Spectrum Computing

I'm not really sure if you gain anything from it. At least in my own sprite code, I always load the the amount of vertical lines the sprite includes. Clipping vertically is extremely easy, you just have to change were you start in the sprite data, if you clip on top, and/or change sprite total line...

I think you might be confusing loaders with ... ... loaders? - I guess it is in fact the same word. >.> Well, let's call them 'loaders' and 'decoders' for the sake of this example. Decoders: as in the exact routines that decode the tape signals into bits and bytes of data and store these in the memo...

Renegade for me. It just has more integrity of the two. Everything is where you expect it to be, plays the way you expect, without any unnecessary elements. TR on the other hand feels like an expanded fan remake of sorts, that is, first and foremost, an attempt to imitate. And that ingame tune is ju...

Cheers. Sounds like it's worth giving it a go then. I forgot about a small issue with it nevertheless, which is that you'll have to store your sprites upside-down in case you're using the stack to read the data, since POP can only move the data pointer forwards. But this probably just amounts to ano...

Recently, I found it to be convenient to have the Y origin point at the bottom of images (sprites), so that essentially they are drawn starting from the bottom up. This has at least the following advantages: 1) Easy non-intrusive clipping at the top; in your 'next line' procedure, check if your scre...

How is the reader of the book supposed to go from "FRAMES-3" to "IY+40"? The word "FRAMES" doesn't appear anywhere else in the book. Regarding the lack of constant/variable list in the book at least, perhaps the 'ROM Disassembly' authors were relying on the fact that t...

Hello, world! What you're seeing here is the effect of the so-called 'good practices' at work. A small example: 0038 MASK-INT PUSH AF Save the current values held in PUSH HL these registers. LD HL,(FRAMES) The lower two bytes of the INC HL frame counter are incremented LD (FRAMES),HL every 20 ms. (U...

Made it! - No cheating ofc. :p A bit tricky and some memorization required (there are a few insta-kill spots, sometimes depending on which direction you came from) but definitely doable. http://i65.tinypic.com/qz2pl2.png Also, I've confirmed the diagonal jump direction bug, this seems to happen when...

Nice. Apart from the whole moonbase floaty feel, which I'm not too sure about, there's actually a decent and thought-out game to it, with a combat system that leans more towards a strategic/positioning type puzzler. Got to the lower-floor 'mine railway' yesterday, will definitely try again more. I'v...

Just my impression but the easiest one might be Enterprise 128 . It uses a Z80 and what seems to be a very flexible screen configuration system, apparently allowing it to emulate Speccy screen modes to a good extent. Hardest systems I'm sure should include ZX80/ZX81. 1Kb of memory and an explanation...

Thanks for the heads up. Excellent stuff, although I assume the unclear licensing status for the Z80 decompressors will prevent it from seeing more usage in original projects.

IIRC division by 3 is the same as multiplication by #55. Then you can shift the result right once to get division by 6. Not sure if that helps? Edit: seems like it's actually #55+1 for more accurate rounding, or something. This seems to work: ;In: C = dividend ;Out: H = quotient ld l,c ld h,0 ld b,h...

Nice, and makes sense in hindsight. You can practically do any sort of uneven terrain this way, let alone regular slopes at any angle.

Well, how about something like this. Let's say your maps are composed of regular 16x16 tiles. Reserve a portion of tile codes for sloped backgrounds. If a tile that is stepped on falls in that range, look up an additional offset to apply to the object's Y coordinate. This should be based on its X co...

Good to know. I've had a similar experience recently trying to figure out the (low-level) +3DOS stuff. Those multi-byte OUTs/INs, madness.

As people have pointed out, this setup is fairly awkward to work with, and most of the time it's not even really necessary (unfortunately, there are exceptions). Regardless, I think it might be interesting to hear opinions on how to plan out things across the pages etc for such a game. Personally I'...

Exolon for me, not much to say there it's practically Spectrum-defining, and that melody is just like hnnng being back home and all.

I also like Solomon's Key a lot, excellent playability, easily a close second.

If you mean like masked sprites and whatnot, you won't be able to see the individual steps of AND and OR that way, since typically each byte is only written back once with the combined result: pop de ld a,(hl) and e or d ld (hl),a inc l ... Think of it like this: masking puts the 'black' parts of th...

Subjectively, one more game that deserves a mention is Ano Gaia. Probably my go-to game starting with 'A'. Illegally blasphemously hackered to make that drill level playable since ages, it just needs a loading screen now. |: Probably will vote ATF though, in large part because I love the somewhat-un...

T is for Twilight: The Land of Shadows. I'm amazed I even have to spell it out!

Star Heritage was massive in our time, but now I love the Sword of Ianna just as much. And yes I don't think it ever got the translation it deserves.

The whole 'leaving gaps' issue is normal in a sense, and is expected of programs that operate on the file level. Notice that, as long as the file you're working with is the last file on the disk, no gap would be left if it is deleted and subsequently saved back. On the other hand, doing a MOVE withi...

I invited many people, and made it public in WoS, Tweeter, and even Spectrum Facebook groups with near 10.000 members and where 90% of the people are british, and nobody looked excited about it, so... :( I have the feeling that they prefer playing Manic Miner over and over again than paying attenti...

I now have an asm loader that loads everything except $6000-$7FFF (and updates my progress bar). Loading this block is breaking TR-Dos, so I need to debug to see what's going on. I don't really want to rearchitect the game because the codebase is shared with the non-Pentagon version (and space in u...

Juan F. Ramirez wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2017 6:43 am

5MinuteRetro wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2017 10:13 pm
And I think S needs to be Sir Fred. Controversial, perhaps, but such a great game.

Noooo! Sabre Wulf! Sabre Wulf!

What's wrong with you people, S is clearly Starquake.

I've made a little progress. The error returned in $5D0F was 1 No file . i wasn't padding my filename with spaces in the file descriptor. Now I get error 12 The channel is not open in $5D0F. But I have already been using TR-DOS - the code this is running from is loaded from basic with a TR-Dos call...