Part of my BBC collection from a few years ago + Game Conversions

[spider]

Rediscovered these pictures from 10 years ago. There were more machines at one point, some come and some go etc.

Anyway the pictures of interest:

Master 128. With internal 30186 co-pro and external 6502 'cheese-wedge' co-pro

I did sell the internal co-pro and use the funds to purchase another machine iirc.


Acorn Winchester Hard Drive. It took a bit of hunting to get a half decent one. It was slow and quite loud. Rodime internal double height 5.25 hard drive of 30mb (or 10mb) capacity. I seem to recall this one of mine was 10mb despite the 130 label. Case is huge and heavy.



Does not look much but this B had either the GoMM or more likely the DataCentre USB (flash loading, think of DivIDE really)



Couple of machines awaiting attention:



Some random "random" programming pics I took, using the 'don't touch the screen its static' Cub monitor.





Do have some more pics somewhere but a FB 'memory' pointed these ones out...



While I'm here and have a few more pics (sorry) , thought about a new topic but figured its good enough in this one!

Anyway, here are some of my game conversions from Spectrum to BBC Micro I did nearly a decade ago. I'm not going to attach the Speccy pics as they are easily found on this site, merely the 'B conversions. I'm particular proud of the Galaxias and Subsunk loading screens I built from their Spectrum versions...

No loading screen for Project X as I could not use the ZX one (I tried) and I just made something afresh for O-Zone:

Galaxias:






Project X - The Microman:






The O-Zone (Project X Microman 2)








Subsunk:








I recall I also did Magic Castle (a simple game few rooms) in one afternoon as a 'challenge' , but the ones above were about 2 to 3 weeks each to do, including lots of testing and playing through etc as well as the 'other stuff' ie screen$ design. Allowing say 3 to 4 hours an evening.

[Stu]

Nice work! I've added those conversions with the preservation tool (apart from Subsunk which is already present) so they should show up in ZXDB at some point.

[clebin]

If Raspberry Pi were taking their Acorn influence seriously they would've made it about 3 square metres in size.

I've never seen a Winchester drive before, but I remember them coming up in computer science lessons in the late 80s/early 90s, alongside paper-tape, punch cards and daisy wheel printers. Funny to think how out of date the syllabus was.

[Sparky]

I love the Beeb! That master looks really good.

[spider]

Nice work! I've added those conversions with the preservation tool (apart from Subsunk which is already present) so they should show up in ZXDB at some point.

Thank you @Stu , that's appreciated. I did not realise we did have 'unofficial' ones listed but I see we do.

For what it is worth or not there's a mention on the Solution Archive about a couple of them at least, Galaxias I'd mailed Fergus before starting the conversion and he did not have any objections. You'll note I've kept all the original authors attribution intact and not applied any (c) to my own stuff, merely a line saying I'd done the "port/conversion" nothing more. There's (only found a few months ago) walkthoughs of some of these on YouTube and there's a comment by one of the Project X authors saying something like "Its a good game even if I say myself" (I can't check now) , I did try to get ahold of all authors but apart from one response I did not get any more! No one has complained anyway!

If it helps to save you time the 'ports' are on the bbcmicro site:

Galaxias
Project X - The Microman
The O Zone - Microman II
Subsunk
Magic Castle

They are relatively OK, have to bear in mind I was (at that time) 'feeling my way in the dark' a bit with it all, so they are not perfect by any means but I'm happy with how they turned out.

I did get about 1/3rd the way through Urban Upstart (inc a neat loading screen) but gave up as I'd done it in GAC, I then retried it again but had other things to do unfortunately. However recently someone took it up and there's now a 'B port of this game:

Urban Upstart

Hope that is all vaguely helpful. I'm not sure if @8BitAG will be able to add anything adventure related info, if they see this topic. Sorry for "mentions" everyone.

If Raspberry Pi were taking their Acorn influence seriously they would've made it about 3 square metres in size.

