Well, it turns out there's not many. I'm ignoring demo modes. We need to allow the game to play as normal, maybe CPU vs CPU, or allowing a scenario to run and run.
Chaos - a pretty obvious one. Setup 8 players, all computer controlled. After about 30 seconds, the game will be complete, often ending in a draw. Not terribly exciting - though I feel that player 4 seems to win more often than not.
Match Point - set up tennis game CPU vs CPU, 5 sets. You get a convincing game out of it in a couple of minutes. There's no CPU level to set - something I noticed was that rallies seem to go on much longer than they do in the standard demo mode. To see the result you have to keep watching and catch it just before the end, else it will go to the pleasant Game Set & Match screen with no clue who won.
Psi Chess - an interesting case. You can set CPU vs CPU, but if you set to level C1 for correspondence chess, it always crashes on the 48k model after thinking about a move for an hour of game time (just a few seconds in turbo). If you set to A7 the highest "normal" level, you get a full game played in less than a minute. Did that level work on original hardware, did anyone ever try it? I remember the blurb made big play of its deep thinking at this level. The only CPU vs. example I can find.
Emlyn Hughes International Soccer - ah, that old chestnut - but again the only self-playing example I can find. Set half to 45 minutes, take the default match of England vs Holland, kick off and go turbo - example score: Eng 23-19 Hol
But... what if you can send minimal keyboard input, just to move screens along? We can't really play the game this way but we can provide a repeated set of keystrokes to the emulator. There's many way to do this, in Windows the easiest is to use Powershell and SendKeys which is built in everywhere. The script for such is below:
FA Cup Football - you need to press A B or C, Y for substitute and Q to exit screen. So if we feed these into the script you can run the whole tournament in about five minutes. Aston Villa and Everton get to the final a lot, just like I noticed when playing normally on a Spectrum.
Howzat - Cricket... a bit more difficult as some keys have double roles. You can't press F as that goes to Set Field. You need that to select the batter. But set the other keys and just let player F be selected last by default. Add a mix of B to bowl, Y & N for the take run? option, 5 to continue from scorecard, and you get an actual game of cricket. Essex 46 all out.
My favourite game so far is:
Advanced Soccer Simulator - also my favourite management game back in the day. Here you can pick a team, immediately resign, then just keep sending ENTER. It will play on and on and on. A season takes less than a minute. I left it overnight, and in the morning it was still going. Each team had won *each* division and the cups an average of 200 times, no matter which league they were in now. Broadly, the lesser English and Scottish teams in the game have 150 or so wins, perhaps exposing the way the game rated each team. Interestingly some teams only showed 12 or 20 title wins. This I concluded meant that they wrapped around at 255 so these teams had won the most. Liverpool and Man U were two such teams. And really curiously, N Forest had 240+ D1 wins, up there with leading teams of the day, whereas Leicester City had the lowest D1 wins, 125. Even lower than Cowdenbeath or Stenhousemuir. I conclude that the author was a Forest fan, and had something to suppress Leicester's performance, what with them being big local rivals.
If we take the rough average of 200 wins in each division, across 80 teams in total, I reckon it played 16,000 seasons in 8 hours. And it didn't crash!
The code - you would need to open the program Windows Powershell ISE, start up the emulator, check the title is correct in AppActivate, set up the keys in the style as shown (ensure it doesn't start with a #), set up the game then run the script.
Code: Select all
#need this to start off
$wshell = New-Object -ComObject wscript.shell
#activate the emulator window - change title to suit
$wshell.AppActivate('ZXSpin 0.7') | out-null
#keep doing this between the braces for ever
#for some games, send important keys multiple times to ensure they are pressed more often
#
while ($true) {
#wait 0.1 secs
Sleep -Milliseconds 100
#send all the keys that will do something in the game - just change as needed. {ENTER} for enter
#e.g. FA Cup football
$wshell.SendKeys('XBXYAXCQY')
#ASS
#$wshell.SendKeys('{ENTER}')
#howzat
#$wshell.SendKeys('{ENTER}NNBABCDYYYEGHIYJK5')
#match day, (and II)
#$wshell.SendKeys('NNNQAOPNNNNNNNNQAOPNNNNQAAAOOOOPPPPPNNNNNNNQAOPNNNQAAAOOOOPPPPPNNNQAOPQQQQAAAOOOOPPPPP')
}
