Microhobby Cassette #1 (march 1985)

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Hello, my fellow MH-threads fans and welcome to another journey into the Spectrum BASIC beautiness!

This time, the first issue of Microhobby Cassette, from march 1985.



After the success of the weekly magazine, released the autumn before, the company released its cassette version, including programs, mainly in BASIC but also (according to the #1 editorial) in "Z80 M/C or other languages (Pascal, Forth, C, etc)" so that readers "could get familiar with them". The programs hadn't any protection system so that readers could "get the lists and observe the different programming criteria according to the author's 'literary' style".

Besides, the magazine encourage the readers to send their own works with the incentive of, if published, earning 15,000 pesetas (of 1985, that's 80,48 €). To get an idea of it, a Spectrum game hit (Knight Lore, Decathlon, etc) costed 2,100 pesetas (11,27 €) by that time, so with the money got, you could buy 7,14 game hits (the 0,14 was, probably, William Wobbler!).

So along this thread we'll see a maze game, a ghostbusters plattform, another animal cruelty sport and some cool utilities, like a personal planner, a program to make big signs and even the Spectrum version of Google Home!!!

Stay tuned in your fave SC thread!

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Tiro de Pichón by Paco Martín



Let's start hard in this thread with a game whose topic is a bit controversial nowadays. Tiro de Pichón is a sort of hunting , a variety of skeet shooting but with pigeons.

We must first choose the difficulty level (Master, Professional, Amateur and trainee). Then, keyboard/Sinclair or Kempston. The keys are O,P,Q,A and space.

Press space and a pigeon will escape from one of the boxes and you must control the sight in order to shoot it. In the upper levels of difficulty is almost impossible to shoot any, there are 25 pigeons (pichones) at first and you have a limited number of shoots (tiros). Hard game with a pretty landscape.

TIP: Choose trainee level if you don't want to frustrate and end up throwing the computer through the window. But even with this level is hard!

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Randax





This cool maze game takes place in Randax's mansion, a millionaire whose money is guarded in seven sacs at the attic of the mansion. You must drive your lorry (inside a mansion??? WTF???) avoiding the fierce mastiffs (that follow a regular movement) and Randax itself, who moves randomly through the mansion. O,P,A,Q are the keys. S pause and space continue.

Once you reach a sack, press up and the lorry will have an 'L' printed on it and must go down to one of the two places at the bottom to unload the gold (with the key 'M') and back to the attic for a new sack again.

The 'M' key is also useful to 'jump' to another random place of the mansion when in danger, but take into account that you have a limited number of jumps for each life.

The game has five levels of difficulty (number of mastiffs, basically) and it's a nice discover, very enjoyable, so it gets the first Seal of Approval of the thread.

[zxbruno]

Thank you for this. I grew up in Portugal and had a cousin who had dozens of Microhobby magazines. I'd go visit him and spend hours reading them and appreciating each page and article. Compared to other magazines of the time they had (imo) better presentation and content. It definitely contributed to my Spectrum obsession.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Sintetizador de Voz (Voice Synthesizer)



Before all these Google Home gadgets, Alexa, Siri, etc, there was Microhobby's Voice Synthesizer. With some *slight* limitations, though. The miracle of listening to your beloved Speccy speaking. You order, it speaks. Amazing.

With an INPUT sentence, the Spectrum repeats what you wrote. You say 'HOLA' and it says 'HOLA' through the Spectrum beeper. Again, amazing.

Then, you type "COMO ESTAS?" (How are you?") and it says "COMO ESTAS?". You type "COMO TE LLAMAS?" (what's your name?") and it says "COMO TE LLAMAS?".

After some minutes you realize this is what you was not expecting. But I must remember you this is a MH thread. If you want a voice assistant, buy one in your local telecom shop.

It's spanish-speaking oriented. So if you try to write in your mother tongue, it might pronounce different. The screen warns of inputting some letters in case of certain sounds: for the sound 'K', you must type O & K. for 'LL' it must be LY, etc.

Back in the day, we're all were silly teenagers that spent hours ordering the Spectrum to say stupid sentences. And we found it funny. They were the 80s.