I've never seen a Winchester drive before, but I remember them coming up in computer science lessons in the late 80s/early 90s, alongside paper-tape, punch cards and daisy wheel printers. Funny to think how out of date the syllabus was.

@clebin , does this help ? , from memory:



Front : 2.5 SATA 320GB
Middle : 3.5 IDE 160GB
Back : 10 (or 30) MB 5.25 DH SASI (pre-SCSI) drive

You mentioned the Winchester, want to see "inside" ?

I love the Beeb! That master looks really good.

Thank you @Sparky It had the later MOS 3.5 (vs 3.2) in it, this seemed in some cases to fix a few games incompatibilities as quite a lot of 'B software did not appreciate running on the M128 very well.

[8BitAG]

...there's a comment by one of the Project X authors saying something like "Its a good game even if I say myself" (I can't check now)...

Ah, yes. It's a comment from Tim Kemp from about a year ago, who collaborated with Compass main man Jon Lemmon on the first two games.

Tim, of course, is better known as the editor of Spectrum adventure fanzine From Beyond, and also for following footsteps of Mike Gerrard in writing the Your Sinclair adventure column.

He seemed to go dark a year or so ago... I'd been trying to get in touch through his various acccounts... but perhaps I'll see if a ping on YouTube will work. *edit: Ah, of course YouTube has removed the facility for user messages... oh well.

[merman]

Cool to see those BBC conversions

[Jbizzel]

@spider thanks for sharing these images. the BBC was the first computer I ever saw, in school when I was 8 I reckon.

I bet they were many peoples first taste of the Computer dream.



Still remember the music to granny's garden.

[spider]

Ah, yes. It's a comment from Tim Kemp from about a year ago, who collaborated with Compass main man Jon Lemmon on the first two games.

Tim, of course, is better known as the editor of Spectrum adventure fanzine From Beyond, and also for following footsteps of Mike Gerrard in writing the Your Sinclair adventure column.

He seemed to go dark a year or so ago... I'd been trying to get in touch through his various acccounts... but perhaps I'll see if a ping on YouTube will work. *edit: Ah, of course YouTube has removed the facility for user messages... oh well.

Ah yes, I had sort of lost that in my memory. I did like the Compass games, I first 'discovered' them (well one of them anyway) on the 'Fourmost Adventures' I purchased. Although Microman was tricky and a few instant deaths, I did enjoy the game on the whole, the atmosphere was brilliant.

I do not have a YT account so I could not comment on the video or the other walkthroughs I found. If you do manage to get in contact please say thanks for the adventures and I'm pleased he (appeared) to not mind my conversion.

PS , meant to say thanks ages ago ( ) for the compiling of Quill differences between platforms, I recall I'd started this and had a vague draft of ZX / BBC / CPC / CBM but had not got further ie Oric etc. At the time of the conversions I had to figure it out, it was much fun until I realised why performing a normal action could send things dark or suddenly jump rooms. , from what I -can- recall I may of pushed a txt file onto Stardot with just the ZX/BBC 'gotcha' differences to look out for.

Cool to see those BBC conversions

Thank you.

@spider thanks for sharing these images. the BBC was the first computer I ever saw, in school when I was 8 I reckon.

I bet they were many peoples first taste of the Computer dream.

I think I was a similar age @Jbizzel when we had our first one at Primary, it had a tape player. Despite some government funding at the time, I do have a vague memory of the school asking for donations for it or something like that. Perhaps they were subsidized instead.

Still remember the music to granny's garden.

Me too.
"Still" denied as well , yes really.

[8BitAG]

PS , meant to say thanks ages ago ( ) for the compiling of Quill differences between platforms, I recall I'd started this and had a vague draft of ZX / BBC / CPC / CBM but had not got further ie Oric etc. At the time of the conversions I had to figure it out, it was much fun until I realised why performing a normal action could send things dark or suddenly jump rooms. , from what I -can- recall I may of pushed a txt file onto Stardot with just the ZX/BBC 'gotcha' differences to look out for.

