My 3D maze game for the ZX Spectrum | Hacker News Reader

My 3D maze game for the ZX Spectrum

jamesmead.org

77 pointstodsacerdoti21 comments

I recently stumbled over a 3D maze game from 1982 on 8-bit Ataris which pretty much blew my mind because of how advanced it looked for the year 1982 running on an 8-bit home computer designed in the late 70's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmfNMo6kHpA

It might not be the first "3D" maze game, but I think it's the first one with free movement and camera rotation?

Not bad at all for 1982. I almost have a hard time believing it

Probably helped a lot by the Atari 400/800/XL/XE hardware architecture [1], which was basically the Amiga's little 8-bit brother (same design team). For instance there was a display list coprocessor which worked much like the Amiga's copper and could modify display attributes independent from the CPU. Of course I don't know how much of this was actually used in this Wayout game.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_family

Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Very Wolfenstein-esque. I don't think I could deal with the sound effects for very long, but you can always turn the volume down and put on some music instead to enjoy the 3D graphics.

Interesting! I was exposed to a "3D" dungeon crawler (Wizardry[0]) on the Apple II in September of the same year.

I do wonder if 3D Monster Maze truly qualifies as "the world's first ever 3D game on a home computer" given that the lead programmer didn't own one of the machines until April of '81 and that the commercial release occurred the following year (at least according to the article on Wikipedia - the sidebar says published 1981 so it's contradictory).

The birthday anecdote seems plausible but if Wizardry was in development for more than six months then it predates 3D Monster Maze.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry

In any case the 8-bit-micro maze games are all handily predated by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War , which unlike all of them (AFAIK) is also a head-to-head multiplayer shooter with netplay, a much more direct precedent for the ID and post-ID FPSes.

The thing that's underpraised about 3D Monster Maze is the quality of the writing and art. It's an (AFAICT) pretty unusual early highpoint of comic storytelling in computer games, which in some ways makes it as much the forerunner of Portal as anything else.

The zx81 game 3D monster maze was my first experience of actually being frightened of the outcome of a computer game - despite the graphics being almost non-existent, the way the text came up about it just terrified my 10 year old self!

How times have changed - I wouldn't mention to my kids that this used to scare me,they'd laugh themselves to death!

Sorry to misuse this for asking a slightly unrelated question. There may be people with knowledge of the ZX81 reading now, so here we go: I remember vaguely that on the ZX81 if you pressed a key too hard, the computer would perform a hard reset. I am pretty sure that this was how my friend's ZX81 behaved, but I would like to know if this was only on his computer or if this was a general problem with the ZX81. Does anybody know?

If you had a ram expansion pack fitted an overly enthusiastic key press could cause it to wobble - it was only held in place by a connector which fitted onto the zx81’s circuit board iirc, and that could cause a power cycle

Can confirm, definitely RAM pack wobble. Still makes me shudder!

Memotech solved this problem by having a lower-profile RAM pack that included a piece of Velcro so the connector stayed secure.

https://www.nightfallcrew.com/27/09/2013/memotech-memopack-1...

IIRC there were ribbon cables for sale you could use to attach the ram pack to the zx81, eliminating the wobble. I seem to remember seeing ads for those in the back of some magazines. I know it was all about cost, but had Sinclair just bundled a ribbon cable connector, the entire "wobblegate" would never have been a thing.

Yes, I remember my friend who had the ZX81 originally took great pains to make sure the table was stable and you shouldn't knock it - we didn't realise how serious it was until it died when we were typing code in and it died.

I think his dad ended up taping it in place so that it was less likely.

Can concur with all the other responders to this post. You could buy official "wobble stoppers", but my dad made one from corrugated cardboard and a LOT of gaffer tape.

I used to type programme listings† in, blind, while my family watched something on TV. When I thought I was done, I'd ask them to switch the aerial cable over so we could play whatever game I believed I'd transcribed. Having suffered from unknown RAM pack wobble during the process was gutting, but on the flipside it was amazing when I'd got it right, or almost right - and whatever mistakes I'd made forced me to learn how to debug software. A skill that pays the bills almost 40 years on :)

† from ZX Computing, or some multi-platform books from the library

Awesome story, especially that blind typing.

In Germany later (for the C64) we had a computer magazine that listed programs in hex code. There was a special hex editor to input these programs and each line had a check sum, so we could easily see if there was a typo in our program. But at one time there was a typo in the printed hex code, oh dear...

Funny the mention of the surviving copies being the Portuguese translation.

I started computing around 1986, the books from Tempos Livres were available in most libraries.

I only got a couple of them, occasional bought by my parents as gifts, and nowadays when I happen to see one in a some book fair where they are trying to get rid of them, I rescue them from certain death.

If anyone remembers Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80 Color Computer I think it was me if the most impressive maze games I ever played on an 80s PC. Some links below. The author released the original 6809 assembly language code and there have been some efforts to port (totally rewrite) it for modern systems, some starting links below, but pretty amazing for the 80s and I wasted a lot of time playing it, and it always amazed all my buddies with Atari 2600s or Apple IIs. Along with Dino Wars probably one of the most unique games ever released for the CoCo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath https://youtu.be/sQKQHKdWTRs https://github.com/DungeonsOfDaggorath/DungeonsOfDaggorath.g...

So weirdly I have this book, its the one thing I kept from my spectrum days. Does anyone want it?

Yes, please and thank you (email in profile)! I have fond memories of using my ZX Spectrum 48K. I still have it in working condition, just need to find a PAL to NTSC converter.

I would absolutely put this to good use if it’s not taken already — website in my profile.

Maybe send it to Jason Scott at the Internet Archive so it can be seen by everyone?

ok thank you

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