Spectrum Computing

public beta 19 fixes and improves some things overlooked in the earlier versions. The most important change is dux loader now using the active address mapper to place some recolored pixel data into the "screen memory" area (instead of sending everything straight to the "pixel memory" as before). It does matter for some 128k games using only one screen buffer as a screen, treating the other one just as an ordinary memory page to store code/variables/buffers/gfx data. One such example is 128k extended version of Renegade. As i found, it has some glitchy sprites (masks mostly) - hard to see on the standard ZX screen, but immediately obvious if recolored; and some of these sprites were kept in the beginning of page7. While it was possible to put the pixels directly in the screen area for the old version, with the new one it's much more convenient, and was done for it. So download both the new emulator and the game pack for the fix to work properly.

Never was a big fan of Batty - found it too hard, too fast and too unfair with bonuses for my liking (the best of all ZX Breakout clones is Impact IMO). But some people think Batty is a great game and requested it repeatedly. So here it is, looking even better than ever (the one undeniable thing about Batty is it looking better than any other ZX Breakout clone).

Batty looks great! Just enough colour to lift the sprites/score off of the background.

MonkZy wrote: ↑Sat Aug 01, 2020 3:36 am Batty looks great! Just enough colour to lift the sprites/score off of the background.

TBH i felt a bit lazy (again) and just assigned same colors for almost everything
while metallic bluish seemed right for the most objects, maybe bonuses might look better different
so if someone feels like adding more paint, it is easy, just append some magic numbers to the dux file: where xxxx = hex address of the 1st byte of any sprite line (not necessarily the top one)
yyyy = ink (lighter color in this game) and zzzz = paper (darker color) in GRB555 hex format
(will be active starting from this line till the end of the sprite or till the next color assignment)

Two more games today.

Super Sleuth sprites were colored so i just kept the original colors (removing the clash of course).
Didn't test it thoroughly but looks like everything works.

Cosa Nostra has no sprite color info in the game and i was feeling lazy, so all were made white with black outlines for now, giving a cleaner picture. Maybe i will add more colors later, as i did with the Blade Warrior.

Same links on the 1st page as always.

Public beta 20 is here!

Some people complained about occasional annoying sound crackling over the silence. It appears to be winaudio problem, and it can actually happen anytime and not just with this emulator (but harder to notice if a loud sound is playing). AIU sometimes windows doesn't send the next queued sound portion in time, and then for a moment silence is played. But while in windows silence is always zero level volume, with beeper it could be either zero or max level, so some crackling/popping is heard on the transition.

In some cases it might be fixed with these methods:
https://www.howtogeek.com/285429/how-to ... indows-pc/
...but if these suggestions won't help or fixed drivers are impossible to obtain, now here is a kludge in the emulator - on silent frames it slowly slides the volume level to zero, thus avoiding the loudest crackling. Look for the "silencer" parameter in the ini. I won't recommend to enable it if your sound is ok, as it costs one frame extra sound lag.

two new games - Hunt Buck 2 Nuclear Defence from YRGB'2019 and the Prayer of the Warrior ('twas a pain to preserve these lighting effects!)

public beta 21
swapped F5 & LAlt+F5 hotkey actions (for more convenient browsing of tape gigascreen galleries)
improved z80 snapshot support (except unemulated hardware of course) and loading snapshots overall
+ some code refactoring here and there in preparation for rzx playback implementation (coming soon)

public beta 22 - finally some rzx support!
Only the playback yet and simplified (may fail in some rare circumstances) but all the matches for the games in the ULAX game pack worked. Given rzx file is treated like a snapshot, so run it with the same End hotkey; to stop the replay press Home once (2nd time will reset the system as before). Note some recordings will need specific ROM image (usually 48k) to work properly, so give it as another starting parameter or dra&drop onto the emulator window as well. Also some are made of different game versions and thus incompatible with the dux files in the game pack.

