ZX Spectrum Game Development Noob Questions
Posted: Fri Jun 07, 2019 8:51 am
Hi guys! I'm pretty much completely new to the ZX Spectrum, but I've recently gotten interested and fallen in love with many of the old home computers and consoles (in addition to the ones I was most in contact with back in the day), especially the 8-bit ones, and the Speccy is one of the computers on the top of my list!
I remember feeling intrigued about the funny colors of spectrum games in gaming magazines as a kid. Now when "everything's the same" when it comes to computers, the Speccy's restricted graphics come across as really unique and even legendary. That's one thing I love about the 8-bit generation of machines, you can usually almost immediately tell the difference from the graphics and music if it's for example a spectrum-, c64-, nes-, msx or amstrad cpc- game! Also a limited colour palette partly forces the graphics artist to better design choices than a large one (many times probably inadvertently on some of the old games).
Anyways, I was thinking of trying to set up some small start of a game on the spectrum with Z88DK, and as a complete noob I'd really appreciate if someone could point me in the correct direction about ZX Spectrum development. I'm not going to try to push the system to its limits and I've got very limited free time at the moment, so I'll have to leave assembly for the future.
1A. Is there a simple "standard" graphics tool that has emerged that "everyone" uses (comparable to spritepad and charpad on the c64), that can export the graphics in tables for assembler and preferably C too? I've seen multipaint before, but I haven't tried it yet: http://multipaint.kameli.net/
1B. If I understood correctly you can have two colors per 8x8 cell on the spectrum? (I've read about Nirvana+ but these questions would be from a standard speccy view).
1C. Are the Bright and normal variants of the colours usable on cell level or do you have to choose for the whole screen which ones to use?
1D. I suppose you can't use basic colour and bright colour of the same colour in the same cell?
2A. Is there some simple AY music tracker that can export music to be fairly easily used with Z88DK?
2B. Do homebrew spectrum games usually support both beeper sound of the early models and AY sound?
3. Does someone know if there's a Z88DK template / code skeleton / boilerplate code somewhere to be found that would incorporate basic stuff you'd need for a game, i.e. user defined characters for graphics + AY music/sfx + input of both kempston and zx interface 2? So far I mostly found snippets or finished games where the code is so big and mixed with assembly it becomes a bit overwhelming.
Actually in this moment I read that Nixy the Glade Sprite (which looks like a very fun and great looking game) has been made with AGD, I think that is something that I'd might wanna look into too.
Thanks in advance for any help!
I remember feeling intrigued about the funny colors of spectrum games in gaming magazines as a kid. Now when "everything's the same" when it comes to computers, the Speccy's restricted graphics come across as really unique and even legendary. That's one thing I love about the 8-bit generation of machines, you can usually almost immediately tell the difference from the graphics and music if it's for example a spectrum-, c64-, nes-, msx or amstrad cpc- game! Also a limited colour palette partly forces the graphics artist to better design choices than a large one (many times probably inadvertently on some of the old games).
Anyways, I was thinking of trying to set up some small start of a game on the spectrum with Z88DK, and as a complete noob I'd really appreciate if someone could point me in the correct direction about ZX Spectrum development. I'm not going to try to push the system to its limits and I've got very limited free time at the moment, so I'll have to leave assembly for the future.
1A. Is there a simple "standard" graphics tool that has emerged that "everyone" uses (comparable to spritepad and charpad on the c64), that can export the graphics in tables for assembler and preferably C too? I've seen multipaint before, but I haven't tried it yet: http://multipaint.kameli.net/
1B. If I understood correctly you can have two colors per 8x8 cell on the spectrum? (I've read about Nirvana+ but these questions would be from a standard speccy view).
1C. Are the Bright and normal variants of the colours usable on cell level or do you have to choose for the whole screen which ones to use?
1D. I suppose you can't use basic colour and bright colour of the same colour in the same cell?
2A. Is there some simple AY music tracker that can export music to be fairly easily used with Z88DK?
2B. Do homebrew spectrum games usually support both beeper sound of the early models and AY sound?
3. Does someone know if there's a Z88DK template / code skeleton / boilerplate code somewhere to be found that would incorporate basic stuff you'd need for a game, i.e. user defined characters for graphics + AY music/sfx + input of both kempston and zx interface 2? So far I mostly found snippets or finished games where the code is so big and mixed with assembly it becomes a bit overwhelming.
Actually in this moment I read that Nixy the Glade Sprite (which looks like a very fun and great looking game) has been made with AGD, I think that is something that I'd might wanna look into too.
Thanks in advance for any help!