What are your current Spectrum projects?

Show us what you're working on, (preferably with screenshots).
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Ivanzx
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What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Ivanzx »

Are you working in any new game for the Spectrum? A piece of Hardware? Anything Spectrum-related goes ;)


We want to see them! :)
redballoon
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by redballoon »

A series of A3 prints of brand new Spectrum pixel art illustrations for 12 - 15 classic ZX Spectrum games.
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Einar Saukas
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Einar Saukas »

I'm still working on improving a Spectrum-related project called ZXDB. Does it count? :)
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SkoolKid
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by SkoolKid »

I recently completed a disassembly of Hungry Horace:

http://skoolkit.ca/disassemblies/hungry_horace/ (decimal)
https://skoolkid.github.io/hungryhorace/ (hexadecimal)

I'm adding Pokes, Bugs and Trivia pages to it now, and was going to wait until they were done before announcing anything here, but since you asked so nicely... :)
SkoolKit - disassemble a game today
Pyskool - a remake of Skool Daze and Back to Skool
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Ivanzx
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Ivanzx »

redballoon wrote: Fri Dec 08, 2017 5:57 pm A series of A3 prints of brand new Spectrum pixel art illustrations for 12 - 15 classic ZX Spectrum games.
Pictures or it didnt´t happen! :P
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Ivanzx
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Ivanzx »

Einar Saukas wrote: Fri Dec 08, 2017 6:01 pm I'm still working on improving a Spectrum-related project called ZXDB. Does it count? :)
Of course it does! And we are all happy about it ;)
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Ivanzx
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Ivanzx »

SkoolKid wrote: Fri Dec 08, 2017 6:30 pm I recently completed a disassembly of Hungry Horace:

http://skoolkit.ca/disassemblies/hungry_horace/ (decimal)
https://skoolkid.github.io/hungryhorace/ (hexadecimal)

I'm adding Pokes, Bugs and Trivia pages to it now, and was going to wait until they were done before announcing anything here, but since you asked so nicely... :)
Interesting! Was it made totally in assembler?
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Joefish
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Joefish »

Having another go at the improbably long titled The Indescribable Adventures of Bertrand Bubblethwaite: Bertrand and the Twisted Support. :D
It's currently a multicolour vertically-scrolling platform rendering routine, and that's about it. Some sprite routines shall follow shortly.
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by redballoon »

Ivanzx wrote: Fri Dec 08, 2017 7:55 pm
redballoon wrote: Fri Dec 08, 2017 5:57 pm A series of A3 prints of brand new Spectrum pixel art illustrations for 12 - 15 classic ZX Spectrum games.
Pictures or it didnt´t happen! :P
Hah! Not all at once and only in-between paid work - I'm working on at least 2 books next year. But you'll at least see the 1st 2 near the beginning of 2018.
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SkoolKid
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by SkoolKid »

Ivanzx wrote: Fri Dec 08, 2017 7:57 pmInteresting! Was it made totally in assembler?
It's 100% machine code, yes. Not exactly one of the best examples of the art of assembly language programming on the Spectrum - in part because it's an early title, I suspect - but it gets the job done.
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Joefish
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Joefish »

Got bored with slow progress and started instead on a simple shoot-em-up starting with this sprite:

Image

I couldn't come up with a decent player ship so instead I've gone for something like Hikaru / Akane from Parodius - :D :lol: :D

I've written a display routine that uses a mask to change the colours of the paper-coloured parts or the ink-coloured parts of a sprite as it's drawn, so I can make waves of enemies in different colours, or change the player colours depending on power-ups.

It's all going to be done with character graphics, no multicolour or anything, and I'm not making a huge fuss over optimising it - it'll run at whatever rate it ends up at. It's just for a bit of fun, so there'll be shots all over the place and probably occasional frame slowdown too! I want to try out a few different weapon types / modes so a slightly less-than-serious setting will do fine. I plan on having the player turn round and shoot backwards when you hold FIRE (if you've ever played Raiga: Strato Fighter, that has a dedicated button to turn around, and Side Arms has dedicated left/right fire buttons, which work great with a mouse on the ST conversion). Other weapon pick-ups will do different things when you hold FIRE, but will all present some way of shooting in a general backwards direction.

The fiddly bit I find with character movement is a lot of things need artificial delays added in so they don't move or animate too fast. And I'm using 4x character positions so I can make the shots and other things move in quarter-character steps (for shallow diagonals), even though they're rounded down to whole characters for displaying. I suppose I could draw the enemy shots as 4x4 pixel dots, then could actually draw them in half-character positions. Not sure if I can afford 8 frames of animation per sprite though or just 4. Trying to keep it 48K. And I've no idea what to do about boss battles.

What I do want to do is add a few extra tricks to the enemy movement patterns, so that it can do things like R-Type II, where if you shoot a ship it turns into a kamikaze diver, or make sprites in a chain react to their neighbours being destroyed and change behaviour, or have enemies that are shielded and can only be shot from the back.
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R-Tape
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by R-Tape »

Sounds great. You could go nuts with some massive screen filling colourful bosses.

Long delays could be an opportunity for some proper in game beeper FX too.
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PeterJ
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by PeterJ »

I'm learning Python and trying to make a desktop front end for ZXDB with Tkinter which is a Python binding to the Tk GUI toolkit. Not Spectrum development I know, but hopefully close enough to be included in this thread?
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kolbeck
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by kolbeck »

I’m working on bringing ZXDB to AppleTV using the API. Probaly conpletely waste of time, but it’s a fun way to smoke test the API in order to improve it :-)

/Thomas
https://api.zxinfo.dk/v3/ - ZXDB API for developers
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druellan
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by druellan »

Ok, this is going to sound like a lot, but it is not, it's just that I'm lazy and start things that I never finish, but...