Yeah, for those that don't know, there is a document in draft format that aims to cover all the various flavours of The Quill/Adventure Writer on Spectrum, CPC, BBC, C64, Apple II, DOS PC, QL, Atari 8-bit, Oric etc.
http://8bitag.com/info/documents/Quill- ... erence.pdf
I've got quite a bit still to work on/correct, when I get more free time (and motivation) to go back to it.

There's all sorts of differences between the various platforms and plenty of challenges in moving a game between them. Or, at least, doing a good job at moving a game between them.

I'm also trying to make sure the old adventure systems have better (and more accurate) representation on sites like the IFwiki...
https://www.ifwiki.org/The_Quill
(that's another huge writing job in itself)

[spider]

Thank you. The attribution is appreciated, first time I think I've been mentioned for anything actually useful!

The only idea I never really looked at as I figured it may of been impractical was some kind of Illustrator conversion of graphics between machines, where said utility was available.

Either that or a 'quick and dirty' conversion of Quill/Illustrator to PAWS, with minor clean up needed.

[8BitAG]

The only idea I never really looked at as I figured it may of been impractical was some kind of Illustrator conversion of graphics between machines, where said utility was available.

Some of the Spanish guys have done some work on moving Illustrator graphics between formats in the past. There are lots of clever Quill/PAW/DAAD people in that community.

Games like this... https://lineadura.wordpress.com/2020/06/07/torreoscura/

A Google translation of a section from that page...

...which led to one of the most laborious parts of the entire creation process, which was porting the aforementioned graphics to the other systems. Unlike what would happen later with DAAD, in Quill there is no (or was never released) any conversion tool between the graphics of one system and others, so a lot of things had to be done "by hand". For Spectrum, the C64 Quill charts had to be converted to Spectrum DAAD charts taking into account that the C64 screen has a noticeably higher horizontal resolution (64 bytes higher, the equivalent of 8 characters). Between the dilemma of trying to make a rescaled version for ZX or cutting part of the image in each graphic, the latter was the most viable and successful. Some screens lent themselves quite well to dispensing with the lateral parts, or to making a "cut" somewhere inside where there was a hole. With this in mind, the process consisted of manually taking note of each C64 graphic order, passing its coordinates to the Spectrum screen equivalents (with a suitable Python script), and manually entering the order with its code and its new coordinates in the DAAD graphics editor for Speccy. Nothing difficult, although of course boring as hell."

Either that or a 'quick and dirty' conversion of Quill/Illustrator to PAWS, with minor clean up needed.

Quill to PAWS is really quite tricky to automate and get working. You really do need to have good knowledge of both systems and the game being ported to do a decent job, so I'm glad that it's not easy otherwise we'd have people churning out broken unofficial ports.

Just a few of the problems moving from Quill to PAWs include "minor ones", like the change from four letter inputs to five letter ones... i.e. you manually need to add the missing letters... a computer can't work out what they should be. And more "major ones" like the fact that in PAWS vocab is strictly split into verbs and nouns and are no longer usable in both positions, as in the Quill. So you're looking at a lot of potential verb/noun clashes that need to be manually fixed.

The latest version of unPAW does do some of the work in moving Quilled/PAWed games to DAAD (as DAADready sources) but, again, you really need to learn the ropes and the differences between the way the systems work.

As an historical aside, games like St. Brides' Silversoft was ported to C64 from the Spectrum PAWed game. Gilsoft did this as a paid commercial service and the Spectrum PAWed database ran under the C64 PAW interpreter with graphics created using the C64 Illustrator.

Automation between versions of the Quill is a lot more realistic. In fact, the Quill Adventure Guides tools has a rough-and-ready system that will take Atari/C64 Quilled games and spit out a Spectrum adventure.

[spider]

Thank you.

Yes I'd guessed even allowing for screen resolutions it would not be that trivial to simply extract and then enter 'drawing' instructions between machines.

The work you mention does sound interesting though. I'm aware of the verb/noun erm 'issue' , I'd not really thought a great deal about the 5 letters one though, talk about "not seeing the woods for the trees!"

