CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

General software. From trouble with the Banyan Tree to OCP Art Studio, post any general software chat here. Could include game challenges...
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TMD2003
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CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

Post by TMD2003 »

Some of you, probably most of you, will be aware that neither of these competitions ever came to a completely satisfactory conclusion. In preparation for the near-inevitability of being next year's host, and for which I aim not to have a repeat performance, I've been combing through what remains of those two unfinished competitions.

GReW was the host for 2017, and I have no idea if he ever joined up here. His site wasn't archived on any of the usual sites and disappeared from its host, with the competition unfinished, and none of the entries indexed here, or at Chris Young's Crap Game Finder. After posting on the CGC17 thread on t'other forum, GReW reappeared out of nowhere, sent me a message, and included a backup of his website - with all the games, including three that were never reviewed, and have thus never been made available in public. I'm indexing them all now, and I've filled in the required form so Peter/Einar/Dave/whoever can add them to ZXDB. The most troublesome was one of these three uMIAs (as I suppose we could call them), "The Color Challenge's Jailbreak!" by Timothy Alcid, an American whose only ever contribution to the Spectrum world is this game. It was submitted as a .TAP file of 1,244 KB... which Spectaculator rejected, but FUSE recognised as raw data and loaded fine. Feed the sound out from FUSE into Audacity, convert to mono 8-bit WAV, throw it at MakeTZX and Bob (Smith's) your uncle, we have a working .TZX. So there's a complete set of working files from the 2017 CSSCGC, and I'll get in contact with GReW again (or at least see if he responds to another message) and see if I can host his old website - he said last time "it's OK as long as it's kept exactly as it was", though that would still hide the three uMIAs and it would be better if they were on display.

As for 2018, there were two competitions, of sorts - one that Catmeows was hosting on t'other forum that never got going, and one that Shaun Bebbington actually did host - though mainly on CSS, by the looks of things - and he wouldn't even mention t'other forum by name, presumably because of all the OMFG DRAMA with a certain hand-held device that Guru Larry once used as a knife. He's been here, I can see that, but last posted in February 2018, didn't update this forum on how the competition was going, and when the website went bang, it hadn't been archived at all by either of the big two archiving sites. Is anyone in any regular contact with him, and could his competition website be recovered? I'm going to investigate the entries from that year as thoroughly as 2017, seeing as they are available here (is it all of them, or just a selection?) but one of them looks particularly bizarre - it's in two formats, .MDV - presumably a QL microdrive - and .IF1, which I've never come across. Is that another Spectrum microdrive file like .MDR, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Anyway, the recovery of the 2017 entries shouldn't take too long. We may even see the site(s) again.
Spectribution: Dr. Jim's Sinclair computing pages.
Features my own programs, modified type-ins, RZXs, character sets & UDGs, and QL type-ins... so far!
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Re: CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

Post by TMD2003 »

.MDV was a Spectrum microdrive format all along, but which I could only get to work on EightyOne, an emulator in which the Spectrum is an afterthought. The Interface 2 ROM image - curiously filed with an .IF1 extension - can stay as it is, but I wasn't going to take this .MDV malarkey lying down, especially when I'd got my hopes up for a QL game that wasn't. Strangely, the .MDV file was also 187 KB, but when formatted on EightyOne, still gave a maximum capacity of 125 KB. What happened to the other space, I have no idea.

After making this thread (with lots of comparisons of tape browsers and CAT listings from microdrive and disc formats and their ups and downs) I found the BASIC source code of The Ring of the Inka, and it is now available in two extra formats that anyone can use:
.MDR for microdrives, and
.DSK for the +3.

