@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ @ @ ADVANCED LAWNMOWER SIMULATOR 2302 @ @ MOWIN' ON MARS @ @ @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ For the Spectrum Next by @ @ J.R. Waterman 20-28 April 2023 @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Introductory waffle =================== This should be the FOURTH lawnmowing game for the 2023 edition of the CSSCGC. Jamie Bradbury - this year's host - decided to enter his own competition (and disqualify himself from it...) with a Z88 conversion of Duncan MacDonald's notorious original Advanced Lawnmower Simulator (it sort-of-works on the letterbox-shaped screen...), soon followed by Ed Toovey's Licence To Mow, a text adventure involving mowing. And then I was contacted out of the blue by former Your Sinclair and current Guardian journalist, Rich Pelley, who was writing an article about Sinclair-based Crap Games, and wanted my help with both the article, and submitting a "new for 2023" Advanced Lawnomwer Simulator into the competition. So I went to town on that, being careful to retain as much of Duncan MacDonald's original code while adding more and more Quirks And Features (cheers to Doug DeMuro for that) of my own. No sooner had I finished that than I had the further idea to enhance ALS even more, for the more recent Son Of Spectrum. It took EIGHT DAYS and a bit of a ninth to finish it off. There was help... there were also hindrances, not least that CSpect isn't quite as reliable or as accurate as I would like, but for now - until the real thing is delivered some time around August or September - it's the best I've got, and I've managed so far. This game - if we can call it that - has been the first opportunity I had to use sprites, for which it was a perfect learning process, and also the first chance to *actually use* tiles rather than just write a program to cut and store them. Plus, I've used as many NextBASIC features as I could, because why wouldn't I, when I have them at my disposal? Also, a new set of tiles is generated every time the game is RUN - eight red weed tiles, and eight mown weed tiles. This should ensure than every game is visually very slightly different. The further idea was that I had to distance this game as much as possible from the "original" Next conversion of ALS, made by Retroasylum in 2020: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/35792/ZX-Spectrum_Next/Advanced_Lawn_Mower_Simulator_Next https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9POrEYj5iOE It's a *direct* conversion (which ALS 2302 is most definitely not!) which looks like the background was drawn with an Atari ST, with the Spectrum's UDG-based ALS playing area plonked on top of it, and then an AY soundtrack was over all the old beeps, which are still intact. Conceptual waffle ================= For all my bashing of the Cult Of St. Greta along the course of ALS 2023 and elsewhere, in this reality they turn out to be right - there really *is* OMFG CLIMATE CHANGE everywhere. London really *is* knee-deep in the ocean, with the Thames Barrier, or at least an update of the original, finally overwhelmed on 17th July... ...2257. Fortunately, technology has progressed by this time to the point where colonisation of other planets is possible, and Elon Musk's descendants have been working on it. His great-to-the-power-6-grandson Zapp Musk-Kroker - not the most competent of leaders - redeemed himself by building the dome that will eventually house the first Martian colony. He has left it to his son, Brandon Musk-Kroker (born exactly 300 years to the date of the Moon landing) to command the next phase: terraforming the area inside the dome. Someone else who was also right, even back in the 19th Century, was H.G. Wells. Mars is covered with Red Weed, and it needs to be hacked away with the most powerful anti-plant weaponry available to humanity: LAWNMOWERS. What H.G. was also right about was Martian lifeforms... who are none too happy about the human colonists, especially if they're from London, the source of the plague that killed all their fighting machine pilots, and whose residents have been looking for somewhere less wet to live for the best part of half a century. It's time for some truly outlandish mechanised horticultural mayhem. LET'S MOW, BRANDON! Belgian waffles, with chocolate =============================== You have a choice of six mowers that have been packed onto the shuttle to Mars and dumped in a shed inside the dome. The shed is equipped with a large bank of batteries, charged by solar panels - so efficient are these by now that even the weak sunlight on Mars is comparable of generating enough to run your mower over the area of Red Weed inside the dome. These mowers are: 1998 PATIO SPRINTETTE Mk.III - reliable enough in its day, but what are you going to do with a petrol-powered mower this far from Earth and 180 years after the oil ran out? 2217 ANTARCTIC IRONWORKS MECHA-SCYTHE - a manual mower that requires only human power, designed for remote locations with lots of foliage and no electricity. "Hod-d-d-d-d-d!" 2234 JMC AGRI-BAZOOKOID PROTOTYPE - built, if that's the right word, by a JMC engineer just in case there was any plant life on remote moons that needed blasting away quickly. 2255 WONGSWORTH 888 SUPER LUCKY TRIM - a superb, top-of-the-range mower from the Taiwanese-American domestic appliance giant. Reliable, sensible, dependable, if slow. 2278 SIRIUS CYBERNETICS WEED-O-SNIP - certainly capable of doing the job required of it and more, if only it can be convinced to stop sulking in the shed. Share And Enjoy! 2301 MR. FUSION ATOMI-CUT 9000 - this is what we need: a fast, fusion-powered mower, fuelled by domestic waste, such as Red Weed clippings. Just watch it doesn't get too hot! Goodbye waffles, goodbye maple syrup, goodbye fresh cream, so long fresh strawberries. Bon appetit, bin! ==================================================== Like ALS 2023, not all of the mowers can be coaxed into life. But unlike ALS 1988, more than one of them is working. Unlike ALS 2023, both success and failure can be achieved with all the available mowers, and it's up to you to find out which mowers are more likely to complete the job. Some of them, it will be sheer blind luck that the mower doesn't break (or worse), others are completely within your control. Now don't wear out the "M" key on your shiny new Issue 2 Next. +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | ESSENTIAL FILES NEEDED TO RUN THE GAME: | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | als2302.bas | LINE 20 | Main program | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | chars6.bin | CODE 64512,768 | 6-pixel character set | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | mars.bin | BANK 9 | Game background | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | mcode.bin | BANK 47,0,65 | Machine code | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | mushroom.sl2 | LAYER | "A full LAYER 2 screen" | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | mowers.car | DATA m$() | Mower names | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | spaceman.spr | BANK 40 | Sprite sheet | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | text.car | DATA t$() | Text for PROC textprint() | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | title.sl2 | LAYER | LAYER 2 title screen | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | toptitle.bin | BANK 9 | Smaller title for menu | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | NON-ESSENTIAL FILES: | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+ | als2302.txt | | Listing of main program | +--------------+----------------+---------------------------+