Spectrum Computing

Seraphima looks great, and I love the way there are several different parallax effects for different areas. But it has some very poor jumping - particularly for a character with such obvious wings, poor level design with too many downward leaps of faith, and a lot of pointless wandering in and out ...

I'm still impressed by Fairlight . That Special FX player has a bit of an off-putting buzz to it (possibly because it uses interrupts to control the drum effects, which puts the note timing off a bit). And the old Wham! Music Box that did 2-channel music just sounds like 2 crude beeper notes at the ...

The production company, TV Choice Ltd, still exists, though now sticks to educational/corporate videos, a lot of them have titles like the things Alan Partridge would present for businesses: https://web.archive.org/web/20231128100117/http://www.tvchoice.uk.com/ There is a hint of Partridge about it...

Just noticed the '2020' at the bottom of the title screen and thought I'd been working on this for a while. Then came here and noticed that first screenshot was dated 2018!!!

And I've done four other games since then...

I assume this was some sort of promotional thing for retailers, rather than ever actually broadcast on TV. It doesn't appear to be part of any known broadcast program.

I've done a game that will only work if you've got an external video interface to generate a second screen, so I can't complain if you have a game where you say it's best played in an emulator with 'gigascreen' smoothing turned on! I was kind of surprised how the flicker when objects appear in my la...

The game Wanderer came with 3d glasses, but it really didn't work. It used vector graphics drawn in red and cyan, but the attribute squares let it down. That and TV's don't actually give very pure red / green / blue light colour separation from the phosphor dots, so the separation in the glasses is ...

Chase HQ II looks like it's squeezed everything down to run in the tiniest share of the bottom few lines of the screen, and still can't manage a playable frame rate. I'm assuming it's the same terribly slow code from Out Run and Turbo Out Run in there. And there seems to be hardly any point in call...

Did I mention all* votes for Parsley Sage and the 7 Bins of Sunak win a £3.4 billion government contract and a peerage? No pressure.

*some, probably.

I vaguely remember an explanation from Joffa about how the sound works in Green Beret , Cobra etc. The game is carefully written so that it always updates within 2 frames of the TV picture (i.e. take less than 1/25 second to execute one cycle of the main game program loop). If it finishes that cycle...

Should be "Parsley Sage and the 7 Bins of Sunak"

Just had two big bugs show up out of nowhere last night. I suddenly realised I'd never seen a particular one of a set of randomised objects appear ever, and when I fixed that so that it did show up, and I got a hit on it in the game, random graphics started appearing all over the screen! :o (That is...

Some elves are still particularly busy right now...

OK, got some more done last night. You can now win, lose, move on levels, and run out of lives. Beeper sound effects are working well, despite being incredibly simple in how they're generated. I put a byte like 01010101 or 00001111 in a spare register, then after each row of the main drawing functio...

EdToo wrote: ↑Tue Dec 19, 2023 10:49 am That is forward thinking.

'Forward Thinking' would have been starting earlier!!!

Going to be tricky. I have to work this week so only got Wednesday and Thursday evenings to work on it. We might all get sent home Friday afternoon but I'm not sure.

Nearly there. More fancy titles, added a background, got the things to lob things at moving round, and colliding with the player. Got a couple of sound FX in too. Now need to make the things know when they're shot and make some more noises and scores.

I'd agree Fairlight is a good comparison. It took the 'Isometric 3D' genre and completely re-wrote it. No more blocks on a grid; no more identical backgrounds. Each room was a custom layout and drawing, with larger open areas to walk around, and no limit on moving objects (or guard helmets) from roo...

FLASH is a waste from a games point of view. As a feature of a text terminal, to be able to flash an attention-getter like that with no programming overhead at all, is quite a bonus. Although arguably Teletext did it neater - flashing the pixels on/off, or you could view it as periodically setting t...

SkoolKid wrote: ↑Tue Dec 12, 2023 2:20 pm Ometron, probably.

Guess I should have looked it up under the publisher!
Never heard of it though, and it looks pretty impressive! (Except for regularly being struck from behind with no warning!!!)
Box art is preposterously sh*t though.

Blimey, those copies of 'Games Computing' are fun to look over. I like the DSS software listing in the first few pages of the May issue - for 'Pimble Wizard' on the VIC 20 :lol: Some sort of dictation error there, I think. Anyone any idea what 'Omertron' (Software Projects, Spectrum) might be? The c...

I love the animations of the duck and the movement on the diagonal stairs, and all the hints. Shame the duck has to turn red when on the same row as a red enemy. Is that an AGD thing?

Cost-cutting meant keeping the size of the ULA down. Adding alternate screen modes would have needed a bigger ULA chip, so one fixed mode made things a lot cheaper. These modern expansion devices monitor the expansion ports and can detect when data is written to the screen memory. They then keep the...

Bit more progress. More graphics, title screen, can move around and lob things.
Need to add things to lob things at.

For short bits of music I find this site useful: https://musescore.com/sheetmusic?text=fairytale%20of%20new%20york You usually find lots of user-contributed versions of music scores, varying in complexity from simple one-note-at-a-time melodies to multiple part scores. Even without signing up you ca...