Odd Job Eddie 48/128 compatibility
Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 2:46 pm
Hi cuties. It's me, Equinox, who used to post on comp.sys.sinclair in the year minus 700. I'm pretty drunk. Who wants a hug?
If anyone needs the background: Odd Job Eddie is a flip-screen platform game that shipped with the Spectrum +2. It plays a bit like Jet Set Willy, with you moving between rooms to collect objects; BUT it was actually an illegally plagiarised version of an earlier game, Pyramania, and as such doesn't play properly (see my own map and notes on WoS) and has various weird glitches.
As I said, this game shipped with the +2 and was noted as being 128K-only. You can in fact reliably crash the game by loading it in 48K mode and going left from the start room and then falling down the hole (which should take you to another room, but in 48K mode causes the game to die -- in various ways -- I actually remember as a kid doing this and seeing the garbage text "NEXT ?" [with a random keyword] and thinking that the game was somehow asking itself what should come next, what was missing. How ****ing cyberpunk).
Anyway, WoS offers a 48K version of this game "OddJobEddie48.z80.zip" which crashes in the exact same way if you do what I described, so I don't believe there is a working 48K version at all -- even though Pyramania (IIRC) was a 48K game. What's going on here? I really hope there's a scandalous trick in the code to make it crash on purpose for no reason on 48K machines, like what Microsoft did when they detected DR-DOS.
If anyone needs the background: Odd Job Eddie is a flip-screen platform game that shipped with the Spectrum +2. It plays a bit like Jet Set Willy, with you moving between rooms to collect objects; BUT it was actually an illegally plagiarised version of an earlier game, Pyramania, and as such doesn't play properly (see my own map and notes on WoS) and has various weird glitches.
As I said, this game shipped with the +2 and was noted as being 128K-only. You can in fact reliably crash the game by loading it in 48K mode and going left from the start room and then falling down the hole (which should take you to another room, but in 48K mode causes the game to die -- in various ways -- I actually remember as a kid doing this and seeing the garbage text "NEXT ?" [with a random keyword] and thinking that the game was somehow asking itself what should come next, what was missing. How ****ing cyberpunk).
Anyway, WoS offers a 48K version of this game "OddJobEddie48.z80.zip" which crashes in the exact same way if you do what I described, so I don't believe there is a working 48K version at all -- even though Pyramania (IIRC) was a 48K game. What's going on here? I really hope there's a scandalous trick in the code to make it crash on purpose for no reason on 48K machines, like what Microsoft did when they detected DR-DOS.