C.S.C.G.C 2023 is open for entries

[R-Tape]

Jbizzle is stirred awake by a ping on his laptop. He scratches himself and takes a moment to assess the surroundings. Free. He is a free man. His stint as CGC host is over. He can relax and regain his sanity. He gets up, looks at the wonky shelf, which he was fairly sure he fixed in March, and the carpet, which he distinctly remembers changing for parquet in July; and where has the cutting of that Rich Pelley Guardian article gone? He opens his emails and sees a 3000 word message from TMD describing his CGC entry about Dvorak keyboards - the date on the email? January 1st, 2023.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

(Sorry)

Congrats @Jbizzel! You did a great job and I enjoyed reading the reviews. I did play most of them, but there were a few I was happy to leave the suffering to you. Between you and Jim, you raised the profile of the CGC considerably! I look forward to the next radio interview.

I really enjoyed playing @Daveysloan's AI Made Me Do It, and @uglifruit's Pam Ferris, and I think I need to have another look at Negative Space.

Congrats @firelord. I'm afraid this was as far as I got with your winner, and I'll probably leave that there. Looking forward to more FLQG.

Commiserations to @EdToo. I see you've got a site started already

[Jbizzel]

Once I realised 2 things I enjoyed it:

1) I was the boss and I could do what I wanted.

2) it was more rewarding to find the good in the crap than it was to find the crap in the good.

Especially enjoyable are the guys that make a game for the first time. I was one of those people once.

[firelord]

That was not expected
Thanks for the honor
I will post a thank you text later

Congrats @firelord. I'm afraid this was as far as I got with your winner, and I'll probably leave that there. Looking forward to more FLQG.

lol
Spoiler follows :

Spoiler

The map is the original PACMAN . The coordinates are for this purpose

I was trying to find time to record a walktrhough of the game

[Jbizzel]

@firelord

Did you like my final review of your game?

It took me weeks. I hope I got it right.

[firelord]

@firelord

Did you like my final review of your game?

It took me weeks. I hope I got it right.

Very good review !
Thank you for your patience @Jbizzel

Spoiler

I suspect you haven't tried

Code: Select all

unlock scary door

...

I must find time to write something inspiring as the 2023 winner.
I was not prepared for that
If I weren't the winner, I could have copy/pasted the usual conspiracy theories... Now I can't.
At least the earth is still flat!
(I have many things to say and explain, but no time to write them—probably I'll end up posting them in parts. )

I will also release the sources of the winning game to honor the Firelord Fan Club in the following days.

Spoiler

By the way, if you had finished the "Real Adventures of Dr. Robbie PSSST," you would have received an unlock code that would have helped you in the "Real Adventures Of PACard MANford."
The problem is, that I discovered you couldn't get the helpful item because of a bug (the only one!) in the submitted version.
So , finishing PSSST would not have helped...
Hint: When you finish "Real Adventures Of PACard MANford," you will get something that will help you in the 4th part of the trilogy!

This is part of the secret of success !

[Daveysloan]

That was amazing! Top top work @Jbizzel.

Huge congratulations to @firelord on a very worthy winner. And @EdToo for a superb update on a classic.

Also quite a relief to know that we don't have an admin headache in 2024 that I never suspected for one moment that we could be in the running for!

Top work all round everyone, long live the most crap (in a funky skillo way) competition ever.

Lovely stuff altogether.

[Jbizzel]

@Daveysloan your game was a lot of fun. Definitely a near miss.

The difficulty on the ice level and the collision detection in some places where just crap enough to take you out of the running.

With a few tweaks that could be a very good game indeed.

[uglifruit]

Amazing work @Jbizzel. Bust out the Advocate and spend the rest of the year drinking Snowballs. That is the only way to recover from a stint in the judge's chair.

@EdToo, you're in for a treat. Though "treat" might not be the word I mean. "Ordeal" might be more apt.

And congrats to @firelord on the award losing crap. Long may it continue.


I had great fun in making my efforts this year. And even if no-one else enjoyed playing them, I actually did. Which is a weird admission. I'll go blind.

[firelord]

I have some time this morning so I'll try to post something bigger than yestarday.

First of all : Congratulations @Jbizzel !
It was a fun year and your mental health seem to be in the same level as last year - so I guess it was a good year!
I hope you have some spare pills to mail to @EdToo ! He will need them
Congratulations to @EdToo for finishing last Next time you will be more careful and you should read the rules ! Good luck this year !