I've tested the .MDR in Spectaculator 8.0, Fuse 1.5.7, Spin 0.7q and EightyOne 1.16, and it's working fine on all of them (even if microdrive emulation on EightyOne is very slow, at least it has it). The .DSK should be fine on any emulator that has a +3, which should be all of them except ZXBaremulator - there's no UDGs, and I can find nothing in the rest of the 48K BASIC listing (i.e. that isn't LOAD, SAVE or ERASE disc commands) that would trip up +3 BASIC.
Spectribution: Dr. Jim's Sinclair computing pages.
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Re: CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

Post by PeterJ »

Just to confirm we have the files. Thank you [mention]TMD2003[/mention].
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Re: CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

Post by TMD2003 »

I am going to make it a project of mine to plug any holes I find in ZXDB regarding Crap Games in days of yore. And the first problem I have is: I don't have a complete set of files, and neither does ZXDB, or I would have downloaded them.

These are the three 16K ZX81 titles from [mention]Shaun_B[/mention]'s 2018 CSSCGC (and I've put out the "mention" there in case Shaun gets a message that says "you've been mentioned!").

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/34712/ZX81/TODOS
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/3 ... /Computalk
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/3 ... Space_1999

If anyone has one or even all three of these files, do let me know. ([mention]PROSM[/mention], maybe?)

Also, I will get a working (and slightly updated) version of GReW's 2017 site back up and running, seeing as he said "here's the website files, hopefully they can be of some use to you". With a bit of luck he wasnae talking pish. (GReW is, I assume, Scottish.)
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Re: CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

Post by R-Tape »

TMD2003 wrote: Mon Dec 21, 2020 12:41 pm I am going to make it a project of mine to plug any holes I find in ZXDB regarding Crap Games in days of yore. And the first problem I have is: I don't have a complete set of files, and neither does ZXDB, or I would have downloaded them.
Just seen this (replied to your email).

I should say that I already have lots of stuff to add for these years: 2002, 2011, 2016, 2017, 2018. It was collated by volunteers, and has been sat with me for ages because there is still a fair bit of collating to get it ZXDB ready.

I'd be be more than happy for you to take a lead on this, but I'd need to go through what I have first, but I'm afraid I intend to do as little work as possible for the rest of this year...
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Re: CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

Post by TMD2003 »

I'll hold off combing through those years, then - 2017 is the one most in need of the update, but if you're already on the case, so much the better.
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Re: CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

Post by TMD2003 »

http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/csscgc2017/index.html

It's back, and three games which would otherwise have been uMIA are now available once again.

Two of these are not exactly suited to us 40-and-50-somethings with failing eyesight, given that they take place entirely in one character square, but see this as a bit of archaeological preservation.
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Re: CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

Post by zup »

Bresenham can't be downloaded. The link points to "Bresenham.tap.zip", when the actual file is "bresenham.tap.zip".

Also, most games lack of any kind of documentation... It seems that most additional files (e-mails, instructions, screen captures) has been lost.
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Re: CSSCGC 2017/2018: The Return...

Post by TMD2003 »

I wasn't around all that much in 2017, I was in the "diving in and out on an as-and-when basis" so I don't remember much about the competition at the time - only that I was intending to enter it, the idea didn't get developed very far, and I only picked it up again and finished it this year; that intended entry is actually going to be the next review when [mention]PROSM[/mention] posts again. Three years late is still better than permanently unreleased, after all.

Other than the introductory message about the three "lost" games, and the links to those games on the relevant page, this site is as GReW left it in early 2018. But I have fixed the filename for Bresenham now (i.e. it's now Bresenham.tap.zip) so the download should work.

As for documentation... I think that, if you look on the "submissions" pages (submissions*.html, where * is a number), each page lists three games with the briefest of descriptions of the game and its controls, and that's about it - no accompanying text files, and the only "documentation" I found were three files called email.txt which were included with the three "lost" games. Presumably those would have been removed once GReW had written the review. Screen captures (in .scr format) can at least be re-taken, and with a fair few of these games there's not a lot to see as they use only one character square for the "action"... such was the nature of one of the challenges that year.
Spectribution: Dr. Jim's Sinclair computing pages.
Features my own programs, modified type-ins, RZXs, character sets & UDGs, and QL type-ins... so far!
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