A true marvel on ZX Spectrum

[rothers]

I love how active the Speccy scene is. It's pretty easy to code for it in assembler, the learning curve is a lot lower than the Amiga.

This new engine is great, I'm loving all the new stuff, Super Mario Bros, 'Nothing' and now this. Awesome.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

I have this faint memory that either Hyper Sports or a different game from the same time (possibly same magazine, said magazine possibly being C&VG) back then had such a more advanced software driven screenmode. The C= 64 famously have many such modes used in demos (very cpu intensive and timing critical).

So i remember Chinese Juggler that did show the juggler in two colors while still, then there was a single screen chopper game where two sprites were alternated as fast as possible to show two colors
And some colored text in Uridium, but that was it.
Me and a friend of mine thought there was a way to do something like Nirvana Engine did, but had no sufficient knowledge of interrupts to put that in practice

[ImmortalA1000]

C64 has two resolutions (320x200 and 160x200) and 3 screen mode types (character, character with extended background colour, bitmap), giving 5 screen modes as extended background colour mode only works in 320x200 hi-res.

Color RAM is also another 1kb 40x25 character resolution overlay that is optional on standard character based screens. Problem always was Color RAM is fixed and there is a few cycles short of enough CPU time to scroll a 1kb character screen and 1kb Color RAM for that screen in the full 40x25 character screen.

Almost all games use the most crap mode, 1kb multicolor 160x200 mode which heavily restricts your choice of the free colour for each 4x8 pixel charblock to palette entries 0-7, the background and global multicolor 1 and 2 being fixed per scanline/screen, hence the greys/browns myth of the C64 video hardware....that's down to underwhelming coding talent or 1983 Apple II quality as I like to call it.

You can fake an 80x50 resolution with PETSCII characters though.

[DisasterIncarna]

even the sound/music sounds decent, rare i hear something audio'wise that i like the sound of on a speccy, that or i am only familiar with the older/original speccys and have no idea about the later ones.

[ImmortalA1000]

There was a Spectrum 128k specific version of Xenon, David Whittaker's YM and AY tunes for ZX/CPC/ST was awesome, far superior to the underwhelming SID composer converting the tune to the C64 version

[burma-shave]

I love the graphical style of this game. If I remember correctly, the manual actually suggests sitting back a bit from the monitor for the best experience! Great music and graphics and a very playable game underneath.