Spectrum Computing

To echo what's already been said... a great idea using the 128K's two display areas, and incredibly well realised. The parallax, animated backgrounds and foreground "snow" effects are incredibly impressive, particularly given the speed it all runs. Pure witchcraft, indeed :D And loads of f...

67890 My brother and I used to play a lot of 2 player games, and once the umpteenth Kempston died and a replacement was refused, we learned the keyboard layout for the Sinclair joysticks to get around games which forced someone to use a joystick. Added bonus: No redefine option? No problem! (Providi...

BILLY BONG An almost unplayable mess due to unresponsive controls, blocky character movements, and a boomerang that seems to decide for itself whether it wants to hit the monster you have thrown it at. Very little going for it, to be honest, apart from being fairly colourful and having a vaguely ar...

Enjoying this, feel like I've made decent progress too :D but never seem to have enough energy to get any further :( I am able to get the generator going OR get into the basement (pointless without doing the former, but still...), and always die before I can do both. Seems really tricky to avoid som...

Level 3 of R-Type was basically one huge boss encounter, I'd be on the edge of my seat the whole way through because if you mess up the positioning of your aux/pod weapon, you're in big trouble!

Just got a new laptop and having problems getting SevenuP to run. It takes a while to open, then crashes when you try to load / save / export anything (i.e. do anything file-related) Once stuck, it is takes forever to close, even when ending process via Task Manager. I can sometimes get around it by...

Yeah, joysticks with more independent fire buttons would have been good. [...] Even on some of the 16/32 bit computers (like the Atari ST/STfm etc.) it was the same The NES and Sega Master System were the first home machines I came across with two fire buttons. They were on display in Woolworths an...

saucysarah wrote: ↑Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:27 pm So I got that program from Alessando's site. If I load a TZX that has 3 games/demos on, how do I save them all as separate TZX's ? It looks like I still have to manually edit the TZX and save each file separately ?

Yes. It's pretty quick and painless though!

ZX Block Editor will do the trick

PeterJ wrote: ↑Fri Aug 19, 2022 8:47 am I'm not sure why it's denied in the first place

From: https://simon.mooli.org.uk/AF/article/commercial.html

Unlike many of my other home computer programs, ZIP is still not freeware; I have a dwindling pile of printed manuals and still sell them periodically. Mail me if you'd like one!

edit 2 ixl is still increasing, in fact isn't the last add a carry so JP NC is enough? Ooh nice, that sounds like it could work too - hadn't considered that! Will test when I get time. Though I suspect the carry occurs while calculating the IXL value, i.e. LD A, IXL ; [8] ADD A, 32-14 ; [7] overflo...

So imagine you have a 4KB buffer that has same layout as upper two thirds of screen. What if you copy 16 bytes on the left side and then just another 16 bytes right under ? It makes pointer arithmetic incredibly simple: for the next 16B you increase high byte of source by one and you increase high ...

Some other tools here too (including wav2ay), worth a read!
www.cborn.nl/zxfiles/wav2ay

To be honest the lack of different sprites didn’t really bother me. Sure, I was more pointing out that they probably all live in memory all the time, rather than different sprites being loaded in each multiload... meaning less work if you still plan to twiddle with their graphics, as you'll only ha...

Thanks @Joefish.

Yeah, I've just tried ## and & but they give me: Frustrating that there are no examples in the docs!

Suppose I have an unrolled loop, plus a table pointing to it, e.g. ldi_3: LDI ldi_2: LDI ldi_1: LDI RET ldi_table: DW ldi_1 DW ldi_2 DW ldi_3 Is there any way for Pasmo to automatically generate the labels? Pseudocode example of the kinda thing I'd like: %for i=3 to 1 ldi_{i}: LDI %next i RET ldi_ta...

I suspect there are only 4 sprites in total which are held in memory throughout the entire game: Billy / Jimmy Male thug (not sure which, hard to tell!) Linda Abobo plus two drawing routines - one for normal, another for inverted - to imply a bit of variety (and allow reuse of Billy's sprite for Jim...

Sprites are harder to modify than backgrounds. They have masks and are often built of several parts (think of the same legs reused in different sprites like in Renegade). I just had a quick play through the 1st level to satisfy my curiosity, and it does indeed appear that *all* sprites have the sam...

Had a quick bash on this yesterday & really enjoyed it. Definitely gonna come back for another go later today!

Hearing that it may be a game I can actually complete (assuming my skills are on par with @Bubu's!) will spur me on too!

I tried this before translating & reading the instructions (so was playing it at standard BASIC speed, oops!) :oops: BUT that gave me time to consider how the programmer was keeping track of the snake's tail, so that it can be erased... I eventually noticed how the different segments are coloure...

That 's a really impressive, challenging game compared to anything written in BASIC! With a bit of memory spent on a few UDGs for background and the car, and maybe some titles, that could be quite the game! The 3D effect is certainly more impressive than those ones that just keep printing the edges...

I made a simple UDG tunnel racer back in the day (adapted from a type-in, so not really my work) and never thought such a neat implementation would be possible, right down to the dotted line down the middle. Nicely done! Thanks! Yeah I remember doing a similar thing... it was Death Valley from the ...

Nice! Cheers for sharing, gave it a very quick spin & got 155 (3%) I'm going to have a go at trying to beat it, maybe I'll stream it on Twitch for the crack. Hehe, cheers! It's much easier to go the whole distance if you're not trying to stay over to the left. I seem to remember my own personal...

Just found this on my hard drive, as a snapshot dated 04/01/2021. Some might say this is more fun than the original US Gold conversion... the frame rate is definitely an improvement a lot of the time :lol: Load from BASIC using LOAD "" then RUN (n.b. I didn't use LINE when SAVEing as the g...

This is a really interesting thread. I'd come to the conclusion that the ONLY way that PUSH/POP could beat LDI was with it completely unrolled, with just a LD SP, nn between every set of PUSHes/POPs. That put me off due to the enormous size of the code required to transfer the full play area. All of...