Search found 1408 matches
- Tue Apr 09, 2024 7:37 am
- Forum: Other Retro Stuff
- Topic: Lara Croft voted most iconic character ever
- Replies: 42
- Views: 948
Re: Lara Croft voted most iconic character ever
It's been also said about Master Chief earlier, but tbh I'm not sure where does this notion come from. Both these characters have very strong identity, (visual, at least) and the fact that they don't say much or that MC is wearing a helmet doesn't stop me (and clearly a lot of other people) from re...
- Mon Apr 08, 2024 5:40 pm
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: The best playable demo of a full price game on a YS/Crash/SU covertape: vote
- Replies: 45
- Views: 849
- Sun Apr 07, 2024 10:17 am
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: The best playable demo of a full price game on a YS/Crash/SU covertape: vote
- Replies: 45
- Views: 849
Re: The best playable demo of a full price game on a YS/Crash/SU covertape: vote
It's very hard, so I've tried to stick to games I remember playing the demos of back in the day and enjoying. Which, to some extent, excludes those I bought the game of because I'll have forgotten the demo but hey ho. 1) Dominator - I remember loading this one, lots. As a massive R-Type fan I loved ...
- Sat Apr 06, 2024 2:37 pm
- Forum: Other Retro Stuff
- Topic: Lara Croft voted most iconic character ever
- Replies: 42
- Views: 948
Re: Lara Croft voted most iconic character ever
I may have shot down my own arguments here. Just asked my girlfriend - who is not a gamer unless you count The Sims or those rollercoaster games - to name a videogame character. Without the slightest pause: "Lara Croft". Can't say I'm surprised, I think some people here have a very skewed...
- Thu Apr 04, 2024 9:24 am
- Forum: Programming
- Topic: Bank switching issue
- Replies: 32
- Views: 1110
Re: Bank switching issue
you prolly have the stack somewhere around $FF00, or something. so when you switched the banks, the window [$C000..$FFFF] moved to another memory region… and your stack stays in the old one. ;-) just remember that memory area [$C000..$FFFF] is affected by switch, and design your code around that. I...
- Wed Apr 03, 2024 8:28 am
- Forum: Showcase your work!
- Topic: Abersoft fig-Forth Recompiled
- Replies: 108
- Views: 1903
Re: Abersoft fig-Forth Recompiled
this will limit the ways to use the system. the idea is that you can move the sprites anywhere in your code, when you want it, not when the system wants you to do it. you command — the system obeys, not vice versa. ;-) Doing this in interrupts will make the code exponentially harder to use. Because...
- Tue Apr 02, 2024 3:18 pm
- Forum: Programming
- Topic: Bank switching issue
- Replies: 32
- Views: 1110
Re: Bank switching issue
I bet you still have interrupts enabled? If you do, you need to update the relevant system variables before you switch banks. If you don't do that, there is every chance the system will sweep in when you're not looking, do some stuff and then "restore" the correct banking as per the variab...
- Sun Mar 31, 2024 7:05 pm
- Forum: Programming
- Topic: Zilog's Z80 opcode choice
- Replies: 20
- Views: 523
Re: Zilog's Z80 opcode choice
Honestly I don't think it's the prefixes I'd be bothered about. If I wanted to tweak the Z80 design, removing the need to re-read instructions like LDIR would've been where I'd go next. And maybe redesign instructions like OTIR to be better suited to a 16-bit IO range (use DE as the destination rath...
- Sun Mar 31, 2024 1:29 pm
- Forum: Programming
- Topic: Zilog's Z80 opcode choice
- Replies: 20
- Views: 523
Re: Zilog's Z80 opcode choice
DEC SP/INC SP are silly instructions too. It would be loads better if it decremented/incremented by 2, changing by 1 has no use I can think of, since you always push a word to the stack. If it incremented by 2 it would just be like discarding the value on the top of the stack (I usually use POP AF ...
- Sat Mar 30, 2024 11:14 pm
- Forum: Programming
- Topic: Zilog's Z80 opcode choice
- Replies: 20
- Views: 523
Re: Zilog's Z80 opcode choice
Well, the decision was mostly made for them. A design goal of the Z80 was to be able to run all 8080 code at a binary level, so you couldn't really just swap out less used instructions even if you wanted to. Whether that was really necessary is a different question I suspect the actual instruction s...
- Thu Mar 28, 2024 1:18 pm
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: Starglider being used to gunge children on telly in 1987
- Replies: 8
- Views: 234
Re: Starglider being used to gunge children on telly in 1987
Yeah, I've heard that said and I didn't actually mean to drive down there, it's just that an incident with my car meant I had to stop in Norwich city centre for a while and when I resumed going to my actual destination, I saw myself heading down that very road. Even though it was a Thursday afterno...
- Thu Mar 28, 2024 9:49 am
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: Starglider being used to gunge children on telly in 1987
- Replies: 8
- Views: 234
Re: Starglider being used to gunge children on telly in 1987
Almost certainly Amigas. From what I hear of Barcadia, you have to pay £10 for a bunch of American quarters, which gets you about 10 goes on the arcade machines, it's also located on probably the worst street for dealing with drunk clubbing types. Meanwhile, five minutes away there is an arcade in t...
- Wed Mar 27, 2024 7:38 pm
- Forum: Hardware
- Topic: Whitby Computers Spectrum Simulator for C64
- Replies: 1
- Views: 170
Re: Whitby Computers Spectrum Simulator for C64
Ah, so a hand coded reimplementation of the Speccy ROM in 6502. I'd have guessed it had to be something like that to function at any kind of speed, actually emulating a Z80 would've been a very tall order. Impressive that he also got it loading actual ZX tapes via the C64's slightly weird tape syste...
