ZX Spectrum - Thread

[Retrofan]

I see that this thread has been forgotten.
A couple of days ago I watched this so nice Spanish program from "Juanje juega", a master:

[ Show youtube player ]

If you can't understand Spanish, you could just take a look to a couple of games that he is telling about in the video:

Shophia II: [ Show youtube player ]

Redshift: [ Show youtube player ]

And a lot more in his video.

[PortuguesePilot]

I follow the Spectrum scene and it's amazing the amount of quality games that have been pouring out in these last months! For me - and I've said it lots of times - the Spectrum scene is the benchmark to which all other scenes should govern themselves.

[Retro-Nerd]

It's pretty good stuff for the good old speccy. But my benchmark would be the C64 scene. The output in quantity AND quality still amazes me.

[acidbottle]

my first computer and loved it, so many games squashed into 48k .. choas in particular blew my mind! fond memories of all day 2 player guantlet with my cousin to.

my amiga homage to horace appeared in AF once upon a time

[pubzombie]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

my first computer and loved it, so many games squashed into 48k .. choas in particular blew my mind! fond memories of all day 2 player guantlet with my cousin to.

my amiga homage to horace appeared in AF once upon a time

Chaos is the best game of all time,,,,! Still play it regularly
Gollup was/is a genius. Chaos, laser squad and battle cars - spent many school holidays playing them endlessly. Remember staying up all night to play a chaos tournament on the last day of the summer holidays. Happy days

[Devo]

Never experienced the Speccy, even in emulation, but I always heard it had a really colorful color palette when compared to the C64. However, it's usually your first computer that you tend to have the most fondness and nostalgia for, so for me it was the Commodore 64 (actually the second computer I owned because i can barely count the VIC 20 I paid $300 retail because it felt like a crappy toy... I found my Commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive in the closet of a half-way house for kids leaving the foster system... it's power supply circuits were blown out due to regular power surges in that old house... got it fixed and it was my fav of all-time). I should at least check out the Speccy in emus.

[PortuguesePilot]

You heard wrong, Devo. The colour palette of the Spectrum is almost incommensurable worse than that of the C64. The C64 was a much better designed computer as a whole and had much better graphical and musical abilities. The strength of the Spectrum was its affordability. It was so cheap that even low-middleclass families could afford one, which explains why it sold so well in Europe at the time (it also helped that it reached here before the C64 and the MSX). The Spectrum also has different resolutions which tend to give its graphics apparently a less pixelated look, but the palette is almost residual and the original 48K had very basic sound capabilities (being only marginally better than the laughable PC Speaker). However, with such limited resources, programmers did some amazing things. Many of the games from the time were incredibly well made, if you can forgive the lacklustre graphics and the meagre sound effects. Some people say that the Spectrum was never meant to be a games machine with such limited abilities, but - maybe because of that - the games excelled at what really counts: playability. These days, a passionate and dedicated community still pours out exceedingly good games for this old machine. Games like Aliens: Neoplasma, Apulija-13, Balachor's Revenge, BeTiled!, Biniax 2, Cannon Bubble, Car Wars, Catacombs of Balachor, Castlevania - Special Interlude, the Farmer Jack series, Fire and Ice, Flynn's Adventure in Bombland, Gloop Troops, Invasion of the Zombie Monsters, L'Abbaye des Morts, Los Amores de Brunilda, Majikazo, Ninjajar!, The Sword of Ianna, Vera, Willy the Wasp, Yumiko in the Haunted Mansion, zblast SD and Zombie Calavera are all AMAZING! Download and see for yourself. They're FREE!

These new games add to the original games library that already had games like: Afteroids, Arkanoid, Badlands, Batman - The Movie, Bomb Jack, Boulder Dash, Bruce Lee, Bubble Bobble, Buggy Boy, Bumpy, Cabal, Canyon Warrior, Championship Sprint, Chevy Chase, Chuckie Egg, Commando, Cue Boy, Cybernoid I & II, Daley Thompson's Decathlon, Fantasy World Dizzy, Dragon Spirit, Flying Shark, Gauntlet II, Golden Axe, Gryzor, Gunfighter, GunRunner, H.A.T.E., H.E.R.O., Hobgoblin, Light Force, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Mad Mix, Miami Cobra GT, Ms Pac-Man, Operation Wolf, Pac-Mania, Pang, Paradise Café (XXX), Pinball Power, Plotting, Power Drift, Prince of Persia, Puzznic, Rainbow Islands, Rick Dangerous I & II, Robotron 2048, Rod-Land, Saint Dragon, Shadow of the Beast, Shinobi, Silkworm, Skate Crazy, Stunt Car Racer, Super Cars, Super Hang-On, Super Trux, SWIV, Target Renegade, The Addams Family, The Great Escape, The New Zealand Story, The Way of the Exploding Fist I & II, Trashman, Turbo Kart Racer, Turbo the Tortoise, WEC Le Mans, Zombi, etc... All excellent and highly recommended games for a very limited machine.

Sure, nostalgia plays a huge role. Maybe newcomers won't find the "it" factor in Spectrum games and will dismiss them altogether, but for me - and others like me - they are truly amazing and I only wish we, in the Amiga community, had the same quality and quantity output as the Spectrum community does. Granted, it's much easier to program games for the old Speccy than for the mammoth Amiga, but one can still dream, can he not?

[Devo]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

You heard wrong, Devo. The colour palette of the Spectrum is almost incommensurable worse than that of the C64. The C64 was a much better designed computer as a whole and had much better graphical and musical abilities.

