Author: RetroBlog Admin
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Where’s my Water? Vs PSSST
Having kids has opened up my eyes to many things There I was cooking tea for the kids and my young daughter asked to borrow my Surface to play ‘Where’s my Water?‘. This game is pretty much regarded by almost everyone as a good game. I found it dull. My daughter was completing the game…
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Skinning the games
It was important to apply a ‘skin’ to each of the games… firstly to make the games more appealing to those who’d never played the games and secondly to separate the games from the other Spectrum emulators that are available. As I’d used the ‘game harness’ skinning the games was fairly simple. The most important…
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Sound – Getting it perfect…
Like most games, Ultimate’s games only do three things: Emulating the graphics was largely trivial, but the sound was far more problematic. To make sounds on the ZX Spectrum, the developer would literally just switch the power to the internal speaker very quickly, on and off. There were no sound samples per se and all…
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Jet Pac – Graphics
The Original Sprites The initial idea was to make remakes of the original games. The first prototype for the Jet Pac remake running on Windows Phone 7 is shown below. To speed up things, the graphics were ripped from the original game, this allowed development to continue whilst the graphics were redrawn. The below screenshots…
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Software
For the development of the Microsoft Phone 7 and Windows 8 Store apps we used various software. Most were free or very cheap. Visual Studio Visual Studio 2010 was used for developing the Windows Phone 7 and the Windows 7 versions. Development was done in C# using XNA via Phone SDK. Visual Studio 2012 was…
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Tooling up
The Collected Works From eBay, I bought the Collected Works. This was a 1988 compilation of all the Ultimate Play the Game games, except for Underwurlde, for some reason. The four games released under the US Gold banner were also not included, but rightly or wrongly, they were not regarded as Tim and Chris Stamper…
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Apptastic idea….
So it appears we’ve now gone full circle, the app coding phenomenon for the smart phones and tablets now perfectly mimics what happened 30 years ago I guess in 2013, we are at the 90’s point in the gaming world. The crossover point between hobbyist/small studios to the mega game studios. I couldn’t help but…
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Finishing off the emulator
All of the Windows Phone 7 devices, only one had a hardware keyboard. The software keyboard was not practical. The screen was too small to include the game and control buttons together. I certainly didn’t want to taint the games by putting button overlays on top of the game, no matter how transparent they were.…
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Testing the emulator
Boy was this hard, testing took far longer than writing the code and debugging was a major pain… Writing an emulator is quite different from coding normal applications. Mainly because with an emulator you don’t get to see it working until it’s completely finished. There is no watching it as it gradually matures. Unit tests…
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Removing the Sinclair ROM from the emulator
The Spectrum has a 16K ROM. The ROM being the primitive operating system (monitor) for the computer, one of the first tasks was to reverse engineer it so a complete understanding of the machine could be gleaned. The exercise was largely trivial as it was well documented, as shown here in The Complete Spectrum ROM…
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Game Harness vs Spectrum Emulator
When I was looking to implement the emulator, I decided early on to move away from creating a ZX Spectrum emulator that could play any Spectrum game. Instead the idea was to produce a Game Harness that could bring the best qualities of these 30 year old games onto a modern platform without the handicap…
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Starting the Z80 Emulator…
Other than being hugely tedious coding up roughly 1,792 op codes it was fairly simple (the op code DAA was fun though!) to write the emulator, the only resources I needed were: I had used Zaks as my main reference but in hindsight I should have started with Sean Young’s document, this document I found…
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Later RARE
A couple of months later, with our degrees in hand, one in Computer Science and the other in Professional Media, we headed down to London to attend a Computer Show, wishing to see Rare. Here the dreams would surely come true! I met a Lead Dev, and to say it didn’t go well was a…
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Early RARE
Sometime before the Ultimate demise, the Stampers had already decided to switch gaming platforms to Nintendo’s Entertainment System and had formed a separate company called RARE – Research And Reverse Engineering. From here Rare and I departed company, as I also switched platforms too, but to the Commodore Amiga instead. In 1992, my girlfriend (now…
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Ultimate Play the Game
The “computer game” has been with us now since Space Invaders was released in 1978, 35 years ago, cor blimey. In that timeframe I suspect the number of games that got cancelled for whatever reason outnumber those that got published. This blog is about a ‘failed game’, or more accurately a ‘failed app’, and whilst…