- Tue Mar 26, 2024 8:36 am
- Forum: Sinclair Miscellaneous
- Topic: DenOfGeek : The games that defined the Spectrum
- Replies: 31
- Views: 690
Re: DenOfGeek : The games that defined the Spectrum
There are also Dizzy (Amstrad CPC) If you look at the internals of Dizzy, it's pretty obvious the primary target platform was the Spectrum. The CPC version stores all the colour numbers in Spectrum format and then remaps them onto its 4 colour mode (this is why there are no blue background objects,...
- Mon Mar 25, 2024 9:29 am
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: A 16K/48K/128K Spectrum game?
- Replies: 6
- Views: 287
Re: A 16K/48K/128K Spectrum game?
Honestly, I'd have thought the requirements for running in just 16K (tiny amount of RAM, can't use IM2 etc) would make such a thing extremely unlikely and little more than a proof of concept if it did exist. I can't even remember games that would be expanded on a 48K machine, I think the prevalence ...
- Wed Mar 20, 2024 2:00 pm
- Forum: Programming
- Topic: Progamming with Chatgpt 4/ copilot
- Replies: 13
- Views: 413
Re: Progamming with Chatgpt 4/ copilot
Ultimately ChatGPT (and all LLMs) is essentially predictive text on steroids. It's very, very good at generating plausible looking text but it never actually understands what it is doing. It's why it might get a long way to producing vaguely correct code, especially in boilerplate scenarios, but it'...
- Tue Mar 19, 2024 8:03 pm
- Forum: Programming
- Topic: ZX Spectrum Emu - Booting issue
- Replies: 2
- Views: 140
Re: ZX Spectrum Emu - Booting issue
I've only had a quick squint at the code, but can't quite see how your interrupts are supposed to work. halt seems to set an internal variable but I can't see where it is used. The actual implementation of maskable interrupts seems to be inside an nmi function (which seems weird) but I can't see whe...
- Thu Mar 14, 2024 11:12 am
- Forum: Sinclair Miscellaneous
- Topic: That thing with the blue and magenta ladders (OUT)
- Replies: 39
- Views: 934
Re: That thing with the blue and magenta ladders (OUT)
It looks like a stack crash, some code got caught in an infinite loop and is PUSHing the same six bytes onto the stack over and over. It's not quite the same six bytes, there looks to be 8 bytes before it repeats in the screen data, but they're different on different lines which is curious. Also th...
- Tue Mar 12, 2024 9:11 am
- Forum: Showcase your work!
- Topic: Saboteur 2 mod
- Replies: 66
- Views: 3342
Re: Saboteur 2 mod
So the recommended speed is 12.5fps? Probably I didn't get the message right. I was precisely asking for responsiveness at 25fps but everything else moving at a more moderate pace which would make sense. At 25fps, when a movement key is pressed the sprite starts moving in the screen around 1/25s la...
- Sun Mar 10, 2024 11:57 am
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: Oblique 3D Graphics - true or not?
- Replies: 21
- Views: 446
Re: Oblique 3D Graphics - true or not?
Oblique projection is a type of parallel projection: ... lines of sight or projection lines, are parallel to each other. I could see crossing lines (with some imagination). But i don't see lines at left side of screen are parallel to lines at right side. Wall lines are parallel, but they are at the...
- Sun Mar 10, 2024 10:55 am
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: Oblique 3D Graphics - true or not?
- Replies: 21
- Views: 446
Re: Oblique 3D Graphics - true or not?
PANDEMIA . Fake perspective - that what exactly describes by feel of that screen. I think it is one-point perspective (see wiki) because all furniture lines should end in one point far away. "All objects will recede to points in the distance". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(gr...
- Sat Mar 09, 2024 2:44 pm
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: Oblique 3D Graphics - true or not?
- Replies: 21
- Views: 446
Re: Oblique 3D Graphics - true or not?
Well it sort of is. There is no perspective (you can see the tiles on the walls are all parallel lines). It's just a really weird mash up of two oblique angles.
- Sat Mar 09, 2024 12:42 pm
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: Oblique 3D Graphics - true or not?
- Replies: 21
- Views: 446
Re: Oblique 3D Graphics - true or not?
They're all oblique projections, since none of them apply perspective. There's always a possibility with this that the end result can "look odd" because your brain can interpret the image in multiple ways and none of them are entirely correct.
- Sat Mar 09, 2024 10:48 am
- Forum: Programming
- Topic: Measuring frames/VSYNC
- Replies: 10
- Views: 545
Re: Measuring frames/VSYNC
One thing to bear in mind is that, unlike the Amiga, you're don't really have to worry about someone having a faster CPU. So a lot of the time HALT on it's own will suffice. If you're execution time per frame is very variable, I'd personally probably use my own interrupt routine rather than the ROM ...
- Tue Mar 05, 2024 10:52 pm
- Forum: Games/Software
- Topic: How hard would it be to hack these racers?
- Replies: 61
- Views: 1794
Re: How hard would it be to hack these racers?
@AndyC But sprites in Enduro are much bigger and active screen area is also much bigger. I think the Enduro engine is just more advanced. Outrun effectively has to calculate and render two roads all the time (it's how branching and highways work), which requires significantly more maths than the si...