Spectrum Computing

Thanks for the explanations, it's always intriguing to hear about stuff like this. (Derailing the topic further) I was just reminded of this (mostly) full-screen multicolour scrolling demo that looked quite promising. Only the author pre-calculated everything on a PC beforehand and it's non-interact...

You're right, it didn't seem a very plausible theory. The main reason I thought that is the BASIC manual states the built-in clock (the FRAMES variable) runs at 60Hz in North America, and I didn't see how that could be possible without deriving it from the mains somehow. Do Spectrums still run at 50...

Well, I finished it and it was still just as easy as the Erbe version. However, the ladder bug isn't the only difference between the two versions. In the original release you can't go down on downwards waterfalls (you just crouch), while in the Erbe release you can. Also this projectile shooter on t...

Isn't the Spectrum PSU supposed to be unregulated? I've read in a few places online that the peaks of the input voltage are used to generate the 50Hz interrupt, but thinking about that now it seems kind of suspicious. If that were true then getting T-state accuracy on the interrupt timing would be p...

No wonder the game seems so easy. I just checked the snapshot I had and it looks like it was the Erbe version. I'll have to try completing it "for real" now.

Some ones that came to mind: Shadow of the Unicorn (£14.95) White Lightning (£14.95) GAC (£22.95) Blast! (£24.95) HiSoft BASIC (£24.95) Music Machine (£49.95) I guess utility software/hardware bundles would be the most expensive in general. EDIT: The Great Space Race was another title that was good ...

Any graphics/display, sound, and keyboard polling routines will have to be rewritten. Of them, the display routines will be the ones that would be using drastically different approaches. Not necessarily. According to this page , games that were converted from the Spectrum to the CPC often left all ...

... best poll ...

I'm not sure about the promotions (some common Sinclair ones were a light gun pack for the +2 and a few software packs) but the introductory booklet has a description of what comes in the box. According to that it was just the two manuals and some leads.

Finally, the true winner earns its rightly-deserved triumph over the C64 conversion.

I don't remember any games that make use of advanced tape loading, but if you're including demos then this is a good example of what can be achieved with emulators.

Oh, I forgot about that. Well, there's always the option of directly POKEing the BASIC to add the '!' based on the detected model.

There are games out there that used dynamic loading from tape. I believe 'The Rats' has a selection of in-game events which the loader program randomly chooses from, but this is only done at the start of the game. And I can't find it now, but someone made a BASIC adventure game where every choice yo...

Couldn't you split the program up into different parts and use the RAMdisk to load from? And compression would help to keep the size down (probably Huffman and a variation of LZ for text). ANS was another compression algorithm I looked at, but unfortunately the size of the table required meant it co...

Seems a bit unrealistic. Selling videotapes in 2019?

Looks like what you'd get if you tried loading a Spectrum game on one of those huge LED advertising displays.

Sounds interesting. I know I'm not the greatest writer, but if I had something worth doing an article about then I could probably contribute.

I guess this is supposed to work similarly to the recently announced Google Stadia game streaming thing? The main point of it was that it allowed you to play games on low-spec hardware that wouldn't normally be able to run them, but it seems a bit pointless if you're just dealing with retro games th...

There are a lot of LDIs and plain LDs in there as well. It looks like the PUSHes are mainly used for the parallax bars and the multicolour scrollers (the text on the right-hand side of the screen is also a multicolour scroller). They've got an interesting attribute scrolling routine: due to the lack...

Thanks for posting those links, there's a lot of useful information in there. Do you guys often get PCBs etched for circuits after you've got the initial design working? I've done a few boards myself and it was a pretty simple process, but I know the materials can get expensive, especially if you ma...

This is something I've wanted to learn more about as well. From what I've heard, it's possible to build a simple computer (without a display) on a breadboard, basically with just a Z80, a memory chip and some sort of memory controller so the CPU can interface with it. And you'd have a clock source a...

In the end, maybe 450.000? This is a "valid" number for all platforms (maybe 70-90% Spectrum). Football Manager came out on virtually every 8 bit system so Spectrum sales would have been nowhere near 70%. Mastertronic had some of their best sales for machines like the Commodore 16 simply ...

Here's another one I did, based off a tracker module. It's too large to be played in most unmodified PT3 players so I just made a video with VT.

Spoiler

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00vYncpl0pk[/media]

[media]https://youtu.be/_I_nAI5IMR8[/media]

Surfing on a Sine Wave

OK, yep. The Latin character replacement thing seems to be working. But it's still allowing wildcards for me.

It looks like it's gone back to the old behaviour now... as in input is unfiltered and wildcards can still be searched. That PHP script might work, but I suppose it would mean that non-Latin alphabets (such as Russian) could not be used? Not that there are currently any Russian titles in the databas...