The Hey Hey Hundred

[PeterJ]

Rev. Stuart Campbell has written an interesting two part article on his top 100 16k games.

Read part one here:

https://wosland.podgamer.com/the-hey-he ... ed-part-1/

[Mpk]

That's my evening reading sorted then.

Happy that he's recognised that the noise in Meteor Storm is actually speech, as discussed here before.

[StanVanman]

What's the second part? I only see one.

[PeterJ]

What's the second part? I only see one.

It looks like the three posts have been merged into one.

[Ralf]

Great job! This link should be actually attached somewhere on this site for people looking for info about great games.

[Nitrowing]

I'm going to read it nust to see if there were actually 100 games written for the 16K

[Matt_B]

I'd have placed the Ultimate games much higher. They're all top ten material for me, with Pssst looking particularly hard done by, down at 60.

Meanwhile, most of the top ten just doesn't do a lot for me. Ah well, I like The Train Game and Jumping Jack at least.

The number one is absolutely correct though. It'd just be wrong for anything else to get it.

[Lee Bee]

There are so many Spectrum titles, you could actually do a "Top 16k games"!

[Juan F. Ramirez]

I'm surprised to see how many good-looking games there are that I didn't know!

[Daveysloan]

They're all so damn colourful, loads of wacky ideas from before the rules about computer and video games genres were established. Lots of playability. Gonna dive into this list, I bet there's loads in there that I'll enjoy that I've never played.

[uglifruit]

Congrats to @PROSM for the placing!

[PeteProdge]

I'm going to read it nust to see if there were actually 100 games written for the 16K

They could all fit on a WHSmiths C15 cassette. [citation needed]

[PeteProdge]

There are so many Spectrum titles, you could actually do a "Top 16k games"!

Considering the estimate of how many Spectrum games exist, you're not far wrong there.

[Matt_B]

There are a certainly a huge number of games, although you're probably only talking a few hundred until you're into the shovelware.

Doing a top 16,000 would probably mean most, if not all, of my games would be in the running, and that just sounds intuitively wrong.

[PeteProdge]

I'm going to read it nust to see if there were actually 100 games written for the 16K

1,970 ZX Spectrum 16K games exist*. (Yes, this is me in 'taking a comedic comment seriously' mode, what else did you expect?)

Surprisingly, just 795 games exist** that are aimed exclusively at the 128K ZX Spectrum models.

* = Source: ZXDB on this site, with Machine: ZX Spectrum 16K and Genre: All Games filter selected.
** = Source: As above, but with Machine: ZX Spectrum 128K only filter on.

[Morkin]

Now we just need a volunteer who owns a 16K Speccy to load those 795 games from cassette and test that they all work

[Mpk]

What of the Rev's issues with loading some of the 16k listed games ?

Lots of games which would likely have made the list are billed as 16K-compatible but aren’t (eg Push Off, Road Racers, Thrusta and Magic Carpet). We’re not sure why this is the case – most of them claimed on their boxes to run on any Spectrum, but they all crash on multiple emulators set to 16K mode unless you use .Z80 snapshot files, in which case they force the emulator into 48K mode whatever you set it to. Sadly we don’t have an actual 16K Spectrum with which to definitively establish the truth.

Is this an emulator issue, or an issue with using z80 files instead of tzx (or whatever) ?
Were some games advertised and sold as 16k compatible erroneously?

[AndyC]

I'd hazard a guess some games had "Any Spectrum" or possibly even "16K/48K" just blindly slapped on the cassette despite not actually running on the 16K. There are a few points in the article where he specifically calls out some 16K titles that use RAM addresses that don't exist on a 16K so it's definitely not as straightforward as "just an emulator issue"

[PeterJ]

I did a test on Thursta by using tape2wav from the Fuse Utils package. I tried loading the resulting wav file into an emulated 16K Spectrum and it still gave a ramtop error.

@Einar Saukas - Do you want these titles that are incorrectly labeled as 16K compatible on the packaging changed via the preservation tools?

[Stefan]

What of the Rev's issues with loading some of the 16k listed games ?



Is this an emulator issue, or an issue with using z80 files instead of tzx (or whatever) ?
Were some games advertised and sold as 16k compatible erroneously?

I spent some time this morning looking into Sam Spade. It’s a single code block of 16386 bytes, which is a bit odd, I would have expected 16384. While loading the stack is overwritten by the code block, when done correctly this can work, but I think in this case it was never actually tested on a 16K Spectrum. When using a 48K Speccy, the stack is safely out of the way.

The only reason the snapshot works is because it sets the model to 48K.

[StanVanman]

It's also a shame that Eric And The Floaters and Bubble Buster by Hudson Soft/Sinclair (the forerunners of Bomberman and Pang), which are only 9K and 8K TAP files, don't run in 16K. Surely they could have been squeezed into the memory.