R-Type GT

[Joefish]

The single-shot sound effect they've used is too high-pitched though; too loud, and too drawn out - it completely ruins the effect of the music!
The tunes themselves sound pretty good.

And that makes a change - I hear far too many in-game tunes that just play relentlessly and have the volume balance of the channels (or 'instruments') all wrong. Or it's all too obvious when notes / whole channels are dropped to play the FX. One of the reasons why I'm happy to stick with 48K development.

[llewelyn]

WOW! It looks and sounds fantastic, I'd never even try to play it because I wouldn't last a second but what gets me is HOW on earth are they getting this kind of performance from a Z80? Its frickin magic when you consider - in comparison - what crap some of the best software houses were turning out in the 80's.

Who wrote the program? I just went and looked at the original 87 version and that's pretty amazing too.

[Joefish]

Bob Pape.
See: http://www.bizzley.com/

It's a very clever bit of work that pixel-scrolls only the character cells of the screen that contain scenery (which it works out from a map of the scenery colour attributes, and which can be added to at any time, which it needs for doing the dot trails on level 4).

It's then got a clever sprite routine that draws whole characters at a time into a back-buffer (the only downside being the 8-pixel jumpy movement of all the sprites), but only if there's nothing already drawn in that character cell (which saves time). It then copies the sprite buffer to the screen but avoiding the character cells with scenery in - so the sprites don't get snared in the scroll function - and blacking out all the cells where no sprites were drawn for that frame of the game.

[llewelyn]

Thanks Joe, I'm glad you gave me this link because I Googled my question and got a completely different answer

[Nienn Heskil]

Not too impressed tbh. Disabling the beeper sound module was a mistake, the game has excellent beeper sfx with its own character and impact unlike the generic AY pew-pews. Little to no consideration on which theme is used where (what's that endlessly restarting LV1 song in the menu etc?). The music is also waaay slow - likely a sign they didn't do the 60->50Hz conversion either (easy, just call the player two times in a row 1 out of 5 times).

Last but not least, should have picked the 2012 CPC conversion for the source of the songs, their versions of ingame themes are clearly superior. Although I like the title track here.

[p13z]

WOW! It looks and sounds fantastic, I'd never even try to play it because I wouldn't last a second but what gets me is HOW on earth are they getting this kind of performance from a Z80? Its frickin magic when you consider - in comparison - what crap some of the best software houses were turning out in the 80's.

Who wrote the program? I just went and looked at the original 87 version and that's pretty amazing too.

R-Type was one of the best games/conversions for the Speccy - this is just a hack to add music for 128k machines.
If you do really want to know how it was achieved - the author (almost entirely the work of one man) wrote a pretty decent book about it a few years ago:
spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2001502/B ... puter_Game
(which I now notice is also linked to by Joefish above).