Spectrum Computing

I got a (briefly) used Atari ST with a single-sided drive for only £175 around Christmas of 1989. The guy bought it to try his hand at programming it in assembly and gave up. I got the money after ROSS recruited a load of us sixth-formers to work weekends on a production line making frozen shepherd'...

If you take lines 170-190 and put them on the end of line 160 after the THEN (with colons between the statements), then remove the END IF (assume that those lines are what is meant to happen when the IF statement becomes TRUE), you can see what it's trying to do. It's printing a block, and when you ...

So I asked ChatGPT to write a simple Spectrum game and it came up with the following: ... 110 LET k$ = INKEY$ 120 IF k$ = "o" AND playerX > 0 THEN playerX = playerX - 4 ... But why doesn’t line 120 work? That's not valid syntax. It needs to be THEN LET playerX = ... But line 160 has an 'I...

Tough one, as there are many amazing looking games and many amazingly playable games, although they're not always the same ones. I feel as if games like MultiDude and Gluf are ever-so-slightly held back by a few concessions to how the graphics are done, but what graphics there are are brilliant. And...

Nice board - where did you get the fabrication done, and was it cheap?

Hover Bovver had a Jetpack key?

In Psion's sorta-classic Space Raiders , if you fire a bullet, then press and hold SPACE and B together, your bullet stops and hangs in midair until you release the keys, at which point it carries on. This makes it a lot easier to pick off spaceships or the last, fast moving invaders. It's not a Sp...

I had Gnasher from Mastertronic, but had forgotten about the hoofing great 16-pixel jumps! It was part of the inspiration for the look of my Gnash-Man Party! , using 16-wide sprites and wide mazes better suited to the Speccy screen. Though I stopped short of making it out to be a sequel as I thought...

Thunderbirds?

Droids?

Came across this stuff on eBay. Now that's got to be a record price for a busted up Speccy+ keyboard, but it's a genuine prop from Doctor Who , which you can own, if you've got piles of cash to blow on this sort of thing! https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/185564292586?hash=item2b347e65ea:g:lCwAAOSw2L1jEzn1...

You forgot to mention what key to press for a bomb..?

I thought the MSX had a wider font for graphics mode, and a narrower one for text mode (40 columns of 6-pixel wide characters), but apparently it uses the same font for both. You just get bigger gaps between the characters in the graphics modes, where the character cells are 8x8 like the Speccy.

It's quite thoroughly American, so it thinks you're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craps

It's why SCREEN$ is so slow. Far quicker to draw everything in different colours (using inverted INK / PAPER if you do want two things to LOOK the same), then check the ATTR from your code, as it's just reading a single byte. If you still then need to compare the ATTR with several options, get the r...

The biggest problem I have with Robin of the Wood is that thick green border around the sides of the screen. It's much less obvious what is a way off the screen and what's just a dead-end when there's always a big chunk of green graphics in every direction. It's poor game design, and shouldn't reall...

It works better with higher-level languages where there are also tons of examples around the internet. If you ask it for something in Z80 it makes some major mistakes, but I've seen it write UNITY code that genuinely works, and for some quite fiddly requests too.

I've always wanted a Spectrum clone of Monkey Island , or something similar. If it were technically possible, I definitely think this would be the artist for the job! Some of his landscapes would look amazing with tiny touches of slow animation such as rustling leaves or rippling water. I think I s...

It's the ones like this that I love. Realistic looking landscapes, despite the completely saturated palette of the Speccy. I'm not keen on artwork with lots of artificial colourisation. Bold colours have their place, for effect, in skies for example, but some artists seem too desperate to use magent...

I suspect what the law was, in the 80s, and what was actually enforced in holiday resorts and - notably - travelling fairgrounds, may have been two different things.

Looks really good, and I can't get over how cute the little penguin looks in just one UDG!
The font is really impressive too.

Arcade Dream was a big April Fool joke. Read the YS letters pages from the month after. They dropped in clues like the made-up reviewer 'Esther Monday' (Easter Monday that year) but pretty much everyone fell for it at the time. And it's not as though a made-up reviewer name was anything unusual in ...

I wonder how accurate their sales forecast was for this title..?

Somehow, I knew it was going to be rubbish!

Crime Busters is an obscure classic. I have the same mini-cab, My Arcade isn't it? Yes, I've got Mappy, Ms. Pac Man, Galaga, Rolling Thunder, Bubble Bobble and Heavy Barrel. Of the others, I'm not keen on the game or graphics of Dig Dug and Burger Time, and later games like Caveman Ninja, the NES v...

Mappy is a pretty good early NAMCO game (contemporary with Pac-Man and Galaxian ) that was never converted. There's the 'inspired-by' Crime Busters (not the Harry S. Price hack), but it's not really close. It got an MSX conversion from Japan and came out on the NES too. Also the Sord M5, apparently...