Hacker News Reader

Comment by jug | Hacker News Reader

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com