[PeterJ]

I'm loving another slice of MicroHobby [mention]Juan F. Ramirez[/mention]

[Morkin]

Me too.

Laughed at the Randax concept - driving a teleporting lorry around a mansion avoiding guard dogs...

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Thank you all. That's the charm of these games, you can find true jewels.

Laughed at the Randax concept - driving a teleporting lorry around a mansion avoiding guard dogs...

Yeah, I couldn't avoid remembering that scene in Woody Allen's "Get the Money and Run" in which he chases a woman driving a Mini Morris inside a house!

https://youtu.be/631DSwYemUY?t=1m43s

[Juan F. Ramirez]

U-33





This time a good submarine game. You start at the left of the screen and must navigate till the dock to the right. The submarine is just a pixel controlled by the keys Q (45º anti-clockwise) and A (45º clockwise). 1 emerges and Z increase speed. In the upper half of the screen some magnitudes are shown, like longitude, latitude, depth ('profundidad') and navigation speed ('velocidad').

During the travel you'll randomly come across some enemy ship, so the screen changes to alert mode, you'll see then your periscope, and use the keys O (left) and P (right) to move and M to shoot torpedoes.


Destroy the enemy ship!

You must shoot quickly as if the submarine is closer than 300 m the ship will throw depth charges and you must avoid them.


Beware the depth charges!

After avoiding all these dangerous boats, at reaching the naval base it's the final challenge, controlling the submarine to enter the base fighting against the strong sea current.

Another deserved 'Seal of Approval' game, as in spite of its difficult control, it is a very original game consisting of different, original 'mini-games' that make you spent a nice gaming time.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Agenda Personal (Contact List)



Why having Evernote and even your phone's contact list if you can have this useful utility for today's man?

Basically it's a database that collects and order all your contacts: name, surnames, address, phone number and ZIP code.

The starting screen shows a list of things the program can do:

C - Make an entry
S - Select (search for an entry using different criteria)
L - List
G - Save (both in cassette and microdrive) (Microdirve??? Now you haven't got any excuse to use it! -Ed)
A - Load
B - Erase entry
I - List on printer

Once you made any entry, the program asks you if it's correct and if so, goes to another blank entry to be filled. Type 'MENU' to go back to the starting screen.

The program is only 8,987 bytes long. Compare it to any similar app on Android or iOS: dozens of useless megabytes, surely.

I found a *slight* bug in the program, though: If you choose the 'L' option, it shows every entry, pressing 'M' must back to the menu, but instead of it, it shows the next message:

3 Subscript wrong, 1630:1

But don't worry, I'm sure it'll be corrected in the next Google Play update. So remember to enable the 'auto-update' option.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Hyperinto



This is a weird maze game. It's an improved version of 'El Laberinto' ('The Labyrinth') published before in the paper magazine as a BASIC list.

You must first select 1 (info) or 2 (play). Then, the difficulty level:

1 - Beginner
2 - Amateur
3 - Professional
4 - Expert

Any other key to practice

You're in the engine room of a huge spaceship, 18 rooms of a tangled mess of pipes. Each room contains 8 tunnels (the round spaces) and you must find the exit that is next to the tunnel at the mid left of the starting room (see the pic above). You start at the right side, again as you can see in the pic above. You move with O,P,Q,A being U go back and T move forward. Personally I can't understand the proper meaning of go back/move forward here.

You press T and go to another screen with another 8 tunnels and so on. Move forward, go back to another screen, ... till you reach the exit. you have a limited amount of time to reach your objetive, depending of the level you chose.

As I said before it's a weird maze, difficult to orient oneself and without understanding the concept of moving backwards/forward. (Maybe the problem is on me, not in the game!)

I think the map is a true challenge to [mention]pavero[/mention] !

Please, I encourage you to play and tell your views... and explain me what in the hell is that maze about!

[Morkin]

Sounds like quite a cool concept.

[Kweepa]

Presumably each screen is a slice in 3d space, with the 8 tunnels running perpendicular to the slice (into and out of the screen).
Also presumably, you can't always go forward (into the screen) or backward (out of the screen), because given the amount of connections on the first screen as a reference, it would be too easy.