Also in this release - bugfix for loadz80 and some rare functions hotkeys changed (refer to emuL-info.txt)

Please report to me any rzx (even not the ones in the game pack) you'll find not working (but first try to run it with a different ROM)

if someone got "22 (117)" version i put there by mistake, please redownload "22 (118)" (small bugfix regarding running snaps after rzx)

Lethargeek wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 7:33 pm Also some are made of different game versions and thus incompatible with the dux files in the game pack.

Now i made alternative dux drivers for all of these, look for ULAX-rzx-dux.zip in the cloud folder.

public beta 23 - some UI bugfixing related to rzx
2 new games - Antiriad and 3 parts of la Espada Sagrada

Your work is wonderful.
Pheraps it's time to think of a hardware implementation ( something along the lines of ZH-HD )

Gvan wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 2:35 pm Pheraps it's time to think of a hardware implementation ( something along the lines of ZH-HD )

The hardware is already work in progress. Very slow progress unfortunately. People here have many problems and little time. We did only very limited proof of concept FPGA testing so far with the board not very suited for the task:

https://cloud.mail.ru/public/9LEs/DwdXr5a9Q
https://cloud.mail.ru/public/FhYz/DoLKkqnCK
https://cloud.mail.ru/public/5qDB/As9YP4yBv
https://cloud.mail.ru/public/D5hy/997cZVH7Z

I hope the next year we'll get first dedicated devboards. As a software man, i'm unable to speed it up.

two more games - Nemesis the Warlock and Robobro Episode 1

also put unfinished (but playable) games in one file ULAX-wip1.zip with short descriptions

this time it's Marsmare: Alienation fresh from YRGB'20
because all the gfx was compressed, the coloration is somewhat simple
maybe i will improve it some day...

now meet the long-awaited Wonderful Dizzy in all its glory (and a little extra)

not tested much, there might be a few mistakes with item colors, please report if you notice

warning: reloading the dux driver (PgDn) in-game may corrupt colors of the keys
so load it just once anytime before you begin playing and then don't touch

I tested Wanderful Dizzy today and it looks great, without color clash, everything was done discreetly, I immediately got used to this perfection.
btw, I have one question regarding the sprites recoloring process.
A few days ago I noticed a new Russian emulator zxpolly that uses a similar technique as emuzwin, although I like your approach more for several reasons.
This emulator comes with a nice sprite-corrector tool, which I really liked.
I wonder if its possible to have a similar tool for ZX ULAX, which would allow easier recoloring job and creation of dux files ?

[mention]Pegaz[/mention], yes, i use such a tool (made by one of the ULAX project participants) sometimes. But i'm reluctant to share it now as it was left unfinished and quite buggy. Maybe the author will improve it someday or i'll find a time to write a new one (and/or a tool to import EmuZWin/Spec256 gfx resources). Also it is only useful for a full pixel-precise sprite repaint, that is quite tiresome even with better tools and i don't do that very often.

improved Wonderful Dizzy coloration - redownload the game pack
different colors for sprites, small glitches fixed, most conspicuous overlapping scenery clashing fixed
replaced dizzy8.sna with dizzy8.trd (unofficial disk release, still waiting for bugfixed official one)

one addition to conclude the january: Roland's Rat Race
also improved Nemesis the Warlock a bit (sprite bump)

Any news for Shinobi?

Eugene C. wrote: ↑Tue Feb 02, 2021 2:03 pm Any news for Shinobi?

Nope, not yet. I'm not sure if it will be even possible to make one universal dux for all these levels and right now i'm not motivated enough to make separate files for each level for manual reloading (won't be pretty). Btw now my main effort is to finish the english docs, so you might trying the second solution with separate duxes yourself soon(ish)

Can you do something for Rollercoaster?

Eugene C. wrote: ↑Mon Feb 15, 2021 8:33 pm Can you do something for Rollercoaster?

i will try, maybe it's possible to do fast, w/o repainting all the sprites