Spectrum Computing

This looks really impressive. Do you scroll the attributes by jumping into the middle of the drawing loop at different offsets? (forgive me if this sounds dumb, I'm no expert on multicolour.) I'm amazed you still have time left over to do the pixel scrolling. Thanks! Nope, attributes drawed from li...

This looks really impressive. Do you scroll the attributes by jumping into the middle of the drawing loop at different offsets? (forgive me if this sounds dumb, I'm no expert on multicolour.) I'm amazed you still have time left over to do the pixel scrolling.

I've made some simple fixes for a few emulators to fix wrong-sounding AY without needing in-game workarounds. To be safe I won't distribute the patched executables here, but you can apply the patches quite easily using a hex editor. I used Frhed but there are a number of free ones available. Make su...

This doesn't count as copied game art, but it also happened the other way round for the re-release. Notice how the drivers have been edited out. Battlecars inlay (1984): https://www.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-inlays/b/Battlecars.jpg Freeway Fighter gamebook (2005): https://images-na.ssl-...

What about the more recent LCD monitors that support FreeSync or G-Sync adaptive sync? They can be set to arbitrary refresh rates, so couldn't you obtain a proper 50Hz display using one?

I'm sorry, I hope I didn't come across as ungrateful towards emulator developers. It's just hard to get motivation for using these features and quirks when the most popular emulators don't support them and they haven't been updated in years.

13. Codename MAT
16. Fairlight

Yeah, I agree that targeting the actual machine is preferable. The reality is though that not everyone owns real Spectrums, and many people are forced to use emulators as their only option. Personally I'd like to write programs for platforms that people will run them on, and I'd say Spin, SpecEmu an...

Thanks for the Spectramine links [mention]druellan[/mention] and [mention]hikoki[/mention]. Dunno why Fuse was different when I tested it but it still sounded fine IMO. Turning the filter on still affects the sound quite a lot. I wonder what the best solution to this is for new releases, as the diff...

It looks like I'm still on version 1.5.0, so that could have something to do with it? I haven't try messing with any of the other sound settings either.

I tried a few more emulators, but a surprising proportion of them suffered from serious audio dropouts, at least on my low end hardware (that's the reason for the black bars on the Unreal Speccy pic). I was going to test Spectramine as well but the only link I found for it was a password protected z...

Thanks for taking the time to run those tests. Could the differences in the Fuse spectrograms be some kind of folding due to aliasing? It's possible it was just a filter though. So Fuse is showing correct behaviour here, and the emulators that are halving the period are doing it wrong? Interesting t...

One thing I've noticed with regards to AY in emulators is that they all have a slightly different sound. In particular, the noise generator sounds a bit off in some of the emulators I've tried. I decided to run some tests to investigate this further, and here are the results I've obtained. First I r...

Lives counter is at 59193, POKE 25729, 0 for infinite lives and POKE 45504, x for number of lives. I used the cheats finder in SpecEmu to get these and it's really easy to use, especially as it lets you set breakpoints on memory accesses.

Top left - Street Hawk

R-Tape wrote: ↑Sat Sep 22, 2018 10:56 am

djnzx48 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 22, 2018 10:40 am Interesting choice of Michael Jackson on the title screen as well.

I thought I recognised it!

Yeah, it could be unintentional but it definitely sounds like this.

Great game! The graphics are good and there's some variety in the different planets you visit. Interesting choice of Michael Jackson on the title screen as well. I agree though that it would have been nice if you didn't have to go back to the beginning after you die.

Great game! Haven't played the original but it's certainly a new idea on the Spectrum. And for 2K of code there's a lot of different mechanics in there. That final screen though... I had to load a single snapshot because I accidentally fell down after escaping! Arrghh! If you got RLE working then I'...

Try 3D Deathchase, Sir Lancelot or Styx - they all run noticeably faster, at least on an emulator. A side effect of this is the sound effects are also dfferent, so the bike sound in Deathchase doesn't really sound like an engine anymore.

Had a go at this earlier and it's quite good, I was expecting a little more interactivity though. It's a bit like those Fighting Fantasy gamebooks where you can get all the way to the end, only then to discover that you've missed an essential item from back at the start. I spent ages looking for a p...

Wow, the game looks really good! There's some great foreboding music as well. It's quite tricky though - maybe I'm just bad at it but three lives don't seem like nearly enough. So here are some POKEs to make it easier: Infinite lives: POKE 30969, 0 Infinite energy: POKE 59204, 0: POKE 59318, 0 Start...

Nice! Playing live on a rubber keyboard does look rather tricky though. It would be cool if you could connect the Spectrum up to the CV output on a synth and play it like that.

Sounds great! I'm curious as to how you go about doing a live performance? Are you triggering patterns with the keyboard or is it all preprogrammed beforehand?

IrfanView seems to be able to view them. If you want to be able to scroll through them you need to go into Settings->Extensions and add SCR| to the end of the list where it says "Load custom file types". EDIT: You can also go into View->Display Options and disable "Use Resample" ...

Does it matter in what order the pixels get drawn? What I meant was not to store the pixels as an offset from the top left of the character, but a relative offset as the number of pixels to the right of the previous pixel. Then for a 5 pixel wide character, 4 bits is enough to go three lines down, a...