[Morkin]

I was going to try it, but it didn't get Juan's walrus of approval.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Thanks, [mention]Kweepa[/mention] , I almost understand the concept.

It seems it was designed by a theorist physicist!

I was going to try it, but it didn't get Juan's walrus of approval.

You're a sort of BASIC gourmet!

[Juan F. Ramirez]

I played it again and it's very easy to disorientate.

This game is getting on my nerves!

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Rótulos (Signs)



This is a graphics utility to create signs on the screen. The program first asks you for instructions. Then, you must input some parameters: height, wide, thickness of the character, number of line to start, number of column to start and finally input the text itself. Both height and wide refers to characters units (8x8) and the thickness follow the next proportion:

0=1 pixel thickness, 1=2 pixels, 2=4 pixels, 3=6 pixels, etc

The sign above was used with the parameters 2,4,2,1,1,"ZX Spectrum". Cute, isn't it?

Then, the program asks you for another text. If you press 'N' then it asks you for printing it.

There's another example, using a *cough* *cough* superb game you all know very well...

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Casafantasmas (Ghostbusters)



At last a good conversion of the great Ghostbusters film for the Spectrum! (did I told you that I don't like the Activision game?).

Well, firstly, I must say that when I was preparing this post, I read in the SC entry that in the list of games in MH Cassette #1 there's 'Haunted House' instead of 'Cazafantasmas'. Reading the comments entry of the game I found: 'plagiarised from Andrew Murgatroyd's program in C&VG (Aug.83)'. Doing a deeper investigation I read this game was published in Sinclair User issue #24 (march '84). But two moths later, in the 'letters' section, the magazine published a note about this after a reader's discovery. It seemed the game was initially published in Computer and Video Games magazine, issue aug '83 by another person. The SU program is identical, except for some missing lines of the C+VG program.


The original british game

So this MH program... is a plagiarised (in spanish) version of the SU game, in turn, a plagiarised version of the C +VG game? It was published with a permission? A permision of SU? or a permission of C +VG? I don't know. I was just going to post another MH game and I came across with this! Please, If anyone wants more about this story, please tell!

I thought it was interesting to tell you this before reviewing this game. Because is a cool game. Not enough to get the Seal of Approval, but enjoyable. You must enter a house to get the jars above and take them to the lorry (this time you don't have to enter the mansion with the lorry! )

But you must face a terrible ghost that follows you and you can avoid it in the best 'Panic' style. If you know the great classic arcade game you know what I mean. O,P,Q,A are the keys. Make a hole (letter M) and the ghost falls in it. The way the ghost follows you is not random, it depends of how you're moving so you must follow an strategy to avoid it. The hummer kills the skeleton located in the upper floor. All in a limited time.

Nice game to play.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

EDIT: The correct name in spanish is Cazafantasmas, not Casafantasmas (in spanish sounds crappy!)

[Morkin]

"TIME" instead of "CRONO".

I was about to say "Heh - saved a whole byte there..!"...

...But then I checked the type in listing and realised they'd put a SPACE after PRINTing "TIME", so no bytes were saved after all...

...And then I realised that I'd wasted 5 minutes of my life checking all that and making this post...

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Duplex



This is a puzzle game for two players only. In a 5x4 grid, you must choose a pair of squares that must contain the same object (everyone has its own value). If you guess, you get the money.

I'm sure you've played the board game, but I don't know what's its name, even in spanish ('memo' maybe?).

Boring game.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Gráficos de Barras (Bars Chart)



The last program of this thread is a simple utility to display a bar chart.

First, you're asked for the number of dates of a magnitude. Then, max and min values. After that, you'll input every value (numeric value -axis Y- & name -axis X). A table will be displayed to confirm it and then the proper chart. Pressing a key goes back to the table and you'll be offered some options:

g - display again
r - new chart
c - modifiy data
p - printer


And with this program this thread ends.

Coming soon, more action with new MH threads!

[Juan F. Ramirez]

EDIT:

First, you're asked for the number of data (columns) of a magnitude.