Nirvana Engine for ZX Spectrum (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Nirvana Engine for ZX Spectrum (2013)

irrlichtproject.blogspot.com

70 pointsbane14 comments

When I was in my teens I bough a book called "Advanced Spectrum Machine Language" by David Webb (IIRC) and it had examples of a rainbow processor (high-res colour by repeatedly writing to the attributes file quickly) and a full-screen horizon (by flipping the border colour bit at the right time). I've often wondered what other tricks were possible. For example, would it be possible to mix colours by changing the attributes on successive frames? So you could, for example, make orange by mixing red and yellow?

I had that book! Programming books were generally out of my budget back then, but I saved up for that one, which I recall being full of incredibly clever tricks. I wonder if this is the same David Webb - I guess it probably is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Webb_%28Hong_Kong_activi...

I think switching between colours at 25hz would give you pretty horrible flicker, although maybe we would have forgiven that in the Spectrum era.

Wow, this is pretty amazing, haha. Can't wait for the latest ZX Spectrum games to take advantage of this!

Hmm, I wonder how/if it affects performance. No catch besides the RAM usage?

It relies on the colour attributes being twiddled every few scanlines, so I'd be rather sceptical of its applications. That said, there is a video of it running here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQajN1XWzJY (on a 48k Speccy no less), and it looks rather performant.

Was just looking at a review for a new game, Stormfinch, which uses this engine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2sd2FNPTBs

It's clearly a little clunkier than monochrome or simple colour attribute shooters, but still pretty competent.

Some of those sound effects are AY-8192 sounding to me, explosions on the spectrum were never like that.

The Spectrum 128 contained an AY-8192, so you are right on the money. Earlier models were beeper only.

They added an AY chip to the Spectrum starting from the 128K model I think. It was also available as an add-on to the original 48K.

Clunkier. Yep. Doesn't look near as good as the 'real' Spectrum R-Type.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6lvAXSGBpI

I think it's the blocky movement that kinda kills it for me.

Perhaps I'm missing something but the video you linked to seems to have blocky movement as well.

Spectrum clock rate covers a multitude of ills.

Dream Walker: Alter Ego 2 as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYufMwAxOl4

Ugh, but that leaves little CPU time for actual game logic. This new trend of devs sacrificing gameplay in order to push more colours to the screen is ludicrous. Next year they'll just be selling games that have no actual gameplay, but are just long animated movies!

Splendiferous.

ZX Spectrum wins again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com