Spectrum Computing

I'll have to be quick as guests are going to knock at the door any moment

So here comes totally out of the blue my New Year gift to Spectrum community. A modded version of Rygar.

It has almost totally new graphics and level design.

Have fun!!! I'll write more later

The download:
https://www.sendspace.com/file/w5nnpn

Some pics:

I played it and I like it. Very cool!

Well done.

Thank Ralf, appreciate the effort! Been playing the original on MAME recently, so this is timely.

Rather than start a new thread, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank each and every contributor on this site and the entire scene for keeping this machine alive into its fifth decade. Only 12 years until it gets antique status!

Happy new year all,

Cheers,

Richard.

Well done Ralf, I look forward to playing it!

Rafal, you have such a recognizable style of graphics! Nicely done!

moroz1999 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2020 12:16 amsuch a recognizable style of graphics!

is it what is called "naïve art"?

Okay, I'm back again

Here's the list of changes:
---------------------------------------------

- New graphics and levels
(some stuff like enemy patterns and powerup positions were left unchanged,
I decided that the result wouldn't be worth the effort here)

- New player sprite

- New loading screen, also inspired by the inlay but I believe I improved it a little bit

- New font, taken from the arcade version

- Adjusted powerup graphics in the menu, in the original version the graphics were
inverted

- Adjusted intro text. Now it's the same as in the arcade version. In the
original Spectrum version it was a little bit corrupted

- Adjusted LETS FIGHT to LET'S FIGHT

- Corrected original bug/design error. When you completed the game, after congratulations
message you were taken directly to the menu and couldn't type your name into hiscore table.
You could type your name into hiscore only if you lost all your lives. Now you go into
hiscore after completing the game.

- The game is shorter now, only 13 levels. Perfect for a quick go In the original version
the levels repeated after 13th level so they were going from easy to hard and them suddenly
becoming easy again. Now nothing repeats and there is a kind of final level.

And if you play it you may notice that the backgrounds became more varied than in the original while the game size didn't change. It's still for 48 kB.

That's because the original has quite a lot of unused tiles and other stuff. It definitely was planned to be something a bit bigger than the version that eventually hit the shops. I'll write more about in in my next post.

Nice one Ralf. The more varied backgrounds are the main improvement for me, and the 13 levels only thing means I'm willing to try completing it. Level 8 so far.

Rygar's instructions don't say much. Does anyone know what the 5 powerups are?

Does anyone know what the 5 powerups are?

It works exactly the same as in the arcade game:
https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Rygar/Items

In my own words:

Star: longer weapon range when shooting left/right
Crown: kill several enemies with a single shot
Tiger (looks more like a bear on Spectrum): kill enemy by jumping on him instead of stunning him
Cross: temporal invincibility
Sun: when shooting up you shoot directly up instead of making some loop/circle with your weapon

Collect all powerups for a big bonus.

and the 13 levels only thing means I'm willing to try completing it

It can be all completed in about 15 minutes

Ralf wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2020 6:44 pmThat's because the original has quite a lot of unused tiles and other stuff. It definitely was planned to be something a bit bigger than the version that eventually hit the shops. I'll write more about in in my next post.

afair there were (never used in the game) sprites of "lava man" (?)

afair there were (never used in the game) sprites of "lava man" (?)

Exactly!

Here are some of the game sprites. I marked the unused enemy:


It's probably this guy:

https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Rygar/Enemies
Dororon/Lava Man


I checked if he could be included into the mod but I believe it's only sprite that exists in the code. He lacks definition in sprites table, he lacks definition of behaviour etc. And in the arcade original he fires some missiles so you would have to deal with that too. I decided it would be too much work for the scope of this mod.

And here are original game tiles, extracted by my tools:



They would be hard to see with standard memory viewers as they have complex structure. In the game you have 256 of 8x8 pixels small tiles which make 80 of 32x32 big tiles that you see above. So each big tile is made of 4x4=16 smaller tiles.

Maybe you can recognize the unused tiles - some bushes and probably and unfinished hut, I guess this one:


There also "wasted" some tiles for making outlines made of a few pixels that a player won't probably notice.

And there are also some 8x8 small tiles unused in big tiles.

In my mod I have overwritten these tiles and tried hard to use it wisely so it was possible to make more content visible to the player.

I like this sort of Modding and exploration of the original games. Thank you!
Rygar is one of my favourite games, although I dislike the jump physics
Any way to change it into something more controllable ?
Also, are there any plans for a user friendly editor ?

That's awesome, is there anyway you can use this image of the game which has 128k music?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UR_uZ4 ... sp=sharing

heh, i'm surprised it still works somewhat ok even after all these changes

but yeah, you won't see the new sprite gfx as the original sprites were replaced completely with the repainted ones (based on original outlines)


(btw, the ULAX screenshots obviously weren't taken properly, to avoid gfx glitches do not switch FULL/auto mode in-game, do it in the menus)