I never owned a +3. I did have about an hour on it at family friend's house, playing with some pack-in games (Gift From The Gods, Mailstrom, N.O.M.A.D, Daley Thompson's Supertest and Cosmic Wartoad) and I've since used them here and there in museums and exhibitions, but, as a +2/+2B owner, I never really properly got familiar with the disk games market.
On the basis of technical evolution and sheer convenience, the +3 should be the best Speccy, but cassettes still ruled supreme and thus +3 disks were a rarity on shop shelves.
I know I could emulate, but I don't know if it would match the authentic loading/saving times. I'm very curious about that. (Also, are there any emulators that emit realistic disk mechanism sounds, like the CaPriCe emulator does for the Amstrad CPC?)
Anyway... I'm here to ask about +3 disk games that were objectively better than their cassette versions.
...which I suppose, on loading time alone, is all of them. But ignoring that factor and ignoring exclusive +3 games like Fish, what games went the extra mile to really make the most of its disk status?
+3 disk games that really stand out
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PeteProdge
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+3 disk games that really stand out
Reheated Pixels - a combination of retrogaming, comedy and factual musing, is here!
New video: Nine ZX Spectrum magazine controversies - How Crash, Your Sinclair and Sinclair User managed to offend the world!
New video: Nine ZX Spectrum magazine controversies - How Crash, Your Sinclair and Sinclair User managed to offend the world!
Re: +3 disk games that really stand out
Some of the Level 9 adventures such as Gnome Ranger and Ingrid's Back only contain illustrations on the +3 Disk versions.
Re: +3 disk games that really stand out
In most emulators you can enable/disable "fast disk load", I assume the loading times while disabled should be more or less accurate. IIRC es.pectrum makes some crackling sounds while load/save disk operations simulating the real sounds.PeteProdge wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 8:49 am I know I could emulate, but I don't know if it would match the authentic loading/saving times. I'm very curious about that. (Also, are there any emulators that emit realistic disk mechanism sounds, like the CaPriCe emulator does for the Amstrad CPC?)
PS: no, es.pectrum is silent, I think it's SpecEmu.
Last edited by +3code on Fri Dec 15, 2023 2:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: +3 disk games that really stand out
Shadow Of The Beast & Golden Axe had extra graphics between levels.
Re: +3 disk games that really stand out
At the Russian forum there is a list of all +3 disk games with improvements:
https://zx-pk.ru/threads/31635-spisok-i ... t-s-3.html
The list itself is in English so don't be afraid to check it out
https://zx-pk.ru/threads/31635-spisok-i ... t-s-3.html
The list itself is in English so don't be afraid to check it out