Spectrum Computing

SNG wrote: ↑Sat Dec 23, 2023 4:08 pm Yes.

The byte reserved will be at 65535.

Enjoy POKEing it.

Can you move RAMTOP that high? I thought BASIC stores it's UDGs etc above RAMTOP and so I'd assume it would complain about it (though I've never tried)

From a programmers point of view, you can almost always replace FLASH with software effects and get a better result. Loading screens might be the only exception, because then the CPU is busy elsewhere and so CPU time is more limited.

Wouldn't it be easier just to recreate the levels in the (vastly superior) Earthshaker? It definitely loads fine on a 128.

Can you be less portable when using Sinclair BASIC? It's already weird enough as it is.

But yeah, this sort of thing will definitely make your code slower and Sinclair BASIC is already glacial.

Got it, thank you. Would this practice on not rolling out be an artifact of designing a code base for multiple platforms? Not really, for the most part unrolling a loop is going to offer similar advantages on any machine using the same CPU. But unrolling loops does generally take more space, so mig...

Isn't H.A.T.E. basically cheating a bit, by severely limiting the places where anything is covered by the background? Whereas Zaxxon (the arcade machine) pretty much revels in every opportunity to show off it's 3D-ness. I also suspect that if H.A.T.E. had been the Speccy port of Zaxxon, the same vid...

Modern C compilers will do a much better job of converting C code into Z80, not to mention providing a much nicer workflow than actually trying to code on a Spectrum. I don't think I'd spend much time using a period toolkit without a really good reason to do so.

Not necessary, french Thomson (if I remember it correctly) translates IRGB using fast PROM, to different pallete, replacing dull white by orange and dull black by 50% gray. That works OK for 16 colours (although if you're going that far in the design it's questionable why you would fix the palette ...

_dw What you're describing is very similar to the character/tile based modes used by a lot of machines (particularly consoles) and how the C64 does things most of the time. The layering is also kind of similar to the Amiga bitplane approach, with a bit of it's Dual Playfield idea thrown into the mi...

For me, colour clash isn't a big deal. The 3 things I'd most want to change are: Add two extra colours (brown and sky blue) Allow 2 brightness levels within the same tile Add a third brightness level All of this could have been achieved with a system like this . The problem with a scheme like that ...

No, you're completely wrong. Analysis is not limited to "guesswork" (although taking guesses and then checking the immediate result - so no "assumptions" - usually makes things faster). For 100% analysis the end result is 100% deterministic (but in practice there's no need to di...

was possible that eliminates the colour clash - at the cost of resolution, but at the same time it makes some game conversions much easier Sure, but then you get "fat pixels". If you ask me, that's a reasonable compromise - but then I think CPC Mode 0 graphics look good, not everyone agre...

Not entirely new, just a small patch/driver could be enough. And for this you don't need to know "what IS on the screen", but "what IS BEING PUT on the screen" all the time. This is how the ULAX logic works. ULAX is, as far as old software not written for it, entirely based on g...

OK maybe I'm a bit naïve, but what about the expansion port? I recently bought a converter that adds a VGA port to the Spectrum, so in that port there are video signals. Could it be used, even with vivid imagination, to add some colour overlay? Yes probably the cost would be high, but people bought...

Everything on 8-bit machines was an active compromise somewhere. You could use a lot of screen RAM and take the hit on performance, like the CPC. Or you could go for a mostly text/tile oriented display like the C64, but pay the price in terms of flexibility to some extent. Sinclair seemed to be keen...

1. Cyclone - has to be really, it's close to perfect
2. TLL - Another stand out title
3. Hate - So many of the others could easily be third place, but this probably just about beats them

Do you mean exactly like Ollie and Lissa, where going through the door you came out of does not take you back to the screen you came from? Because I'd hope that's mercifully few.

3. Operation Thunderbolt

Those "jokes" could well have appeared in YS' Kindly Leave The Stage section. Clearly AI has come on a lot at incomprehensible humour

But chatGPT just gets its answers from trawling the entire internet and working out which word is likely to follow on from the previous word, unless they have recently changed how it works. It only writes 1 word at a time it has no idea about what it is writing about. Stephen Wolfram has a good vid...

Jet Set Willy has to come top really, it just has more staying power overall despite the quirky bugs (although I'll freely admit to think JSW2 is better overall). Manic Miner comes in a very close second, fun but once you beat it there's not a lot of reason to go back. As for third, Styx I guess, bu...

Terminator 2 has to fall into this category surely? It takes about 6 minutes to complete, but it's so laughably easy that it's 6 minutes from the first time you load it up.

Lee Bee wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 1:50 pm I nearly said Robocop because you get your gun out, but I don't think this happens in the Spectrum version.

The Speccy version doesn't do that, but it does change when you get the big gun near the end (the junkyard stage IIRC)

Does this mean I don't have to worry about someone putting a colon in a +3 filename and switching drives? (like a cheap PHP path hack with slashes) -- that would be good -- I never had a +3. Haven't checked it yet. I do seem to recall it had 8.3 filenames maybe because they wanted to be CP/M or DOS...

equinox wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 8:34 am And then the real real question is "what if the user wants to save a file on their +3 disk called 'T:FILE'"?)

Spaces and punctuation marks aren't allowed in +3DOS filenames, unlike tape filenames, so they'd be out of luck.