16/48 Tape Magazine 03 - February 1984

Y'know, other stuff, Sinclair related.
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Morkin
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16/48 Tape Magazine 03 - February 1984

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Been a bit of a gap since my previous two posts - took a while to get through this one.

Issue 3 was the first of these magazines that I actually owned, so I'd an idea about what was to come.

SPIDER

Image

...Which is oddly enough a 'snake' game, as you can see. Collect the flies, avoid the stationary wasps, try to trap your opponent. I'm not sure what sort of trail the spider is leaving behind but it's obviously to be avoided.

The game starts with a backdrop of a spider web, PLOTted and DRAWn onto the screen. Features of this BASIC game include redefinable keys, which is a welcome touch from the crazy keyboard layouts of the previous tapes' games.

It's nice to see the presence of the computer controlled sna... errr... spider competing against you, but after a few goes I concluded that its presence made it nigh on impossible to get all the flies. After tentatively breaking into the BASIC program I didn't see anything resembling a "well done Spidey, you've scoffed all the flies. Mmmmm, flies..." type message. So I figured the program wasn't actually counting.

So, with a high score of 458, I gave up and continued along the tape...

EDITORIAL

"What would George Orwell have thought about a magazine which can only be read by a machine?" we're asked.

("Doubleplusgood" I reckon.)

A quick thanks for the response from issue 1 - only had one space for a reader's program in this issue though, so I'm guessing 'our Barry' had his work cut out again this month.

Introducing THE LONG WAY HOME ("yay!"), with graphics ("woot!"), as long as your Speccy is a 48k one ("booo" - 16k owners).

Again, encouraging submissions - £5 for anything published (e.g. a letter) and £50 for a program.

LETTER

From Pete Telfer, scrolled up the screen with a nifty little routine. Some nice POKEs for you in case you'd forgotten:

Code: Select all

POKE 23692,255 (stops scroll?) message when something is printed below line 21
POKE 23658,8 (turns CAPS LOCK on)
POKE 23609, n (changes duration of keyboard click tone)
RANDOMIZE USR 3280 (scrolls screen up 1 line)
ELEMENTS

Hmmm, my spidey sense (or is that snakey sense?) is tingling. I think we could have some learnin' coming up...

Image

Aaargh..! Never been a massive chemistry fan. Might as well go for the "all one hundred" elements option.

The first choice is to list them all with melting points, boiling points, density etc. (which prints very slowly so would probably take the best part of 20 minutes).

Then there's a basic test on symbols and names... "We bought it to help with your... <snip>" ("enough of that" - Ed)

I had a quick go, and was gutted to have scored 0/10, before realising that the INPUT$ answers were actually case sensitive. I had another go and scored 4/10, which was still fairly pitiful as it asked me the same questions a couple of times...

Eventually I concluded that my life's path won't probably require me needing to know the the symbol for Praseodymium, so I decided to carry on through the tape.
Spoiler
Pr
Next, we have... Another scroll routine! Flippin' eck, why is this magazine so obsessed with SCROLLing...?

The routine demonstrates a (307 byte) vertical and horizontal pixel scroll that readers can use in their programs.

There's a simple and clear explanation - I guess they assume the readers know some BASIC but not machine code - so there's some info about which POKEs to use, and how to call the routines.

Next....

THE LONG WAY HOME

Barry C. Thorne, Jim Dann

The first in the series of the 'Long Way Home' adventures, a mix of BASIC and machine code. Memories of playing this included a slight annoyance with the parser - "WHAT CAN I SEE" rather than "LOOK", and the blippy sounds taking a while once you've entered a command. Playing it on an emulator was a blessing, as I could speed it up to reduce the pause duration between inputs.

I don't think I ever completed one of these back in the day, so I was committed to giving this one a decent crack (which goes part way to explaining the delay with this post!).

Anyway, the saga starts with you stepping into your "Trans-mat unit" to get home... but something is wrong..! You rematerialize in the wrong place, on a spaceship somewhere.

Image

As mentioned earlier, there are some nice graphics for lucky 48K owners, appearing instantly on screen, including some cheeky Speccy references thrown in.

Image

Image

Image

Great use of FLASH in the graphics too, which I failed miserably to reflect in my screen grabs. :roll:

What makes this adventure quite tough is the random attacks by Uncle Clive's robots:

Image

I didn't work out a way of defeating them consistently. I found a laser gun to shoot them with but its powerpack depleted quite soon. The game instructions suggest not to worry if you die - it's part of the learning process. But the regularity with which they seem to turn up adds a sprinkling of luck to the proceedings. I guess these things were flying off the production line in 1984.

With a bit of luck I managed to my amazement to get to the end without cheating - the game is actually fairly easy to complete:

Image

I did find a room with a load of gold/diamonds so perhaps I missed out on escaping with a full bounty, but I didn't want to push my luck with the robots.

