Spectrum Computing

It's really got to be Batty hasn't it? I was always a big Arkanoid fan to start with, so a 'free' version on the front of a mag that was so polished was a big winner. I enjoyed the Rasputin demo quite a bit too, but that game has not aged as well as Batty.

Ultimate's default choice of keyboard controls being QWERT, when something like QAOPM would have made more sense. I know nothing about coding - would they have had available space to include a redefine keys option? they'd have to care about gameplay though rather than just graphics. 80's me feels l...

Congratulations Paul on a great milestone for a very entertaining channel! Here's to the next 100..

Did anyone else make the mistake with Daley Thompson's on the rubber key 48k, where someone suggested using a golf ball, and rolling it with the palm of the hand back-and-forth instead of pressing the keys or waggling their Quickshot like they were trying to make themselves blind (those early leaf s...

Much as I am not spreading all my various "quirks and features" any further than they need to be, and while I'll keep most of the details of my existence as a deliberate enigma, I may as well say this: if I do catch the Wuhan Flu, I will not be asking for medical assistance, and I may not...

I seem to remember putting an isometric mining game map together, but no idea if I actually sent it in or not. Probably doesn't matter if I did or not, I doubt it was very good.

I remember seeing this inlay in the archive, probably the weirdest one: https://ia800604.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/1/items/World_of_Spectrum_June_2017_Mirror/World%20of%20Spectrum%20June%202017%20Mirror.zip&file=World%20of%20Spectrum%20June%202017%20Mirror/sinclair/games-inlays/t...

Fascinating stuff, makes so much sense, but would never have drawn those conclusions myself.

Sounds great, can you put some sort of GIF showing it in action please? I think you'd get people even more interested if you could show it running. Thanks!

Killa Gorilla, Transistors Revenge and Daredevil Dennis on the BBC Micro are ones I remember from my youth when my half brother used to visit with his Beeb in the mid-late 80's. Still fire them up in the browser sometimes.

Perhaps I should be a bit ashamed to admit this, but I sold a lot of Amigas/ST's off the back of the fact I couldn't "see the PC platform going anywhere" in the late 80's and early 90's. In defence of my myopia, we did only have EGA/VGA at the time, and then you'd have to buy a Soundblaste...

PeteProdge wrote: ↑Mon Sep 07, 2020 2:06 pm
What were they smoking when they said that!?

Probably smoking cracks, Pete

Just noticed that High Score is narrated by Charles Martinet, AKA the modern voice of Mario.

A nice touch.

I worked in a games shop in 1986 and then again in 1989 we never even stocked the NES. The shop went with the Sega Master System as it was easier to get hold of. I remember that you had to sign a legal contract that if you were going to be a Sega dealer then you weren't allowed to also sell Nintend...

[mention]Ersh[/mention] Purely anecdotal I realise, but I worked for an independent computer/console retailer in the UK 87-97, and I can tell you that the NES was FAR outsold by the Master System in consoles and games, possibly even as much as 20 to 1. Nintendo didn't start to make a dent in the mar...

[mention]TMD2003[/mention] Having seen what the SID effects look like on an oscilloscope I now know that this is created by a square wave that's "more up than down" or "more down than up" The technical term for this is PWM, or Pulse Width Modulation, a common technique used on mo...

The biggest embarrassment of all, though, came when New Computer Express had some abject moron cover the budget re-release and somehow manage to assert that the 128K version didn't have any music. (Having presumably loaded the 48K version into a Speccy 128 by mistake.) Perhaps the issue with the mu...

Number 20 is a Design Design game I think, either Warlock, Halls or Dark Star. I'm sure they all used the same health bar...? I knew I'd seen it somewhere! I'm guessing Dark Star! Edit: I think HOTT was similar but in white. It doesn't appear to be the correct answer as there's been no ding ding.. :(

Number 20 is a Design Design game I think, either Warlock, Halls or Dark Star. I'm sure they all used the same health bar...? Yeah, my first thought was HoTT, but then I thought straight away that it looked a bit 'fat'. After I posted I had a look back and I agree. I mean, it's the most generic a h...

Number 20 is a Design Design game I think, either Warlock, Halls or Dark Star. I'm sure they all used the same health bar...?

ketmar wrote: ↑Thu Aug 13, 2020 9:47 pm simple, but surprisingly fun. final boss is a Bas**rd!

Don't you mean 'Batsard'?

Older members of this site will know I've gone on about this before, so I hope they can forgive me for mentioning it one last time.. But I find it so bloody frustrating that I worked for Altera for 7 years, and tried to get the retro computing/gaming sceners interested in FPGA for so long, only to b...

First one that springs to mind is Melbourne Houses 'Terrormolinos', an adventure about Brits on the P?s? in Spain. Doesn't get much more British than that. I remember the advertisement strap line years on without looking it up. 'Wish you were here in Torremolinos - instead of me!'

It's like watching a pinball game score go up with the pledges right now, almost 1/2 a million quid in 30 minutes. Insane. Just bought a second, for the grand kids - 'in my day you had to load a tape, uphill, both ways'

The nearest for me would probably be style 2. My ideal is high res, no colour clash using the original spectrum palette only, with perhaps a couple more variations on the brightness of the original colours. Anything else to me just looks like Atari ST/Amiga, which while nice just doesn't invoke the ...