Which coin-op classics still need a good Speccy version?

[ZXDunny]

DEVIL FISH

A lovely little maze-chase game with fish food, expanding baddies and a cute death sequence. Would likely be a cinch in AGD.

[Ralf]

Did you mean "Which arcade games have Spectrum port but it could be done better"?

And what do you means by "classics"? Only games from 1980-1984 period or so?

[Nick]

Sky Kid
Ladybug

[Joefish]

Mappy
Sky Kid

With narrow bits of scrolling and only a few enemy sprites, I'd love to see these done in multicolour. They could be 128K only to get both the music and use screen-paging to help with the graphics. If anyone's interested I could probably knock up a custom graphics engine and a few sprites. Leave it up to someone else to code the game.

I had an idea for something like Sky Kid with two buttons. As well as supporting multi-button sticks, it should be possible to rig a joystick with a button that can can do the 'impossible' combination of UP and DOWN at the same time, and use that to trigger rare quick-tap actions like the loop / bomb-drop button in this game. So you could do it without a special interface. Obviously you couldn't hold down such a button, but there are plenty of uses it could have with a quick tap, e.g. smart bomb, bring up menu. It seems more viable than Penetrator's tap-right-to-fire, anyway...

I guess you'd need diodes going to the special button to avoid shorting the normal UP and DOWN switches. Although you can get DPST Momentary switches, just not very arcadey ones. It would just be another way of adding a second button that would be fairly easy to support.

[Ralf]

Yeah, 80-84 would be roughly the period in which the Speccy could expect to do a decent rendition, under normal circumstances. (Obviously it performed well on some later stuff too.)

And no, I mean either games with inadequate Speccy ports OR no Speccy ports at all.

Actually we got quite a lot of quality remakes of classic arcade games on Spectrum recently

- 100% faithful port of Pacman
- Pietro Bros, a great multicolor remake of Mario Bros
- Kung Fu Master remake
- Mr Do, a recent remake of Dig Dug that you probably missed
- Astro Blaster, just a few days ago

and maybe something more

But we still miss good versions of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Junior. Anybody for the challenge?

[Joefish]

Donkey Kong would be a good one to do in multicolour, with the stepped girders.

[Ralf]

And do we have Kangaroo on Spectrum? I believe we don't

[Turtle_Quality]

I always liked Artic Galaxians. Was always happy with Penetrator for Scramble, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers for Defender

Not sure that Asteroids was ever done justice on the Spectrum, Cosmic Debris was smooth and fast but not really arcade quality. Likewise Centipede/Millipede had many versions but I only remember them looking like compiled basic with character movement

Bezerk was nicely remade a couple of years back by an old friend of mine Steve Snake

I waited in vain for a Spectrum version of Gorf.

[Ralf]

Not sure that Asteroids was ever done justice on the Spectrum

Well, I enjoyed Planetoids.


We must all remember that original Asteroids machine used a hardware that worked not with sprites but with vectors. On Spectrum you can't simply do it this way so you you'll never get it 100% similar.

[Stefan]

We must all remember that original Asteroids machine used a hardware that worked not with sprites but with vectors. On Spectrum you can't simply do it this way so you you'll never get it 100% similar.

So you're basically saying that Elite, Starion, Star Strike etc are all drawing sprites?

The fun thing about the spectrum is that it has neither native sprites nor native vectors - only a bitmap to do what you want with.

An asteroid game using vectors would be pretty cool and I'm sure it would be 99.9% similar to the arcade.

Another fun fact about vectors is that they scale beautifully (sizewize not performancewize) so the limited display resolution of the speccy is not that important.

update 1:
Ooooh and disassemblies on the web - for example https://computerarcheology.com/Arcade/A ... ckPatterns

update 2:
Hmm... those are some pretty fine lines, 256 x 192 may be a bit chunky - but still similar!

update 3:
And oooh again - look at those vectors - they are all fixed in the ROM and not rotated on the fly.

[djnzx48]

A similar game to Dig Dug was developed for TS-Conf as Digger.

Scramble had some mockup graphics made for it, along with Donkey Kong.

[Ralf]

And I would also like to see this one done in good,playable way.
It's basically a breaout/arkanoid style game but this seesaw adds some fresh, new flavour

https://youtu.be/Ebuo3f9A6EE

[Turtle_Quality]

Clowns was probably more widely known as Circus and was very nicely implemented on the Atari 2600 VCS Console with Analog paddle controllers which are pretty tough to replicate on a Spectrum. The graphics are certainly doable on a Spectrum

Warlords was also never implemented on the Spectrum but well implemented from the Arcade to Atari VCS with paddles, a 4 player battle is probably the most fun I've had with any game - I've just bought some very expensive paddles and ordered a USB adapter so I can play this again. I think to implement a paddle game the best way on the Spectrum would be reading left right keys very frequently and moving your character with inertia so you can quickly accelerate and decelerate to the right spot - but I don't remember anyone attempting that with the various Breakout clones.

There are a number of VCS games that I would like to see on the Speccy but that's getting a little off topic, but when I get my current game done they are on my project list.

On the multiplayer front, Pacman Battle Royale can't really be considered a classic as it's relatively recent, but it looks great fun and I'd love to see that on the Speccy

[Joefish]

I did wonder if two smooth 2-bit rotary encoders set in a pair of paddles could be linked to a Kempston mouse interface. Admittedly that only gives you two, not four, but it would give you a 0-255 reading for each.

