Speccy ports

[Bizzley]

No I didn't work on the Amstrad port, other than go through my Spectrum source code with Keith Goodyer and try and help him out over the phone when he had some questions. There's a good breakdown of what went on with that port at http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/R-Type with a couple of quotes from Keith and myself.

[Seven.FFF]

Bob wrote a really rather good book about his experiences writing the Spectrum R-Type port.

Recommended reading, if you haven't come across it before! It's a free download.

[AndyC]

No I didn't work on the Amstrad port, other than go through my Spectrum source code with Keith Goodyer and try and help him out over the phone when he had some questions. There's a good breakdown of what went on with that port at http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/R-Type with a couple of quotes from Keith and myself.

Yeah, it was a brutally harsh time frame and the result is frankly still quite impressive for so little time. The full thread on it and the subsequent development of the 128K remake port is full of interesting details but Keith gave a fairly good breakdown of exactly how it was done near the beginning (http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/games/r-typ ... s-128)/10/). This kind of thing wasn't really uncommon back in the day, hence the prevalence of Speccy ports or occasionally cut and shut jobs, like Barbarian, which took the low res C64 graphics (with their 3 colour sprite limits) and the Speccy code to produce a multicolour "16 colour" mode port.

[jmk]

I heard a claim, from a programmer, that one game was exactly the same as the Spectrum version - even generating the Spectrum screen output, which was then converted in real-time into the screen format of the CPC. Naturally, it wasn't a very fast game by doing that!

But, to be fair, I think they said they had one week to make the CPC version.

[Ralf]

Yes, I read somwhere similar stories too. That some CPC games were generally a Zx Spectrum emulator - executing Spectrum code and creating in memory Spectrum display and only at the last moment running a procedure which converted Spectrum display to CPC display and send it to screen.