Spectrum Computing

always hated the wall-hugging weapon in R-Type , not even because of its movement pattern seemingly covering less space but because it being so weak in comparison to any other I play the arcade version under emulation rather than the Speccy version these days, but that weapon is so much more useful...

PeteProdge wrote: ↑Sun Feb 11, 2024 11:58 pm The Plagues Of Egypt got this, with four votes!

Noah got only one.

Sadly ironic that Noah didn't even get a pair of votes.
And after he was expecting a flood.
Never mind, let's hope he can take that on board, and move on.

That's very good. I like how you've used black edges on the background objects, and how that lets you use light and dark shades without affecting the background colour. Also the highlights and shading is impressive for such blocky limitations! I'd like to see a bigger player sprite though, in more t...

I heard the staff of the first moon all quit when they learned the staff of the second moon were getting paid more for shorter hours...

Now vertically, this would have to move in whole characters, but there's a way of hiding that in the gameplay. The trick is, you don't scroll vertically every time the player jumps or drops down, unless they're about to fall right off the bottom of the screen - in which case they should already be f...

Wall_Axe wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2024 11:21 am Any chance of a .gif or YouTube video showing the scrolling?

Can't at the moment. Could someone capture it in a GIF and upload it?

And excuse my ignorance as well, please, what is the 4-pixel position? The original thread suddenly started talking about 4 pixels, which didn't make sense to me because attributes are aligned to 8 pixels. Hence I lost track of that discussion. Different relevance! In the first instance, rothers ha...

Fantastic bit of work! So it is optimising to only redraw around anything that moves. And it's interesting how that sometimes leaves further away objects overlapped in the wrong order, but those glitches are outside of the rectangle being copied to update the screen. So not much different to what I ...

rothers ' post about a Sonic clone got me wondering. How quickly can you shove a pixel pattern up to the screen to make an attribute-block landscape appear to move in pixels? ; ; Example Pixel Scrolling Attribute Blocks Code ; ; by: Jason J Railton ; for: Spectrum Computing ; ; dated: February 2024...

Lupus Invadus
Fleece Yourselves
Sheep Deprivation

Loopy Lupus
Wool Raider
Wool Snatcher
Ewe Can't Handle the Truth!
Advanced Welsh Simulator

Don't really know, but the farmer's name should be 'Artie' - Artie O'Dactyl

Sounds complicated - far easier just to have two buffers and swap between them, and scroll each one a byte at a time. Now, if you really want to be clever, write the data to the two screens of a 128K Spectrum and time it such that it takes four scanlines to update each row, and then swap screens eve...

I think it should be a wolf. Foxes really don't take sheep! The sprite is great though!

That sort of effect works so much better on a 128K because you can swap screens at the attribute mid-line so it costs you hardly any CPU time to do 8x4 attributes - so long as you can time other routines around the switches. On a 48K machine it would take you two scan lines to change the row of attr...

This all sounds very long-winded. ZXSpin can be launched from the command line with the name of a file and it launches and loads it. One REALLY BIG advantage is, if there's already an instance of ZXSpin running, it instructs that to load the file and doesn't open another window. This is a huge advan...

I've got major plans for this and want to recreate this demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE1KylKQDrQ which looks absolutely amazing, the peak of spectrum scrolling I reckon. I think it's possible, although it seems that exact demo, once logic and sprites were added, was too slow due to the mul...

If you take another two studs off all four sides, you can add 45° roof slope bricks around the edge to make a neat frame. Decide whether you want the slopes facing inward or outward though, then pick the right bricks for the corners. That'll also protect it from knocking bits off the edges.

Is that website getting theirs from Ali too? Makes a bit more sense I suppose. Easier on the wallet. I guess they won't say 'LEGO' on them then! Then again, LEGO's own pop-art mosaics that now use smooth round tiles, they don't say 'LEGO' on them either. That's only moulded onto the studs of bricks ...

Yep, that last one is how the scenery blocks in Cobra are rendered. The pixel data for the scrollable tiles of scenery for one line of the screen are loaded into the CPU registers in pairs, then the stack pointer pointed at screen memory. So then by doing PUSH BC, PUSH DE, etc. a row of scenery tile...

Yes, I've had exactly this problem with an old LCD TV, rolling over and over like a CRT with the vertical hold shot to hell. I suspect it's trying to capture two successive interlaced PAL frames to form one whole image, then display that (which leads to image lag), but the Speccy (and many old machi...

You could save some money by working out the areas where you can lay down some much bigger plates, either in the sprites or in the background, rather than buy everything as 1x1 plates. At least with Speccy graphics you have the advantage of being able to use primary colours, which are relatively eas...

Evil Genius wrote: ↑Fri Jan 19, 2024 4:10 pmTurn them on their sides and they become secret passages

How to tell everyone you're a serf without admitting you're a serf.

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 ...