Congratulation to all the other fellow developers. All games were amazing and of high quality.
All of you have proven that you can work under the Firelord Quality Games label. (All except @EdToo who failed this years test... )

Spoiler

It was unxpected to win , since I thought JBizzel had issues playing my Lantern adventure games.
I put quite an effort to make Real Adventures of Packard Manford . I consider "Real Adv of Pacman" and "Top Gun 2 Maverick Dangerous" my most advanced CSSCGC games. My biggest problem was lack of time near my home windows/linux PC. When I had time it was because I was in a coffee shop (with my android tablet) waiting for my son to finish his lessons/tournaments. I had to work with web tools only ! Lantern was a windows program so I my little home computing time I used lantern and the when I was outside I worked with the lantern XML file. I used pastebin a lot! Also , I spend quite a time trying to find a story authoring web page to help me connect the stories of Adventures Of Cookie,Dr Pssst and PACard MANford. Almost all of my BASIC games were made using zxcoder.org/basic2tape.dimotika.tk and pastebin.
I've already said some thigns about the development of the trilogy. When I find the time will post a more detailed article here and on Itch.io . You might find this more interesting than the game

Now the less serious post :

After the huge success of Real Adventures of Cookie Man and Dr Pssst I was expecting that Adventures of Pacman would win easilly! Technically it is an advanced adventure game with ghosts moving using advanced AI techniques! The main goal of this game was to inform the public about the real story of Pac Man. Most people thought that ghosts were bad and they were afreaid of some yellow pills. Did you know that Pac Man was based on a real life character? Things aren't always as they seem...
Two years ago you heard from me the real story of Santa Claus. last year you learned that Cookie was an real person and there was scientific proof. This year you learned about the Dr Pssst and Packard Manford...
2024 will be the year that you will learn the real stories about some of your beloved movies.

Spoiler

I finished Adventures of Pacman yesterday with the TAP I submitted to the contest. The only issue I had was the item inside the locker box (it will help but it's not vital to the game).

Can you unlock door ?

[TMD2003]

Geh! What's this? No sooner is the 2023 competition over than there's already an entry for 2024 before the year has even started, meaning that I don't get to put the first entry in at 12:01 am on 1st January for the first time since 2021 because I couldn't enter my own competition (but had an entry at the stroke of Jools Holland telling everyone the competition was open and that's what gave me the idea to do so).

Either way - last night I had an idea for a quick and dirty opening entry which should at least be the first submission in 2024. All I will say at this stage is... it isn't going to be for the Spectrum, it won't be an Etch-a-Sketch or ALS clone, and isn't going to be very long. I've got some final fettling to do for WOOT!, and then the programming for CSSCGC2024 can start properly. (Although I have done a test or two already...)

And, @EdToo - if you don't own a Next (either version) or an N-Go - then get familiar with the way CSpect works and do so now. And if there's any other Sinclair system you're not up to speed with *cough*qlhinthintql*cough* then get some practice in with that as well. You're going to need it!

[EdToo]

And, @EdToo - if you don't own a Next (either version) or an N-Go - then get familiar with the way CSpect works and do so now. And if there's any other Sinclair system you're not up to speed with *cough*qlhinthintql*cough* then get some practice in with that as well. You're going to need it!

I had suspicions which caused me to download a QL emulator over the weekend

[TMD2003]

I had suspicions which caused me to download a QL emulator over the weekend

QemuLator, I suspect. Am I right? If so, everything I write is suitable for a standard QL, though if I was to go barging onto The QL Forum to see if I could cajole its users into writing something for their favourite machine's big four-zero, they're more likely to use SMSQ/E for which you'll need QPC2.

But I wouldn't do that... right?

[EdToo]

But I wouldn't do that... right?

Depends if you are paying me back like @R-Tape for making you type M 100 times for no reason.

I'm currently totally confused by the QL emulator, I get a choice of TV or Monitor when I start which either puts me into split screen or full screen mode. I need to read the manual.

[TMD2003]

I'm currently totally confused by the QL emulator, I get a choice of TV or Monitor when I start which either puts me into split screen or full screen mode. I need to read the manual.

For the record, all my QL games come with a couple of procedures pre-installed to switch between one and the other on the fly. Essentially, all that's happening here is that the QL sets up the screen differently according to what it's plugged into. There's nothing to say you can't use the TV mode with a monitor, but anyone who had one in 1984 would be using it for business and would need the higher resolution for the word processor and spreadsheet.

