Things you never knew about Bubble Bobble

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equinox
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Things you never knew about Bubble Bobble

Post by equinox »

There are a lot of things you never knew about Bubble Bobble, like the fact that the weird dark blue inverted medicine bottle thing is supposed to be an ice lolly (I think?) and -- FOCUS, EQUINOX, FOCUS.

Okay, here is my question. If you turn on your Speccy and hit Caps Lock and then load Bubble Bobble, it looks all freaky and weird, and the bubbles have a sort of "square mask" on them. Why is this?

It's fascinating to me because back in the day I had a Speccy and a Beeb and I got into the habit of turning on Caps Lock because that's what the Beeb does (in fact it doesn't understand BASIC keywords in lower case!). But what does that mean on a Spectrum? You're doing POKE 23658,8, you are basically changing *one single bit in memory* -- and this breaks Bubble Bobble? How and why?
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Things you never knew about Bubble Bobble

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Sorry, I can’t reproduces this. I tried various releases on all machines and leaving the caps lock on before the load doesn’t make any difference. Am I missing something?
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PeteProdge
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Re: Things you never knew about Bubble Bobble

Post by PeteProdge »

ACE magazine had a cover-mounted cassette which had a playable demo of Bubble Bobble for ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 users (and possibly Amstrad, if my memory serves me right).

The demo lets you play the first five levels. It nearly ended up accidentally being the full game, but a last minute testing by an ACE member of staff realised the mistake and alerted the tape duplicators.

Apparently, the Commodore 64 demo does have all the data for the 100 levels, it's just programmed to stop after level 5.
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