Spectrum Computing

Fantastic game, graphics and music are amazing as expected. I like the sound effects, in particular the gun feels really satisfying to fire. Although with the great weapons it would have been nice to see a bit more varied combat besides the two enemy types that are in the game. I only completed the ...

I still hear a lot of clicking on Windows, and everything sounds distorted, especially AY music. I think I can detect the slight audio delay as well. It's probably just because my CPU sucks (it's < 2GHz).

The mouse speed is slightly fast too I think. Survivisection had a menu with different settings for the cursor sensitivity - would it be possible to add something like that? (if it's not too much work)

You could try using CHR$ PEEK 23560 instead of INKEY$ (or use LET s=PEEK 23560). It returns the last pressed key instead of the currently pressed key, so it could detect keystrokes that would normally be skipped. The downside is you can't use it to tell when no key is being pressed, but you could ma...

It is possible to detect UDGs with SCREEN$, you just need a few POKEs. Here's a column from YS #20 that tells you how to do it.

I think he's referring to the 'swordfish' picture that appears when you complete Manic Miner without using the level skip cheat. It was probably a reference to this originally.

Try POKE 37793,24.

Hi [mention]bigjon[/mention], I just want to say thanks for your great tutorial! It really helped me when I first started learning machine code. But one thing in it confused me for years - when you say that EI is used to enable the keyboard and DI to disable it. That had me believing that interrupts...

I played it with Kempston mouse and I think I completed it, but it was hard to tell because clicking on some objects (bartender, peephole, taxi stand) resulted in a lot of random text spewing all over the screen ;) And I had some unused objects left over at the end. But it's a really nice game, the ...

I found a shortcut to save a couple of seconds on level 5: you can jump off the side of the screen from the rightmost spring and land on the exit platform, instead of going back through the teleporter. But it's easy to mess it up.

Nicely done Ersh, it looks like you're well ahead of me! Now try running it with sound turned off as well to save time on the teleporters

The music does sound a lot better if the offending notes are POKEd to the correct values. I actually thought the main sprite was from Lemmings, but after looking at that game they are completely different. It's a nice looking sprite anyway.

Interesting title screen effect, I wonder if it's meant to look something like the patterns in this Interlace demo.

I tried improving my time and this is the best I could manage - it's around 2:40. I just can't do the right-hand section of level 3 reliably.
wonky.szx
wonky.rzx

Finally managed to complete this without using snapshots, but man it's hard. The jumps on the third screen require some insane reactions, and it doesn't help that you need to leave the music on to keep the game at a playable speed! The most frustrating parts are the jumps where you bounce off a wall...

I'm usually quite awful at shoot'em'ups but I was able to get decently far in this game. The difficulty's quite reasonable and it looks very polished. And it's fast too.

I just noticed a small mistake, Clicky Click's Dungeon is listed as Clickety Click's Dungeon in the database.

Are you going to do another chart for January [mention]PeterJ[/mention]?

I heard it's because programs didn't make their way into Russia until quite late, around 1986 maybe, so by the time they got JSW and MM they had already seen more advanced games and the older ones didn't have the same effect. And there was a huge amount of publicity surrounding Manic Miner after its...

Yeah, looks like it's back to normal. The paging problem turned out to be a bug in ZCL that's been fixed for the next release, so I've got it working again now

It works for me, are you using the correct Spectrum model? When I played it before the colours were wrong because I accidentally had the Pentagon selected.

Nice game, I got to level 2 playing the non-bugfixed version but I'll try to get further with the new release.

Well I just tried jumping into the exit on the first level (off the pad next to the dot) and I ended up landing down the bottom on the right hand side.

It's odd, because some of the other pages were updated only this year (I downloaded a tape file viewer from there a few days ago). But hopefully it'll be fixed sooner or later.

Nice work! It's great to see more original concepts like this. I don't get what the dots slowing you down are for, are you supposed to collect them or avoid them? I looked at your note table in sound.c and it looks like some of the values are being used for the wrong notes. The correct values should...

Weird, the Zeus site (desdes.com) seems to be down at the moment. Has the domain expired or something?