'Inspired by' suggestions

[Joefish]

Not sure why it's not been put in there already, but Crime Busters by Players is clearly inspired by Namco's 1983 arcade game Mappy, just without the horizontal scrolling.

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[Ersh]

Might I suggest another; "Pi There!" by Automata UK is inspired by Atari's 1983 arcade game "I, Robot". Base gameplay is very similar, colour the ground and don't jump when the Eye is open.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmvWxG2zvs8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9l1WojESKI

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[Joefish]

Oh, good spot. I love I,Robot but I've not seen that game before. It's a bit clunky, but it does the job. Although it doesn't then add a solid trail over the part you jumped. I suspect this might be compiled BASIC?

Back as a student I toyed with the idea of a 2D version of I,Robot on the ST. I actually started writing a version with a scrolling, panning 3D layout that looked a bit like a slicker version of Trailblazer (flat squares without the depth of solid cubes). You could paint the level and jump around leaving trails, but there were no baddies and the arcade game just had too many custom variations going on to replicate it any further.

That and, like I can't stand with SNES Mario Kart, having flat coloured squares on the ground you're not allowed to cross all just looks a bit lame.

[zxbruno]

Little bit off-topic, but wanted to say it's amazing to see how arcades had smooth (by 1983's standards) 3d animation.

[Ersh]

Oh, good spot. I love I,Robot but I've not seen that game before. It's a bit clunky, but it does the job. Although it doesn't then add a solid trail over the part you jumped. I suspect this might be compiled BASIC?

Back as a student I toyed with the idea of a 2D version of I,Robot on the ST. I actually started writing a version with a scrolling, panning 3D layout that looked a bit like a slicker version of Trailblazer (flat squares without the depth of solid cubes). You could paint the level and jump around leaving trails, but there were no baddies and the arcade game just had too many custom variations going on to replicate it any further.

That and, like I can't stand with SNES Mario Kart, having flat coloured squares on the ground you're not allowed to cross all just looks a bit lame.

That sounds very interesting. If one would use level layouts like in Pi There! i.e. no barriers only a black void, Trailblazer-like graphics would probably work nicely.

Although I was fine with SNES SMK. At the time, the 360° freedom coupled with some really fun physics was enough to make me ignore the "flatness" of the tracks. It had some great multiplayer as well.

Little bit off-topic, but wanted to say it's amazing to see how arcades had smooth (by 1983's standards) 3d animation.

Yeah, it was a pioneer, flatshaded filled vectors at a very respectable framerate in 1983, pretty impressive!

[Joefish]

That sounds very interesting. If one would use level layouts like in Pi There! i.e. no barriers only a black void, Trailblazer-like graphics would probably work nicely.

You could probably make it work with enemy sprites that patrol the maze instead of all the unique hazards of I,Robot. Along with maybe the overhead birds. They'd need to be scaleable to be placed within the level. The roadway was drawn in two bitplanes, giving three colours for squares (red for new, blue for marked, and green for obstruction), but sprites could be drawn in the rest of the palette. I also used a rigged perspective view so that after a certain distance each pixel row of the screen was locked to one row of squares, so no matter how far away the furthest squares were, you could always make out the full map.

Unfortunately I don't think my old disks are recoverable. I did buy a USB floppy drive and a utility to read ST disks to try and recover some of my old stuff, but very little was readable.

I wondered if you could do it on a Speccy using multicolour, just scrolling a Trailblazer roadway in and out of the screen, with key attributes spread out along the row to be able to do 8x1 only where needed. But it'd be a nightmare to draw sprites on a screen with a hotch-potch of distributed attributes. And I don't think 8x2 multicolor gives you the resolution you need, as squares in the distance rapidly shrink to just 1 pixel high.

[SteveSmith]

Little bit off-topic, but wanted to say it's amazing to see how arcades had smooth (by 1983's standards) 3d animation.

I thought it was a remake when I first saw it. I don't remember many arcades from back then having such good 3D graphics!

[Ersh]

I wondered if you could do it on a Speccy using multicolour, just scrolling a Trailblazer roadway in and out of the screen, with key attributes spread out along the row to be able to do 8x1 only where needed. But it'd be a nightmare to draw sprites on a screen with a hotch-potch of distributed attributes. And I don't think 8x2 multicolor gives you the resolution you need, as squares in the distance rapidly shrink to just 1 pixel high.

Do you mean having a static striped bitmap and the scrolling would be done with attributes (multicolour where needed)? Wouldn't the positions of the 8x1 rows need to be dynamic though, how would you handle the timing if not going for a fullscreen multicolour routine? But yeah, sprites on top of that would probably be a headache either way.

[Joefish]

Yes, you'd have a striped bitmap and draw the squares by mapping the level design onto alternate INK / PAPER values across the row. That's how Knot in 3D works. But for 8x1 attributes you'd have to follow the edges of those stripes, so where they get wider you might have to draw one or two multicolour character cells, then skip a cell, then draw some more multicolour, etc. But then you'd only get vertical colour resolution of one character in the cells you weren't strobing, so I guess that's a bad idea.

