Spectrum Computing

Yes, these are tips for Dizzy games.

It's for Dizzy 1-4 , just as the filename says - "DizzyHelpPart1-4.zip"

It's Christmas time, so it's time for my gift game for the Spectrum community. This time I wanted to do something a bit different. It's a game with a religious theme, you don't have them very often, don't you? ;) It's not a Christmas theme however. It's maybe a less known biblical story, yet I found...

Maybe somebody would be kind enough to drop me a reminder when these titles are added to the SC archive, so I can upload the RZX files?

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/zxdb/ad ... ew_rzx.php

It was made as temporary solution but it seems that it will last for years

It's an ambitious project so good luck with it. An important thing with these kind of games, that people often overlook, is balancing them. So they aren't too easy or too hard. So there isn't any single army unit or trick which beats everything else and makes everything else useless and unnecessary....

Merry Christmas everyone

Some backstory for people not so well versed in Russian games and in Russian culture generally. This is a work of Vyacheslav Mednonogov, a famous Russian programmer who created in the 90s such megagames as Black Raven or UFO: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=15244 His nick Copper Feet i...

Looks really interesting, we don't get these kind of games much often on Spectrum

Alessandro, is it a remake of this game?
https://www.mobygames.com/game/1366/joa ... the-sword/

Yep. it looks like we have a new engine.
Seems like there is yet another game called Crazy Christmas made with this engine:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10714

And it has the same bugs as Cursed Castle.

Congratulation on realising this. There's a lot of good stuff here.

In Roasty, is some weird control of the hero after flipping the switch a bug or a feature?

And I was using Spectaculator as well.

With exactly the same scenario - in 128kB mode game
crashed immediately after selecting Kempston, exiting the menu, entering the gameplay and pressing left or right on emulated Kempston.

As long as you don't press anything, it works.

Nice game with obvious inspirations coming from Ghosts'n'Goblins.

Some things to be fixed:
- Kempston control is messed up
- game crashes on 128kB Spectrum

I had this game on the Gameboy, it was called Pitman

So it's Spectrum game, inspired by Atari game, inspired by Gameboy game

If you start looking for game inspirations, you often end with such chains.

So it's actually a remake of Atari 8-bit game.


Nothing to be ashamed of The Spectrum version keeps the good original level design and improves the
graphics and music of the original.

Very nice game!
Good graphics, nice music, smooth movement and good puzzles. What would you need more?

I wonder why this ghost is collecting Roman helmets but maybe it's not the most important thing in the game

I never got into Joe Blade games.

Can't say they were bad. Just uninteresting for me. It didn't help that they were monochrome and all looked the same. And required mapping.

Some of these games seem to have a colour clash very similar to Spectrum.
While others don't have it.

Did Vic-20 had something like colour clash?

Pretty stuff!

It will be that as well Political management, diplomacy, espionage and turn-based combat, all rolled into one.

I get some Defender of the Crown vibe here.

Now I'm lost. I was going to believe it's some war simulation but now I'm not so certain

Zaxxon is one of these games that have cult status on other platforms but were always nothing special on Zx Spectrum.
Just like Boulder Dash, River Raid or Donkey Kong.

And looking at the video - yes it's bad. Very slow and jerky. Certainly could have been done better.

Nice spot!

It looks like the game on the first screenshot is the original one and the game on
the second screenshot is a later version with improved graphics.

At the Russian forum there is a list of all +3 disk games with improvements:

https://zx-pk.ru/threads/31635-spisok-i ... t-s-3.html

The list itself is in English so don't be afraid to check it out

The easiest significant improvement would be 16 colors for INK and PAPER, without FLASH and BRIGHT:

Yes. 16 independent colours without any BRIGHT thing.
Spectrum bright colours were too similar to their non bright versions. It was almost like Spectrum had only 8 colours.

This seems to be the same program:
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/1 ... /Xmas_Card
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/1 ... /Xmas_Card

Or is there a reason that it's stored as two entries?

Probably the best way to deal with colour clash without serious increase of the screen memory would be hardware sprites. You could even keep the background as it is, with the clash rules. It would have its limitations but with clever design most people wouldn't even notice it. The worst clash happen...

In the previous years I helped with Woot but not this time unfortunately.
I'll be releasing my new game on Xmas and another one probably on New Year so Woot would be too much for me.

Good luck with your projects guys!