I'm recovering some text adventures and software I wrote end of eighties/start of nineties (mostly, the tape loaders I wrote for them, I have the software preserved on disk) and other tech programs by my father. In the meantime I'm hunting some software distributed in Argentina, so I can take pictures of the inlays, I'm categorizing maze games (perhaps also take a look at "vector graphics" games), also testing images from the Outlet Magazine, and someone convinced me to open my own Youtube channel on where I'm streaming all this, plus, I'm checking Spectrum games, one by one, alphabetically, for my own personal collection.

Oh, and I have a small Telegram bot that connects to the amazing [mention]kolbeck[/mention] API for quick searches on the ZXDB, and it is also capable of search on WOS, NewSpectrumGames, maps.speccy.cz, and converts you in Hulk(tm) if you bite your lip! :D
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Joefish
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Joefish »

R-Tape wrote: Tue Jul 10, 2018 8:39 pm Sounds great. You could go nuts with some massive screen filling colourful bosses.
Long delays could be an opportunity for some proper in game beeper FX too.
Thing is, a big screen thing is still a lot of memory out of 48K. What I might go for is one boss that I can recolour and give it different ways of attacking or defending on different levels. Maybe even just have it show up at arbitrary times rather than definite levels.
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ZXDunny
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by ZXDunny »

My current project (SpecBAS) is still ongoing :)
Climacus
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Climacus »

By now, I dont have any time for coding. Perhaps after summer.
The last Ive done for Spectrum is a video-series (in Spanish) analizing the code of Martianoids in this blog.
Perhaps it can be useful.

https://analisiscodigomartianoids.blogspot.com/
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MatGubbins
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by MatGubbins »

Climacus wrote: Wed Jul 18, 2018 10:25 am By now, I dont have any time for coding. Perhaps after summer.
The last Ive done for Spectrum is a video-series (in Spanish) analizing the code of Martianoids in this blog.
Perhaps it can be useful.

https://analisiscodigomartianoids.blogspot.com/

Nice!!
way back in 2002, I wrote a map editor for Martianoids
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 6&id=16646
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Seven.FFF
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Seven.FFF »

On top of all my other unfinished projects, this for the Next. Both client (Next) and server (Windows/linux).

Image

https://youtu.be/V9lhEi3sHtE
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Joefish
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Joefish »

R-Tape wrote: Tue Jul 10, 2018 8:39 pm Long delays could be an opportunity for some proper in game beeper FX too.
Thinking about this, I don't want to add a big artificial delay in there. But I could do the sort of thing I did with Buzzsaw+, and integrate the beeper loop with the screen copy loop (in Buzzsaw+ a beeper 0/1 was generated after each line of multicolour was copied).

The screen copy loop takes around 1.4 frames. If the game can run in 3 frames then that's nearly a 50% duty cycle for sound effects. I suppose I could artificially extend that period of speaker control, but I doubt I could do anything else productive with that extra time other than twiddle the speaker. If I entered a different loop to do something else then the sound frequency would shift (unless the loop had exactly the same timing as the screen copy). And I wouldn't want to extend it so the game goes any slower than 4 frames.

Come to think of it, the timing of a screen copy is going to be all over the place as it goes in and out of contention, so maybe that's not the best idea I've had...
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by Climacus »

MatGubbins wrote: Wed Jul 18, 2018 11:02 am
Climacus wrote: Wed Jul 18, 2018 10:25 am By now, I dont have any time for coding. Perhaps after summer.
The last Ive done for Spectrum is a video-series (in Spanish) analizing the code of Martianoids in this blog.
Perhaps it can be useful.

https://analisiscodigomartianoids.blogspot.com/

Nice!!
way back in 2002, I wrote a map editor for Martianoids
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 6&id=16646
Great!!!
Very interesting!!!!!
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R-Tape
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by R-Tape »

Joefish wrote: Wed Jul 18, 2018 10:00 pm Come to think of it, the timing of a screen copy is going to be all over the place as it goes in and out of contention, so maybe that's not the best idea I've had...
You're more of a perfectionist than me! I'd be happy with a (slightly clunky) nearly but not quite constant framerate. I think some decent sounds could be achieved just by 'animating' the speaker twiddles/calculated delays during the spare 2 or so frames every loop.
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R-Tape
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by R-Tape »

Image

Finally some bad weather! Managed to get plenty of coding done on Bean Brothers.
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reidrac
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Re: What are your current Spectrum projects?

Post by reidrac »

I'm working on a new game for the Speccy (Castaway was my previous one, that feels ages ago!).

Shot from my ZX Spectrum+ with a Sony Trinitron TV:
Image

Regular screenshoot from emulator:
Image

I'm still not 100% sure what is the game about, but I think it may turn out the game I couldn't make when I released Escape from Colony 8.

A bit of adventure exploring a space base, with puzzles type of use object X with Y. The story may be a continuation of Castaway (not that it is too important).

I'm targeting 48K, but this time I started with my own routines from scratch using SDCC (if I'm not using the SP1 sprite library, it doesn't make sense using the Z88DK compiler). I'm implementing basic 1 char multi-directional scroll, and so far not using SP1 is paying off because I have lots of memory :D

In case you don't know, I usually tweet about 8-bit gamedev (inc. this game): https://twitter.com/reidrac

EDIT: the game title (for now) is Starblind.
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