Okay, well I heard one guy say it was much more colorful, and he probably had Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome due to his alcoholism and/or encroaching senility

[Dunny]

The Speccy palette went for either 0 or full values in the R,G and B parts of the colour palette - so while the c64 got a reasonable approximation of a skin tone, we got bright purple. There were 8 colours, with a further 8 being slightly brighter. So yeah, the palette was very bright and colourful, but not terribly realistic.

At least until the new ULA64 came out, which enables the Speccy to output the same colours as the C64, and 64 colours onscreen at that. Still has the highres pixels+attribute squares issue though, which a number of people have gotten around rather well of late.

What would be good is if the Amiga had anything like the games creator packages that the Speccy has. The games being made on them are pretty stunning in the main, and all run on the original unexpanded hardware - unlike the games creation packages for the Amiga which require upwards of an '030 to be anything like playable.

[005AGIMA]

Did someone say Spectrum?

Here's some recent Spectrum news. Prototype given to museum.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/0...ype_laid_bare/

[hexaae]

ISSUE WITH ZXSpin + SPEEDLINK COMPETITION PRO EXTRA JOYSTICK

I've bought a new Speedlink USB Competition Pro Extra joystick (SL-650212-BKRD) because old Speedlink SL-6603-Sports-Eu was at a dead end… Unfortunately this new version gets identified by Win 10 as "Game Controller for Android" with 15 buttons (?) etc. and the problem is it has bad default buttons mapping thought for lefties…

In brief: how can I remap Kempston joystick Fire button 0 with ZX-Spin? I tried but Fire 0 seems not editable...

[Dunny]

I added Joysticks to ZXSpin pretty much as an afterthought, so it's not as friendly as it should be. If you have the joystick set to kempston emulation then you can't redefine it. You have to select a "User Defined" stick and then click on "Define" but this only allows for keyboard presses.

[hexaae]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I added Joysticks to ZXSpin pretty much as an afterthought, so it's not as friendly as it should be. If you have the joystick set to kempston emulation then you can't redefine it. You have to select a "User Defined" stick and then click on "Define" but this only allows for keyboard presses.

Time for a small update to implement Kempston fire button editing too under Extra Buttons?

[Dunny]

I have the sources ready to go on a VM with the old IDE installed, but tbh the Spectrum scene has become so damned toxic of late I'm reluctant to bother...

And besides, I'm still heavily involved with my current Speccy inspired project at present.

[hexaae]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I have the sources ready to go on a VM with the old IDE installed, but tbh the Spectrum scene has become so damned toxic of late I'm reluctant to bother...

And besides, I'm still heavily involved with my current Speccy inspired project at present.

Please
Your ZXSpin is still the best available on Windows offering all required features… If you could make Kemspton Fire button editable and remappable to any other joystick button it would be very useful for weird controllers…
And if you could add the options to quickly switch between ULA/standard modes under menu "View" (or a new "Display" sub-menu under "Emulation" menu...) would be even better

[Dunny]

As soon as I'm happy that SpecBAS has matured, then I may go back to ZXSpin. There's a veritable shitload of issues that Win10 has brought to the table that need addressing.

[hexaae]

WOW! Didn't know SpecBAS… is incredible!

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

The colour palette of the Spectrum is almost incommensurable worse than that of the C64.

You've GOT to be joking, Pilot! True, the Speccy palette is a basic RGB palette, but it's certainly more colourful than the awful colours chosen for the C64 which were meant to work best on NTSC and look bloody awful on PAL: it's either those awful browns, or purplish blue or bright lime green yellows. Ugh!

Luckily, I had the Atari 8-Bit in my youth, much more rounded palette.

[Retro-Nerd]

You've GOT to be joking, Pilot! True, the Speccy palette is a basic RGB palette, but it's certainly more colourful than the awful colours chosen for the C64 which were meant to work best on NTSC and look bloody awful on PAL: it's either those awful browns, or purplish blue or bright lime green yellows. Ugh!

This is complete nonsense. The C64 PAL colors are pretty good. Of course not if you judge by emulation only with this horrible looking Pepto PAL palette.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

This is complete nonsense. The C64 PAL colors are pretty good. Of course not if you judge by emulation only with this horrible looking Pepto PAL palette.

I'm not using emulation, I'm going by YouTube channels that claim to use real VIC-II in their videos, namely a channel called "C64 Studio" among others. Those colours look awful, only suited to one type of image, like a theme, except everything's like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...dware_graphics

These palettes show what 8-bit systems can be capable of, and to be honest, the PAL C64 is the dullest of them all, in my honest opinion. I like colour palettes that feature a wide range of colours, like the Atari 8-Bit and the C-16 and Plus/4 on the Commodore side. At least with some systems, you have a limited number of colours on screen but a larger range to choose from for each one, and it's these that I think are the best option. A nice even RGB range is also preferred, and the Speccy and the Amstrad CPC have those.

As far as I know, the 16 C64 colours were chosen by resistor values and they tried to feature as vast a range as possible, and to be honest, as can be seen here, they look nice on NTSC:



Unfortunately, the C64 NTSC palette turns to murkier, browner colours when converted to PAL:



(I have it on good authority that these are real h/w colours)

Aren't they worse? Maybe if someone's grown up with using such a palette, they won't have such an issue, same with Speccy owners and their bright, primary-coloured RGB palette. But if you haven't used those systems for a long time, then they can be quite jarring. I find the Speccy palette colourful, but then I grew up using an Atari 8-Bit machine.