What you get is:
"Monitor" mode: Mode 4 (4 colours, 512×256 portrait-oriented pixels), window #1 (red) on the right (where the default PRINT output will be), window #2 (white) on the left (where LIST will operate by default: PRINT #2,"text" to use this window), a slight hatched border around both, window #0 (black) below both of these (the equivalent of the Spectrum's INPUT area; PRINT #0,"text" to use it).
"TV" mode: Mode 8 (8 colours, 256×256 landscape-oriented pixels); windows #1 (red) and #2 (blue) the same size and on top of each other, and not defined to reach right to the edge of the screen so as not to get distorted or cut off by the TV tube. PRINT and RUN and the screen will be red; LIST and it'll be blue (and of course these can be redefined). Window #0 (black, below) is still in the same place as for the monitor but has fewer lines to work with.

Your most important command at this stage is LRUN (the QL doesn't have a LOAD ... LINE 0, it uses this instead). And a load command will be something like:
LOAD mdv1_qlprogram_bas (doesn't execute immediately) or LRUN mdv1_qlprogram_bas (executes when it loads).

Have a play around with some of my programs to get used to it - every one comes with "loading instructions for noobs" so that even a total novice can get them going on QemuLator, QPC2 or even (dare I mention it) QLAY:
https://rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/programs_others.html
Or there are some magazine type-ins from the early days, which I thought made great examples of how to make a CSSCGC QL entry:
https://rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/qltypeins.html
Towering Inferno is a particularly good one, as is Jumper (which really, really should have been called QL*Bert).

Dilwyn Jones - "Mr QL" - has an online HTML version of the QL user manual and its keywords guide, which I will be constantly referring to when I make QL programs. See here, and keep it bookmarked: https://dilwyn.qlforum.co.uk/index.html

[EdToo]

Thanks @TMD2003 that is very helpful, none come across a system that uses two screens at the same time like this. I'll have a play with your programs and learn something new this Xmas.


This didn't help much, but was wonderfully 80's British.

[Jbizzel]

Personal computer magazine hated Clive.

[firelord]

I received my official award with the official JBizzel signature :




https://craftmypdf-gen.s3.ap-southeast- ... ZP1dFLk%3D

[Jbizzel]

Strictly unofficial award.

I did arrange a prize but it got sorted so late in the day that I never got to tell anyone about it.

A prize worthy of the compo, I believe.

[R-Tape]

Congrats firelord - clear the fridge door!

And compliments to bizzel on his elegant cursive handwriting. A rare thing in this age of shrivelled handed tik-tokkers.

[Jbizzel]

Ok, the real prizes that I commissioned for the winner and loser....

@firelord and @EdToo

I had these wonky willy cuff links made as a special price for the winner and loser. That's not a cheap image printing on to them, the wonky willy image is made from polymer clay, and the image runs all the way through them.

But because it's a crap comp he's a wonky willy!

[firelord]

I just ordered a suit in the colours of ZX spectrum to put these
If EdToo already planned to have a ZX suit as a prize I must cancel it.

Btw, I made the CSSCGC certificate to use in my game campaigns:) If @Jbizzel doesn't want his official signature to be visible to billions of fans, I could replace it.

[uglifruit]

These are amazing!

And "wonky willy" is a phrase I won't be googling to find them again.

[EdToo]

I just ordered a suit in the colours of ZX spectrum to put these
If EdToo already planned to have a ZX suit as a prize I must cancel it.

Btw, I made the CSSCGC certificate to use in my game campaigns:) If @Jbizzel doesn't want his official signature to be visible to billions of fans, I could replace it.

I was assuming there was one cuff link each, I thought we could wear our matching spectrum suits and one cuff link each on the anniversary of Sir Clives passing.

[firelord]

I was assuming there was one cuff link each, I thought we could wear our matching spectrum suits and one cuff link each on the anniversary of Sir Clives passing.

I think so too.

The 2024 prize could be a suit to match these cuffs. You could add a suit part and let the other hosts add the rest of the suit parts. So, whoever wins the contest 5-6 time will have the full suit to wear in official events.

[firelord]

Did any of you manage to decrypt Dr PSSST encrypted tape diary (https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4 ... _of_Pacman)?
The famous gardener/scientist/historian Dr PSSST always knew that the best way to store importand documents for very long times was a ZX Spectrum audio tape. It was a much modern and reliable way compared to ancient egyptian papyrus or writing in rock... Also, he knew that encryption using shift techniques were impossible to decrypt!

Spoiler

If you finish the game you find in a chest the secret password.
I know that noone had the courage to end the game but I had to mantion that!
The tape was made to earn extra crap points because it is ecrypted using crap encryption/decryption techniques implemented in BASIC.