An alternative idea I just had would be to do part of the screen in 8x1 multicolour, then lower down switch to a wider block of 8x2 multicolour. Still tricky to draw sprites, but maybe a bit more manageable. I think it would only scroll in/out of the screen. I'd love to have it pan left/right as well but that might mean a little too much computation, re-painting the basic stripes, and some huge look-up tables to map the colours into all the right positions.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Robon by Softek is clearly inspired by Berzerk arcade game:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index. ... &id=4185

Even in the instructions we can read:

"Here is a superb version of Beserk"

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[Alessandro]

Code Masters' Kamikaze seems to be inspired by Namco's Sky Kid coin-op.

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[Ersh]

Seems this thread has been overlooked, so I'll give this a bump.
Would be nice if the following games mentioned above could have an "inspired by".

Crime Busters – inspired by Mappy (Arcade)
Pi There! - inspired by I, Robot (Arcade)
Robon – inspired by Berzerk (Arcade)
Kamikaze – inspired by Sky Kid (Arcade)

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[Cosmium]

Robon by Softek is clearly inspired by Berzerk arcade game:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index. ... &id=4185

It certainly was! It's one of the arcade games I was recently referring to here: Re: What do you now know many years later

along with
Megapede inspired by Centipede
Repulsar inspired by Missile Command
as correctly catalogued in the DB.

[Cosmium]

Yes, you'd have a striped bitmap and draw the squares by mapping the level design onto alternate INK / PAPER values across the row. That's how Knot in 3D works.

Sounds interesting! I've always wondered how Know in 3D achieved it's clever display. Can you elaborate some more on how it was done?

[Joefish]

Yes, you'd have a striped bitmap and draw the squares by mapping the level design onto alternate INK / PAPER values across the row. That's how Knot in 3D works.

Sounds interesting! I've always wondered how Know in 3D achieved it's clever display. Can you elaborate some more on how it was done?

Pause the game in an emulator and just save off the screen pixel bytes (6144 bytes from address 16384). Then reset the emulator to the black/white startup page of 48K BASIC and load those pixels back in. You'll see a pattern of diagonal wedges drawn on the screen. By colouring them in particular patterns you can get the appearance of solid blocks.

[Cosmium]

Sounds interesting! I've always wondered how Know in 3D achieved it's clever display. Can you elaborate some more on how it was done?

Pause the game in an emulator and just save off the screen pixel bytes (6144 bytes from address 16384). Then reset the emulator to the black/white startup page of 48K BASIC and load those pixels back in. You'll see a pattern of diagonal wedges drawn on the screen. By colouring them in particular patterns you can get the appearance of solid blocks.

Oh yeah, so I see.. so only needing to manipulate the ATTRs instead of the whole bitmap to animate the display, and so using 1/8th the CPU. Clever stuff.

I really liked this game back in the day and got quite lost in it (literally!). There wasn't much else like it. It's good now to have an appreciation of how it was achieved. Thanks

[Joefish]

Oh yeah, so I see.. so only needing to manipulate the ATTRs instead of the whole bitmap to animate the display, and so using 1/8th the CPU. Clever stuff.

I really liked this game back in the day and got quite lost in it (literally!). There wasn't much else like it. It's good now to have an appreciation of how it was achieved. Thanks

Yes, it's clever. I'm not sure of the extent to which it can render blocks around you. I suspect it's limited to something like a 3x3 grid up to four of five blocks ahead of you, with anything outside that stretching off to infinity - or at least to the edges of the screen. It just all goes by too quickly to really be sure. But not really good enough to do something like a 3D platform or exploration game, since far-off blocks can't be seen properly as individual cubes.

Although the technique could be adapted for some sort of 2.5D platform game, where player movement is limited to certain planes, so you can control to what extent you need to draw the local blocks.

[PeterJ]

The SAM Coupe game 'The Lost Disks of SAM'

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/3 ... sks_of_SAM

Was inspired by a game written by some bloke called [mention]R-Tape[/mention]:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... _of_Albion

Supporting evidence here:

https://www.worldofsam.org/products/lost-disks-sam

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[druellan]

Oh Mummy 2021 (https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/3 ... Mummy_2021) is of course inspired by Oh Mummy (https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/3 ... m/Oh_Mummy)

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[StanVanman]

This is pretty obviously inspired by Xevious:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/1 ... trum/Orbit

The SAM Coupe game 'The Lost Disks of SAM'

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/3 ... sks_of_SAM

Was inspired by a game written by some bloke called @R-Tape:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... _of_Albion

Supporting evidence here:

https://www.worldofsam.org/products/lost-disks-sam

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See also:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/3 ... ts_in_Hell

and

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... _Beautiful

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