Dreams of childhood about creating a game on the ZX-Spectrum
Hello, residents of the Habrasociety.
I wanted to write this post by reading the post Computer gaming - paper and felt-tip pens .
My first computer, the Great ZX-Spectrum, appeared around 1992. Of course, at first I played it all day, but then I got carried away with Basic and programming. I wrote all sorts of programs for myself and rejoiced until I saw a friend on his super i386 2mb game, or rather GAMES - WarCraft I and UFO. And so I wanted something like that bright, beautiful and exciting to be on my Old Man Spectrum and in about the year 96 I wanted to make the Game for myself - WarCrafter;)
Caution, little traffic!
He began to create sprites, to select the sizes and aspect ratio of units and buildings. The castle turned out to be the largest - 7x8 familiarity, in the middle of the picture there is a mine, a ram of castles to the right of it, a little higher there are viewing-defense towers, a house of peasants, a catapult, a ballista, from above it is a farm :)
Pictures from the text are clickable Then I started the animation - stages construction of buildings, marinas and other structures. All construction was supposed to be animated: Then he drew the stages of the castle construction, estimated the sizes of buildings and moving objects:
Explanation of the following picture. Combat units are represented either by pictograms, both in the case of a knight and a Viking, and by a picture, in the case of a catapult. Then there are the tasks of the arrays of the game world, according to which animals and buildings will be placed. I couldn’t do AI, so the game implied a 2-person game, where the color of the border would indicate the player who makes the move: Then I started doing game control, scrolling cards, selecting units, controlling units: Taxes ... Next TTX units, technical aspects of unit movement , conventions in the world data array:
And finally, after all the preparatory stages, the actual code on Basic'e itself. At that time, I was still interested in the chic LaserBasic thing - this is the BASIC compiler, the compiled code worked much faster, but after loading the LaserBasic RAM there was catastrophically little. Therefore, I had to abandon it and write in the only language available to me then - the Great and Terrible BASIC. Everything went fine, the code was written quickly and vigorously (in those days I could not take my eyes off doing hours of work and redoing), everything was wonderful, but ... 48 Kilobyte Spectrum was not enough for such a "global")) project on Basic, was done about 20-30% of the code and 90% of the pictures. About 3 months were killed for everything. UPD: A good article about the Spectrum on Ferra , thanks comrade Levsha100
Thanks to comrade piroJOKE for reminding me of an interesting site with Spectrum games that you can play directly on the site. For nostalgic.
UPD2:
myspeccy.com seems to have gone down from the habraeffect, periodically informs me that it is Drupal and you all go by the forest.
UPD3:
I had a self-soldering spektrum on the Leningrad BIOS board of 1990, the double sign from the cassette was supported by the “-” sign. By the sign "*" a memory editor was available. On the advice of a friend, I soldered the toggle switch to the processor legs to cause an NMI non-maskable interrupt. It seems like an analogue to minimize the game, then "*" go in to see the contents of the game in a hex editor. Rules in this way money in SimCity.
I reread this book hundreds of times:
I wanted to write this post by reading the post Computer gaming - paper and felt-tip pens .
My first computer, the Great ZX-Spectrum, appeared around 1992. Of course, at first I played it all day, but then I got carried away with Basic and programming. I wrote all sorts of programs for myself and rejoiced until I saw a friend on his super i386 2mb game, or rather GAMES - WarCraft I and UFO. And so I wanted something like that bright, beautiful and exciting to be on my Old Man Spectrum and in about the year 96 I wanted to make the Game for myself - WarCrafter;)
Caution, little traffic!
He began to create sprites, to select the sizes and aspect ratio of units and buildings. The castle turned out to be the largest - 7x8 familiarity, in the middle of the picture there is a mine, a ram of castles to the right of it, a little higher there are viewing-defense towers, a house of peasants, a catapult, a ballista, from above it is a farm :)
Pictures from the text are clickable Then I started the animation - stages construction of buildings, marinas and other structures. All construction was supposed to be animated: Then he drew the stages of the castle construction, estimated the sizes of buildings and moving objects:
Explanation of the following picture. Combat units are represented either by pictograms, both in the case of a knight and a Viking, and by a picture, in the case of a catapult. Then there are the tasks of the arrays of the game world, according to which animals and buildings will be placed. I couldn’t do AI, so the game implied a 2-person game, where the color of the border would indicate the player who makes the move: Then I started doing game control, scrolling cards, selecting units, controlling units: Taxes ... Next TTX units, technical aspects of unit movement , conventions in the world data array:
And finally, after all the preparatory stages, the actual code on Basic'e itself. At that time, I was still interested in the chic LaserBasic thing - this is the BASIC compiler, the compiled code worked much faster, but after loading the LaserBasic RAM there was catastrophically little. Therefore, I had to abandon it and write in the only language available to me then - the Great and Terrible BASIC. Everything went fine, the code was written quickly and vigorously (in those days I could not take my eyes off doing hours of work and redoing), everything was wonderful, but ... 48 Kilobyte Spectrum was not enough for such a "global")) project on Basic, was done about 20-30% of the code and 90% of the pictures. About 3 months were killed for everything. UPD: A good article about the Spectrum on Ferra , thanks comrade Levsha100
Thanks to comrade piroJOKE for reminding me of an interesting site with Spectrum games that you can play directly on the site. For nostalgic.
UPD2:
myspeccy.com seems to have gone down from the habraeffect, periodically informs me that it is Drupal and you all go by the forest.
UPD3:
I had a self-soldering spektrum on the Leningrad BIOS board of 1990, the double sign from the cassette was supported by the “-” sign. By the sign "*" a memory editor was available. On the advice of a friend, I soldered the toggle switch to the processor legs to cause an NMI non-maskable interrupt. It seems like an analogue to minimize the game, then "*" go in to see the contents of the game in a hex editor. Rules in this way money in SimCity.
I reread this book hundreds of times: