 1020 LET cosa=COS rad 1030 LET sina=SIN rad 1040 LE...

Looks like there are some minor differences from the final ROM. For example, the prototype ROM has additional channels "N" and "T", where "T" is used for communication over port $fd. Also, it features code for both FORMAT and MOVE, although CAT and ERASE still do nothin...

That could also be a good alternative. I think I'll finish the editing part before deciding what kind of visuals to use for playback.

The waveform display doesn't really require any additional CPU. I can easily add an option to disable it if it does turn out to be an issue.

Good idea, I might try that. The reason I went for paging is because I thought a long delay incurred once in a while would be better than shorter delays every row, but redrawing the display took longer than I expected.

I've now added a scrolling (well, paging) tracker display synchronised with the music. You can try it here: synth-v0.1.0-0-g2bd8639_128.tap The problem is, the rendering speed is not great (even when the code is placed in uncontended memory) and this causes noticeable gaps in the song playback. Is t...

I thought this game was released in 2019 (there was a thread about it here). Or is this an updated version?