Spectrum Computing

I don't recall playing many demos. I probably did play them, I just don't remember! I'm pretty sure I didn't come across any demo on that list that inspired me to rush out and buy the game though! I don't see R-Type on the list though - was that a C+VG Spectrum/C64 dual tape? I can't remember if I p...

I kind of agree with a lot of that list, from a gaming point of view. Apart from the BG3 crap. And maybe Hitman is a bit fanboy. Then again, why post about this result now; did I miss a post about the poll when it happened? :lol: It's one thing to say it's slanted towards more recent games, and a yo...

The artwork was good but I didn't like that rather drab spotted background framing; I much preferred full-page images. I guess it's an attempt at brand-recognition marketing. I always associate that style with re-releases; I wouldn't look at repeated designs like that and immediately think 'Ooh, a s...

Jet Set Willy 2, surely?

(If it's right, I'll hand it over to someone else).

What happens if you enable noise on more that one channel? Is it any louder? Or is it just the same as when it's on one channel? I can see how maybe you could temporarily override the setting of noise pitch for your sound effect, but continue to use noise on your music channel for percussion. Would ...

I do love that loading screen. It makes that big cartoon style look so effortless! I mean, you can clearly see the colours are restricted to the Spectrum's simple palette, but you have to look really hard to find even a hint of the artist struggling with attribute placement.

Yes, an early DS is a good bet. Which model is not quite so easy to decide, as each has strengths and weaknesses. The original DS doesn't have a particularly bright screen, but can play GBA games as well as DS ones, if that's remotely interesting. The DS-Lite is smaller and has brighter screens, but...

I've had a Weedo Tina2 3D printer for a year and a bit now. It's one that has a case surround rather than being an open deck. It's not completely enclosed - the back and front are open, but it keeps the dust out and doesn't knock other things off the table while it works! It's a neat compact design ...

Nirvana doesn't let you do 4x2 attributes. A multicolour-enhanced attribute still takes up the whole 8-pixel width of a character cell, even when it's only 1 or 2 pixels high. It doesn't offer any improvements or smooth stepping to attributes in the horizontal direction. If you look at multicolour ...

Uridium runs at 25fps, so there's no time for multiple screen copies. There are plenty of tricks it could be using, all of them very complicated. The dreadnought designs aren't exact copies of the C64 ones either, so it seems there are limitations to what it can render. And even at it's slowest it'...

by the way, you cannot copy the whole screen in one frame, not even using stack tricks. there is simply not enough tstates. you may be able to build it from several tiles, but copying fullscreen backbuffer and keeping 50 FPS is physically impossible. This is true. This is the first time I got it wo...

You can always use the time after a HALT to draw some more sprites, or maybe paint a scrolling area that the player and other sprites can't cross (maybe a bit of parallax foreground), so long as it's all based on data from the previous frame of your game update. Then once the raster has got past the...

Although it means an additional delay at the start, it's easier to update just behind the raster. If you're ahead, you have to keep ahead, and you just can't do that unless you're only updating a small area of the screen. Otherwise, the raster will catch up and overtake your copy function, leaving a...

Actually moving the data in the screen memory area is nearly always going to flicker, unless you get very, very good at timing exactly what you're updating where on the screen with how the TV picture is redrawn. Most games will draw the game to somewhere else in memory first, with all the scrolling ...

I did code two educational games (well, convert to the Speccy) back in my schooldays for a games shop in Kettering that had its own line in business and educational software, but I question whether a copy was ever produced, let alone sold, and my old tapes were thrown out some time after I'd graduat...

With Z80 it seems to fail to grasp the very precise rules whereby you can perform certain tasks on certain registers, but not every task on every register, as you usually can with variables in a higher-level language. It also seems to throw-in the odd instruction from other assembly languages (like ...

According to this video it is a pulse-counting type of encoder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTrUw8XFM50 I know you can get rotary encoders that report their absolute angle on four or five pins (a 0..15 or 0..31 value that relates to the angle 0..359°), but according to that rebuild it simply use...

Surely you need to be reading that at a hell of a rate to detect the switching, to the detriment of the game? Then again, it seems they only use 16 pulses per revolution of the controller, so maybe interrupt-driven checking is fast enough. For a good rotary controller I'd suggest wiring a rotary enc...

ParadigmShifter wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2024 11:07 pmApparently one of the prostitutes on his yacht took him too literally when he said he wanted to be tossed off.

At least they wouldn't slip off your boat...

No-one else has posted for hours, so have another one:

W - Swords of Bane

C - Match Point

Didn't know PSD had come out on the Speccy. I had both on the ST. Captain Blood took a lot of effort to get into, to master the icon-based dialogue with the aliens (which didn't help being conceived in a foreign language to start with, so the single-word interpretation of each icon you were given co...

This is an impressive set of very inspiring early games, as I look at the landscapes of Combat Lynx and I see the open-worlds of Just Cause . Turbo Esprit would be Driver if the view would just rotate around the corners. And Scuba Dive makes me shudder at how many times I've drowned and realised it'...

So are you saying playing a note at a random point in a frame might sound bad? If that was directed at me then no, there's no argument. It doesn't sound bad exactly, just I expect a bit farty as it's constantly stop-start, and it's a harsh-sounding square-ish wave behind that as it's all 1s and 0s ...

Head Over Heels plays short melodies when you pick up various objects, though there's nothing plays continuously. It's really just an extension of the sound effects. In my own games the beeper sound effects are done by twiddling the speaker bit high/low off the back of a more vital loop of code (e....