Spectrum Computing

That was the thing - the last time my friends had time to play games as a group was when we were in our early 20s after that most had family or jobs so we couldn't get togeather for hours at a time.

I can remember spending days playing campaign for north Africa when I was in college No chance that is ever happening again.

In my mid 30s its now essentially impossible to find friends that all have the same time off at the same time, and want to play a board game.

It's something I never really thought about as a teen & in college we just assumed we would always have time for network gaming and board games

I get what you guys are saying about the social aspect - its always funny watching a friend get screwed over and rage quit a game. Much more than a stranger and its something about all being together in the same space.

I guess with the computer at least you can have some way to play a similar game. Better some experience than no experience I guess.

Yeah. It's certainly true that as we've all got a shade older, we just have less time for this kind of thing and that makes a computer version a more compelling prospect than it was back in the day.

This isn't a major challenge or anything, but I think it'd be interesting to see a game with stereo sound effects on the Spectrum. Getting the AY chip to output in stereo is a common mod, but it's only really utilised for music. So how about playing sound effects simultaneously across the left and right channels to get stereo sound? Imagine something like 3D Deathchase, 3D Monster Maze, Elite, or Starion where you could hear where the enemies were coming from. If you were careful with the timing you could even get a basic form of HRTF by playing the sound on the nearer channel slightly earlier.

There might be problems since there are many different stereo setups so there'd need to be some kind of calibration, and with some setups you can't get sounds panned 100% left or right. I still think it would be possible though.

was the minmax algorithm used for chess game AI on the spectrum?

Interestingly, I just came across this paper which indicates that the AY-3-8910 chip was being used for scientific research, and that two-channel sound experiments were conducted using it.