Spectrum Computing

Great little game! Clean graphics style with nice music to match

@Ast A. Moore, Once we get confirmation that the prize has been won by someone, maybe you could share your loading secrets? I will let you know when we get confirmation from Pringles. I can confirm the competition is already closed - just received an automatic reply from their address: https://i.po...

This raises a question from me... You know how a lot of games from 1987 onwards would run on both 48K and 128K, with exclusive enhanced things for the latter? (Usually AY music, all levels loaded in at once, etc, like Out Run or Target Renegade)... Well, is there a ZX Spectrum game that loads in fo...

The snapshot for Geordie Land has code and data in the upper 32K of the memory map, so it's definitely not 16K compatible. Of course, it's always possible that there exists a 16K version that hasn't been preserved, but I would think it to be very unlikely for a 1989 game. EDIT: Looking at the YS adv...

This seems to be a very minimally altered version of the "Jack-man" type-in from Tim Hartnell's book, The ZX Spectrum Explored (1982).

... so as you lose lives, the delay value for the note has an increasing offset added to it, distorting the pitches and making the music gradually slide out-of-tune. Do we know the intention? I still wonder if it's to do with attempting to account for printing the number of Willys in the game panel...

I'm getting fuzzy with the details, but isn't this something to do with accounting for the number of lives being printed at the bottom? The more lives that need printing, the longer the main loop, therefore the different the sound. I remember this being mentioned in an interview with Matthew Smith ...

Few can say they've achieved as much in their time. To almost single-handedly revolutionise the way that the average person thinks of and interacts with technology is simply incredible. Yet to him, the computers were just a side-business. He applied his ingenuity to many other fields, with a palpabl...

1 - make it sound cleaner/better when digitised to TAP. For this, you can try applying a compression filter on the audio. In simple terms, this will alter the audio so that all parts of it are at around the same volume - all of the quiet bits and the loud peaks will be brought to the same level. Yo...

Bedazzle wrote: ↑Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:24 pm Nice, but link is broken.

Try this one instead: https://popeymongames.co.uk/2021/04/23/ ... -at-28234/

A comment from a copy of the video on YouTube : It is not a real chess game (I was that young guy in the background). It is simply a graphics demo I coded up in Basic. It did not play, it just showed a board. It would seem to be a legitimate comment since a search for John Mathieson (the commenter) ...

Version 1.0 of the engine (for Postie's Peril) is finished. Is it available somewhere? I would like to add it to our archive! :) Wow, this is quite a necropost! ;) I must admit that I stopped working on ZAD after December 2019, due to a lack of motivation. It was going to be a lot of work, since th...

This (and the linked article) got me thinking... could the stack be used to fetch the horizontal row addresses? If you point SP at the applicable row address in a table then just POP each time you need the next one... and add the horizontal displacement. Yes, you can do that. In fact, that's what m...

If you define "best" as "fastest", then no doubt the "best" routine will probably be something like a compiled sprite routine (where the sprite data is actually baked into the code), with optimisations to account for the reuse of values already within registers, and pop...

TMD2003 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 11:32 pm Do us all a favour and post it - otherwise I'll never get to see anything beyond screen six.

No problem: https://www.connosoft.com/prosm/otherst ... -fails.zip

Thanks for the reply, mate! I hadn't realized that... So sad and frustrating news for me... Anyway the loading time is limited, even with standard speed, but I'd like to also have a turbo one, for fun purposes... So, you mean that turbo CANNOT AT ALL be done on the 16k due to technical limitations ...

I'm afraid turbo-loading is not possible on the 16K machine, due to memory contention (the CPU will sometimes have to wait when accessing the first 16K of RAM to allow the ULA to gather data for the television picture). The 48K can handle a turbo-loader because the extra 32K of RAM is exclusive to t...

Actually - genuine offer to the first person to complete Tardigrade and post a screenshot - a box of Quality Street with all the nice ones taken out. My less impressive screenshot: https://i.postimg.cc/zLqptx6S/Screenshot-2021-07-27-at-23-23-43.png You'll note I didn't post this earlier. Enjoy, PRO...

[mention]R-Tape[/mention] Screenshot in spoiler

Spoiler

I've got an RZX recording as well if you'd like. That last level... *shudder*

Wow! Tough game, but with a good difficulty curve. Tight controls, and big, smooth animations for a 16K program. Up to level 15 so far - I like to start over when I hit your "master" limit of 30 fails, so as not to rush through the game too quickly. I really like how you keep layering more...

It works for me on Windows if you drag and drop the .ROM file onto Fuse (though it must have the extension .ROM to be recognised). No need to fiddle with the ROM selection dialog. Whether it works on MacOS is a different matter, but it should, since all versions of Fuse are derived from the same code.

I find it absolutely ridiculous that anyone would pay that much for a copy of the N64's most common game, sealed or not. Hopefully the market remains impervious to these cynical fiddlers... ...then again, if they could be persuaded to bump up the value of, say, Make-A-Chip , then I might not think t...

And so, a new format of meme was born:

IIRC, Woody's SpecEmu has ULAplus support: https://keybase.pub/woodywoodster/specemu/

R-Tape wrote: ↑Thu Jul 08, 2021 8:21 pm ...and if that doesn't work then we'll insist on sending us a selfie holding today's newspaper in one hand, and your real Spectrum in the other.

Do FPGA devices count as real Spectrums?

(ducks head back in trenches )