Spectrum Computing

Lulz to that, natch. But bear with me...

After a bit of prevaricating, I last night decided to plunk down for an Oculus Quest -- it is IMHO one of the most exciting tech products in years. I've dreamed of decent/affordable/practical VR since the days of Virtuality, back in the early 1990s... and I think Quest delivers on that early promise in a way that no product before it has.

But as an aside, I wonder if or how one might get a Spectrum emulator running on the Quest? I know it's Android-based but I guess the platform is closed, or at least very-tightly controlled by Oculus. Anyone on here any thoughts on if or how it might happen? Could an existing Android emulator be ported to and/or side-loaded onto Quest? It'd be fun to play Manic Miner right in front of my face!

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to enjoying the next Spectrum Show in surround-o-vision.

The Playstation one lets you feed in video (supposedly - I've never tried it) that it then plays out as a giant static (but flat) cinema screen in front of you. It also does that when you watch DVDs in the headset. I've not tried a 3D Blu-Ray in it though, but supposedly it mimics the sort of view you get in a 3D cinema. This lets you move your head and look around, and the large screen stays relatively still in space.

What you could do with an emulator is either split the display down the middle for each eye (someone's done this with a C64, glueing an LCD screen into a phone visor headset) or send the main screen and alternate screen of an emulated 128K machine to each eye. The latter approach would have more detail, but you'd have a problem with synchronising updates. You'd probably want some sort of 'gated' update so you can draw to the screens, then 'flush' the screen data from both video RAMs into two static images in the headset.

Neither of these will respond to head movements though. It'd be like one of those Tomytronic 3D LCD games, or that awful Nintendo Virtual Boy (though with better displays).

5MinuteRetro wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2019 12:25 pm It'd be fun to play Manic Miner right in front of my face!

How about playing The Sentinel as it was meant to be played?

https://simonowen.com/spectrum/augmentinel/

I did have a dream of recreating various Spectrum games in VR. I got as far as implementing a few in 3D, and spent the rest of the time since wondering whether to splash out on a proper VR kit or stick with Cardboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7y4dce2eA

Stefan wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2019 5:09 pm

5MinuteRetro wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2019 12:25 pm It'd be fun to play Manic Miner right in front of my face!

How about playing The Sentinel as it was meant to be played?

https://simonowen.com/spectrum/augmentinel/

Nice! thanks for the link

SteveSmith wrote: ↑Wed Jun 19, 2019 1:14 pm I did have a dream of recreating various Spectrum games in VR. I got as far as implementing a few in 3D, and spent the rest of the time since wondering whether to splash out on a proper VR kit or stick with Cardboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7y4dce2eA

Oh! I remember being excited by this. Did you get no further? Shame! If you ever get it into a working state -- especially for Quest -- you're guaranteed at least one customer.

Actually i have created a ZX Emulator that runs on the Magic Leap 1 AR glass. I've also ported it to the Quest and I use it for myself and little demos.(Maybe i put a demo video on YT). So the technical side is not the problem. However, the more complex thing is to distribute such in the store. Even that the source code of the emulator is my own, the rom file is not and especially also not the games. So yes of course it's possible but not sure it's worth to spend too much time on it.
What i want to do is to release a real 3D version of an isometric game known from the ZX. But because it's not really a market, it's just a side project and because i have many others i hope it will become reality this year.

On this subject, is something like this technically possible for Speccy games?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316vI2LUDWI

I'm assuming not, since the Speccy had no specific concept of "sprites" and layers built in.

SteveSmith wrote: ↑Thu Jan 30, 2020 11:06 am I'm assuming not, since the Speccy had no specific concept of "sprites" and layers built in.

Precisely. Since there’s no dedicated hardware for that in the Spectrum, you can’t extract the concept of layers from any one piece of software. Not only that, a ton of Speccy games didn’t even bother with layers, opting instead for simply XORing all the graphics onto the screen.

Ast A. Moore wrote: ↑Thu Jan 30, 2020 2:58 pm

SteveSmith wrote: ↑Thu Jan 30, 2020 11:06 am I'm assuming not, since the Speccy had no specific concept of "sprites" and layers built in.

Precisely. Since there’s no dedicated hardware for that in the Spectrum, you can’t extract the concept of layers from any one piece of software. Not only that, a ton of Speccy games didn’t even bother with layers, opting instead for simply XORing all the graphics onto the screen.

ZX ULAX might be able to sort of bridge the gap by also providing depth info next to the recolouring info.

That demo's clever, but I suspect there's more to it than just the display. Someone seems to have added a depth value to individual background tile/colour pairings in that Mario demo since the background blocks layer up far too neatly. The stairs in Castlevania are too perfect, and someone's added textures on the tops and sides of blocks in MegaMan that weren't there in 2D.

It clearly requires some game-specific tweaking, but that's a lot easier to tweak on a tile-map based system than a pixel screen like the Spectrum has.