Another option would be a 5-bit rotary encoder which could be connected via any joystick port. This would give you a number 0..31, which isn't great, but you could get more simultaneous players. The problem is such things tend to be stiff clicky types.

[DouglasReynholm]

A similar game to Dig Dug was developed for TS-Conf as Digger.

Scramble had some mockup graphics made for it, along with Donkey Kong.

Wow, those Scramble and Kong mockups are beautiful, though there are obviously some questions as to how the colours in Scramble would cope with scrolling. Digger is much more like Mr Do than Dig Dug, and that's not running on anything anyone would recognise as a Spectrum anyway.

Seconded, Reverend.

I see from its Wiki a port of Parasol Stars was mooted (doesn't say by whom) for us Speccy users, but canned. I'm sure a cut down version would have been possible just as it's predecessors were given pretty good treatments, especially given the chance of a 128k only version to fit in all the graphics and sound. I'd love to see some mockups or more of that!

[Joefish]

Notes on the above:

There's not much point doing Asteroids with vectors since they don't scale or rotate. Maybe just for the player. What it does need is smooth pixel movement.

On the other hand, I think Centipede is actually better with character movement. Maybe you could make the player and the leaping spider move in smaller steps but only stop in whole character squares. As for the centipede itself, it still needs to step and change direction on the character cell grid. Maybe the body segments could just be animated to look smoother.

And although it's a step away from the arcade original, maybe a bigger blockier version (looking more like Bomberman) might be a new way to go with it.

Penetrator is a decent Scramble variant apart from (a) its controls and (b) its habit of leaving randomly coloured attributes littering the screen. Perhaps some more modern pre-shifted character-based scrolling techniques could be used on it, just with a scattering of different UDGs so the scenery still looks pixelly rather than blocky. Maybe an R-Type/Zynaps-like picky scroller could be applied to it, scrolling the scenic edges and relying on large blocks of attribute colour for filling in (to save time in the scroller). But it would need to be pretty clever to be able to cope with a pointy pixel landscape instead of a character-based one.

The Scramble mock-up with thick lines and stippled fill-in for the scenery looks fine in a static shot, but (a) is a bit fiddly to program either with vectors or UDGs. And (b) pixel-scrolling large stippled areas looks fuzzy and distracting, particularly on emulators with non-50 Hz displays. That and none of the other vertical colour split sprites or scenery can be scrolled horizontally in anything less than characters. About the only thing you can take from that is the horizontally split fireball and fuel tank colours. Although the sprite designs themselves are spot-on.

The Donkey Kong mockup has a similar problem with the vertical sprite movement along the angled girders, but this should be easily fixable in multi-colour. There are few enough sprites to make that a viable option.

[mickfarrow]

Here are the sprite sheets to the mock up's of Donkey Kong and Scramble.



I've also done some mock up's of Tron and Mr Do!

https://sites.google.com/site/zxgraph/h ... -mock-up-s

[R-Tape]

Hi mick, just a note to say that you need to chop down your direct link a bit to see the image on the forum.

Very cool btw

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Amazing!

[toot_toot]

Great topic!

Two that instantly spring to mind are Congo Bongo and Up n Down, both by Sega.

Both were supposed to be released by US Gold and were advertised at the same time as Spy Hunter, Zaxxon and Buck Rogers but were never released. Although they were released on the c64 and they’re great games, I’d love to see decent conversions of them - unlike Zaxxon and Buck Rogers!

[R-Tape]

So many potential projects! If any have legs maybe they should have a dedicated thread.

Donkey Kong would be a good one to do in multicolour, with the stepped girders.

Agreed. I don't think I've shared this—I worked with binman for a while on a Nirvana version, but it didn't take off (the failings were all at my end). I think his graphics are the same as the Next version. The mockup at the top left shows the graphics I worked with:

All binman's graphics


Here's a gif of my early attempts on the Speccy (using Nirvana), though I'm sure I had something somewhere with a proper player sprite.



It's all very do-able. It just needs a coder willing and able to put heart and soul into an arcade port (get in touch with binman if this is you!).

[Joefish]

You could still slant the girders; just need to keep the sprites floating at least 1 pixel above them.

[R-Tape]

You could still slant the girders; just need to keep the sprites floating at least 1 pixel above them.

Aye 2 pixel slants was the plan. The screenshot was just early stage mucking about.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

A pity that project didn't take off, @[mention]R-Tape[/mention], the graphics are just amazing!

[Morkin]

Penetrator is a decent Scramble variant apart from (a) its controls and (b) its habit of leaving randomly coloured attributes littering the screen. Perhaps some more modern pre-shifted character-based scrolling techniques could be used on it, just with a scattering of different UDGs so the scenery still looks pixelly rather than blocky. Maybe an R-Type/Zynaps-like picky scroller could be applied to it, scrolling the scenic edges and relying on large blocks of attribute colour for filling in (to save time in the scroller). But it would need to be pretty clever to be able to cope with a pointy pixel landscape instead of a character-based one.

I guess the thing with Penetrator is that its level editor allowed some fairly freeform landscapes. I remember creating levels with lines and lines of rockets & radars for a laugh, just to see what'd happen.