New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

T his parcel from Rod at Future Was 8-bit has landed at the perfect time.  The Vicky Twenty board is a clone of the Vic20, tape loading should work, but since breathing life into my Vicky, I haven't tried it yet. Andy at Hewco makes consistently excellent Vic20 games - Vic Nibbler, Pumpkid, Escape 2020, Cheesy Trials and more... Hewco games have their own folder on my SD2IEC card. I will add this, I won't be loading from tape every time, but doing it occasionally is fun. Tape loading is something I guess we're all grateful that we don't *have* to do any more, but the nostalgia is strong when you occasionally do it because you want to. (Muscle memory automatically typed ,8 after the quotes though...)  I'm using a black datasette here (with adaptor) because of half a dozen datasettes, this is the one that works the best. (I guess I should learn how to service the others.) Perfect! Fitting a playable game into the unexpanded Vic's 3.5k is an admirable achievemen...

T he OLED screen that Quazar makes for the Z80-based  RC2014 is 128 x 32 pixels, a wide and thin format. The way that you send data (bytes being vertical) makes it good for smooth sideways scrolling. I did this a while ago and as usual I'd almost finished when I moved onto something else. It's written using Forth, which I really love.  In return for a small sacrifice in performance (according to Leo Brodie's book, it can be almost as fast as assembly) you get some very helpful features. For example, numbers are 16-bit signed  (in the implementation I use), the stack makes it very easy to pass parameters in and out when calling words, and I like the way it makes me structure a program. It forces you to start with the small building blocks. So it is with some joy that I've returned to the dino game and started a new tunnel game.  Again the screen format is well-suited to this type of thing.  For the Dino game I made myself a box with two arcade buttons (he jumps...

T his purchase of two *brand new* Vic20 games has just arrived. They're from The Future Was 8-Bit's 4.99 range . (I had already bought Escape 2020 digitally but I wanted to support the range, and owning these new tapes is pretty magical.) I find it mind-blowing that quality games are still being made and published for a computer which is so close to my heart.  It wasn't my first computer. The first I got my hands on was the school PET and the first I owned was a ZX81. The Vic came shortly afterwards and kept me going for years.)  Having the new tapes arrive made me have a rummage through my Vic tapes and cartridges. Something that's bugging me is that I'm sure I had a cartridge version of Omega Race but if I did have it I can't find it now.  I do prize that Sargon II cartridge.  This is a good point to mention my Vicky Twenty project as I haven't posted a picture of the board yet. Following a successful sixtyclone project , I was very excited that Rob has no...

 I 've just discovered this Gem on the 2011 Denial disk. (By Robert Hurst.  Thread discussing its development here . Game available here .) I love Berzerk and this is a very good-looking and very playable version. The software sprites move quickly and smoothly and the sound effects are just right.  What could be better than that? Well the MMX+ version has synthesised speech! Yes, sound samples of the menacing robotic "Intruder alert" type sounds as featured on the arcade game. Coming from a Vic chip. That's blowing my mind.

R evival of the project, that is. It's not a resurrection-based game. Following a hiatus due to realising that my original concept was rubbish, I had a different idea. It's nothing particularly original; sideways scrolling, and the sheep following one another like a snake. There will be things to collect, and things to avoid. Avoiding the enemies will be more difficult, the more sheep are following the one you're controlling. The idea is that you start with one, and accumulate friends as you go along.  They may be dispatched by enemies, and there will be a maximum of four because of the way I've used two sprites to get hi-res with multicolour effect. There are no collectibles or enemies yet, but here's the basic action, which I'm really happy with. The sound you hear on the video is being played by a breadbin 64. It's my most recent tune for this game. The video is captured from VICE It was my first go with the 64's scrolling capability. I ...

P rogress with this project ground to a halt for two reasons; I found that I really enjoyed writing the music and have been doing a lot of that , and because when I got to the point where my characters were moving around, I realised that my original concept was rubbish. At first I'd seen a cross between Lemmings and Pacman - where the sheep would flock and also follow the character that you control. The idea was to try and lead them around obstacles and solve puzzles. After a break I had the idea of being able to switch character. Each has a name and a 'special skill' and you work out how to use the characters to solve the puzzle. The mechanics of that are kinda working, as you can see. It needs more characters, the ones that are there need more work. But most of all it needs some time spending designing some devious puzzles for this scenario. I'll probably take a break and write more music, and let this stew for a bit.

I 'd like to send thanks and kudos to icon64, the team behind Rocky Memphis - The Legend Of Atlantis. That's Stuart Collier, Trevor Storey and Saul Cross. I'm a great starter of games but not a great finisher. The short list of games that I've become obsessed with through to the end include Portal 1 and Day of the Tentacle. I'll spend days trying to figure out a puzzle and I don't like too much pixel-perfect-platform-jumping or battling enemies. Legend of Atlantis fits the bill perfectly. There have been similar games but for a native C64 game this looks and sounds so good and plays so well. The puzzles are perfect. You don't want them to be too obvious and just go through the motions. Nor do you want them to be impossible or unfair. In LOA you collect items as you go along (which aren't too easy to find because you can't see them on the screen and have to search) and you have to work out how those interact with devices you find in the room...

S o far I've not written very much about the actual gameplay. That's mostly because I had done a bit of that before I started writing this blog. I will write some of that up 'retro'spectively. (geddit?) But I've been choosing to do other things such as the music and whilst doing that I got hung up on writing a system for converting music notation to assembly . I've been muddling by with a miscellany of tools (TMPx, an online sprite editor, XCode etc). This has been working pretty efficiently, with a few frustrations. So today I decided to begin work on an IDE for Mac, which AFAIK doesn't exist. Not bad for a day's work.  The syntax colouring alone makes the assembly so much easier to read. The line numbering probably took more time than the rest put together. You never know what's going to go smoothly and what you'll be stuck on for hours. But is this just displacement activity?? Am I avoiding getting on with the gameplay because I'm...