There is a relative lack of decent conversions to the Atmos (quill) something I would eventually like to do, time permitting.

I've not really noted anything Quill based on other machines that would want a port over here to the Spectrum, however having said that UpperGumtree -is- sort of on my list even though its not Quill, the missing ZX version needs adding and if I recall when I looked at this a few years back it was mostly CBM Basic similar to Urban Upstart, allowing hopefully relative ease of understanding along with a map/solution already about I suspect. It may make a decent Quill or PAWS conversion as it would have to be done afresh.

Spoiler

Something tells me, if I -did- do this, a few weeks after much blood/sweat/toil the long missing ZX version would magically appear!

[8BitAG]

I've not really noted anything Quill based on other machines that would want a port over here to the Spectrum

There are several games that are exclusive to other platforms, such as some BBC titles (e.g. a few of the Larsoft games, the Suds titles), and interesting titles on the C64, Atari & PC that were from US/Australian AdventureWriter users. I have been tempted to port some of them to Spectrum PAWs (mainly because using inPAWs makes coding in PAWs on a modern PC easier & quicker than coding in Quill on the Spectrum).

I don't have much appetite for such conversions, though, considering now that most people will be playing any such port via an emulator. You may as well play the original version on the specific emulator than a (often badly done) port that might only exist as part of some numbers game. Most people don't seem to take the same time as you, when it comes to ports... as some of the awfully shoddy bug-ridden, un-playtested z-machine ports of old adventures prove.

I can understand the appeal of porting games to less supported systems but the Spectrum isn't short of text adventures to play.

Something tells me, if I -did- do this, a few weeks after much blood/sweat/toil the long missing ZX version would magically appear!

Upper Gumtree would be interesting. I don't believe it actually ever existed as a Spectrum game (any mentions of such are, I think, in error) so I don't think there's much chance of a missing version ever surfacing.

[spider]

That's a thought then, perhaps you should consider a port or three if time and enthusiasm permits.

Thank you for your kind comment regarding the ports, it is greatly appreciated as I know you'll be aware of the time taken to do such things. , its not a quick copy and paste affair But it was done for sharing with the community not for any reward as is obvious. I'd not of minded if anyone had said "omg this sucks" really, that's up to them. They are not forced to play it, I merely made the 'best I could' at the time.

I did leave them 'as is' but I recall I did change one thing in Project X, I could not recall exactly but from memory the conditional to let you jump out of the sink / wash basin does not work because it checked for the wrong item being present or carried (I can't remember sorry) , although its not a big issue as you do not need to go into there , again as far as I remember. This was the only 'bug' I put right. I left the small Easter Egg in Galaxias too, but that was more a personal thing for the author I think.

Upper Gumtree, that is a bit of a dilemma really. I do think you're right and my comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek as such, but if it ever did appear it would not happen until after said conversion was ready, sods law and all that. At least the Basic is vaguely understandable. I do not think it would do too well using the 'Urban Upstart' engine as such, graphics may be a pain, it would probably be best in PAWS or perhaps Quill/Illustrator with the split screen tweak.

[spider]

Upper Gumtree would be interesting. I don't believe it actually ever existed as a Spectrum game (any mentions of such are, I think, in error) so I don't think there's much chance of a missing version ever surfacing.

I did actually mention this to someone in an email (they are not registered here) about this, to gauge opinion from a completely neutral perspective. They are aware of the other conversions and afaik are aware of Urban Upstart etc.

[spider]

I think I need another one, although I am giving thought to some kind of FCPGA based device, so I can run (ideally) BBC + Sam + Oric on one 'unit' , not hugely fussed about the other main machines as I have a working +2 and a CPC464 and not really wanting a breadbin again.

They seem quite expensive though the FCPGA type of devices, and the cheaper ones might need programming. I'm guessing aside from a jtag adaptor in these cases, the software (cores?) are a simple "flash in" , certainly no more difficult than flashing something like custom OS's into phones...