Sparky wrote: ↑Thu Feb 11, 2021 12:24 pm
How did you translate it?
Was it by doing it visually or recompiling?
It's great BTW!
I assume the question is about how did I port the game, on technical level.
In short - recompiling.
First I spent like two weeks trying to understand the original: saved several dumps from the emulator, analyzed the files with small C# program to visualize the memory as a bitmap, and to detect changed areas; spent some time commenting the code with Skoolkit.
After that, I started to form the code for ZX Spectrum from code fragments from the Skoolkit HTML output.
I prepared the custom font - TI calsulators have BIOS calls to write chars/strings on the screen so I had to prepare a cusom proportional font and a procedure to draw a char and a string. Also some other BIOS calls was used like generate a random number, or print a number (for health value), so I had to write my own instead.
I wrote the procedure to copy "shadow" screen onto the real ZX screen, at first it was on pop/push-es, but later I re-wrote it on simple ldi-s.
Copying the code I always made wure it compiles - pasmo used as a compiler. I tested the code per-procedure when I could.
To convert the graphics I wrote some C# code, first to extract the graphics and then to convert tiles/sprites from bitmaps to DB statements in the code. The tiles/sprites was resized from 8x8 x 4colors to 16x16 x 2colors, so I also did some work in Paint.net to smooth the graphics after the scaling.
Data like rooms and room descriptions was also prepared with C#, directly from original dumps.
So step-by-step I made all the code copied and working.
After that - a lot of testing, and some minor improvements over the original.
Finally, the last stage was to pack everything with LZSA1, to make the loading file like 2-times shorter.
VSCode was used as a primary editor, with Z80 syntax highlighting, and a useful plugin counting CPU cycles for selected instructions.
Hope I answered the question