Apart from the aforementioned minor annoyances, a pleasant adventuring experience with some nicely drawn locations. Looking forward to the next one already. :)

Right - onto 'side b'.

OF DUNGEONS AND GREEN MEN

...And a shout out to Brian Howarth, author of the Mysterious Adventure series. This month is dedicated to the first adventure - The Golden Baton

(I don't think I ever played any of this series.)

As far as the hints are concerned, I can only access them after entering the last 6 digits of Digital Fantasia's phone number. I'm not too sure about how useful this is as a security feature, given that (a) their number is on their magazine adverts, and (b) you can BREAK into the BASIC program to reveal this:

Image

Ahem. Anyway, the final feature is an apology for an incorrect Hobbit hint from issue 1 (obviously took a while for someone to point it out).

VORTEX

A game for two players. Ah well, let's try it anyway... Again, I'm not familiar with this game but I'm told that "Cheatability decides how slowly the die changes so that you can control your moves."

Turns out it's a slightly glorified Snakes & Ladders game. Only, you have to make it up to square 100 and then back down to 1 again (not sure if anyone played S&L like that, on the way back being 'regurgitated' by the snake?

Well, I had a few problems running this. Using a couple of emulators, first I had to switch to 16K emulation to get it to work. Secondly, the game started freezing randomly, and I got an error message whenever I landed on a vortex... In the end I tried a different emulator, deleted a PRINT #1 command from the BASIC program, and ended up getting it running. Woohoo..!

...Unfortunately my joy was short-lived as it's a snakes and ladders game, so I played with myself briefly (fnar) and then moved on.

REVIEWS

3D Desert Patrol (CRL) - slightly ironic criticism of gameplay sluggishness due to part of the game being written in BASIC (given the nature of most 16/48 programs). Summary: "playable, if somewhat dull".

3D Combat Zone (Artic) the review is quite positive "well done John Ritman and Artic".

3D Tanx (DK 'Tronics) (you're getting the theme now?) - a worthy review, "a simple, addictive game with plenty of action. Almost one of the classics."

OK, next...

RENUMBER

"A BASIC renumbering program"

Jeez, OK so a bit dull but potentially I reckon this might have been a quite handy utility 'BITD' when I was tinkering around with BASIC programs. It's a small bit of code which will renumber your BASIC programs (well, duh..). Instructions include:

Image

...Which is exactly what I decided to do at that point.

THE 15

So what's this then?

Image

Oh. OK. Well, as you can see I'm not great at these things, and wasn't inspired enough to try to solve it for long.

COMPETITION

Finally, there's a call for the next issue's competition - a "CLS" competition. Most exciting way to clear the screen. Anyone want a go? Well, all you need to do is get your entry in by "The Ides of March 1984"...

...And the 1st and 2nd place for the previous animation competition - whaddya reckon..?

2nd place:
Image

1st place:
Image

...Aaaand that's the lot..!

Once again a mixed bag, with The Long Way Home clearly the standout program on the tape. Am already looking forward to typing my code into TLWH episode 2 and seeing what happens.




...And I wonder if there will be another SCROLL routine. :lol:
My Speccy site: thirdharmoniser.com
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PeterJ
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 03 - February 1984

Post by PeterJ »

Great stuff [mention]Morkin[/mention]. Thank you!
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 03 - February 1984

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

The text adventure looks cool with those very crafted graphics (and the Sinclair robot), it doesn't match with average quality! :D
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 03 - February 1984

Post by R-Tape »

Great stuff. The Long Way Home looks a lot more polished than I realised, I wonder if all the installment were written on the fly or the author had a grand plan from the start.

Nice animations. 1st place went on to bigger things.
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Morkin
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 03 - February 1984

Post by Morkin »

Juan F. Ramirez wrote: Mon Jul 16, 2018 9:28 pm The text adventure looks cool with those very crafted graphics (and the Sinclair robot), it doesn't match with average quality! :D
Yeah, pretty short but impressive considering it's written in BASIC (apart from the pics which are called in machine code).

Despite being in BASIC the arcade games have tended to be well programmed - not sure how well they've aged (some of them seem a bit dull). At least you seemed to get more on the Microhobby tapes..!
R-Tape wrote: Tue Jul 17, 2018 12:52 pm Nice animations. 1st place went on to bigger things.
Nice find, that one slipped me by somehow..! It wouldn't surprise me if contributors to the magazine also went on to get into development of some sort.
My Speccy site: thirdharmoniser.com
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 03 - February 1984

Post by PeterJ »

Any chance of doing anymore of these [mention]Morkin[/mention]
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Morkin
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 03 - February 1984

Post by Morkin »

Yeah - I'm part way through one but got stuck on TLWH... :?

Will be up soon.. :D
My Speccy site: thirdharmoniser.com
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