/vr/ - Retro Games

Without the exclamation point it loses its soul, it needs to be called Zniggy!™

obviously it needs to be a manic miner / jet set willy clone

but does anyone actually want to waste time creating a game so awful nobody wants to play it even for the novelty?

is it "zed niggy" or "zuh-niggy"?

>>5620648
The latter is how I pronounce it personally. With a cheerful "zuh-niggy"!

>>5620648
It's actually pronounced "Sniggy" as the word originates from some bullshit language where Zs are pronounced like an S. It's also a convenient filter to root out those who aren't TRUE fans of the series.

>>5620645

A benefit to this approach would be that you could easily divide the game world into one screen rooms and give each to a different anon.

Even so, 4chan-based collective games are hard to pull off and it'll likely fail. Remember Vidyamon?

if we actually want to do this, would we try to make it as awful as possible or make it actually good, defying the meme?

>>5620591
OP will soon know what it's like for parents with a stillborn birth. It's sad all around. RIP Zniggy!

>>5620694
what a shame

https://github.com/WHumphreys/Manic-Miner-Source-Code
Get to it zniggers

I was imagining some anon composing a banging SID chiptune that would blast through speakers during the gameplay.
Then I remembered Zniggy! is about a ZX Spectrum game.

>>5620748
instead it will sound like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t8XVKB0ZAc

>>5620591
I know how to program the ZX spectrum, the Z80 is pretty comfy with its 8/16bit registers and addressing modes.

but the zx spectrum emulators are all donkey shit
no normie will ever touch that
actually no neet incel will touch it either
its just so fucking unusable and shit to set up.

I suggest we just make a game that looks like it would run on the zx spectrum.

heres a mockup at the correct resolution and color limitations
what do you think

>>5620818
a walk animation using 3 frames for feet kek

>>5620640
You're right, I apologize

>>5620836
with some extra headbob and arms

well gonna stop posting since i get 0 yous

>>5620818
Yeah, making it look like a shitty Speccy game but actually putting it up in something like Unity is the only way to make things happen

>>5620849
Do your thang, do whatcha gonna do
Do your thang, do what ya wanna do now

Important aspects of Zniggy! gameplay:

1. Controls and jumping controls stiffier than first NES Castlevania
2. You press Up to jump
3. No mid-air jump control
4. Insta-death from falling of a small height
5. A forced/artificial delay on the buttons input
6. Ear-piercing shriek with reverb and delay every time Zniggy! jumps
7. Collecting items commences only when you stand in front of the item and press the button, walking through the item does shit
8. Bad decisions concerning color pallettes (first of all we have to get rid of this stupid Speccy trend of having black backgrounds; make 'em pink or cyan for more Znigginess)
9. Bad scaling ("small" enemies bigger than house or tree sprites etc.)
10. Unappealing enemy sprites such as randomly generated pixels, blocks and rectangles put together with no design, floating balls and triangles
11. A 1-bit monophonic rendition/butchering of "For Elise" as the background music (preferably only first two bars looped into infinity)
12. Random crashes occuring during gameplay for no apparent reason
13. One live, no continues
14. Game over means kicking you out from the game forcing you to boot it and load all over again

>>5620818
A+ plus for effort man, it looks really nice and I really appreciate what you've done so far. But I guess if you switched the colors around to make it less pleasing to the eye it would stay more faithful to Zniggy's description.

>displayed in a vomit-inducing colour palette consisting of baby blue, puke yellow and eye-rape red

All the colors are there, but I think the biggest issue here is that they make sense. I've uploaded the Boulder Dash ZX Spectrum image in the other thread where the ground you dig through is yellow and the boulders are red. I'd say you should take that as an inspiration for companies releasing games on that micro computer not giving a fuck about consistency.
Also, needs more gems/jewels.

>>5620916
definitely should be an insufferable platformer
the hardware is so weak the stiff movement is pretty much required.
I'd do something almost like those cinematic platformers like Flashback, where per-pixel movement is impossible, and you always step an entire tile.
but i still want (you)s for my artwork

>>5620818
>>5620836
>>5620849
>>5620856
>>5620868
Well done, but the effort to make a bad game doesn't seem worth it

>>5620940
On second thought, I don't know much about color limitations on the ZX Spectrum though. That might've made sense, given the restraints. I dunno.

>>5620940
headache inducing u say?
>>5620949
it doesnt have to be a bad game tho
it just cant be a good game
and it wont be a good game anyway
it will be mediocre to poor

>>5620952
2 per 8x8 tile out of a palette of 8
though you have some brightness bit giving u 16 colors, two of which are black i believe
its pretty awful
no hardware sprites either

>>5620818
>zniggy uses 2 colors
as soon as he starts moving those colors are going to fuck up as he goes over the attribute grid

>zniggy has a likable sprite
here, let me show you how it's done, lad

>>5621108
based

>>5621108
kek

>>5621108
this is more accurate anyway

>>5621108
kek you got me that looks terrible
though there is nothing wrong with a little attribute clash just makes the game seem even worse

>>5621108
that's what I call a british scotformer

>>5621108
Just like my British video games

>>5621108
I gave it an animation
how did u get so good at british art?

>>5621195
too smooth, this isn't the ps4 wtf dude

Would someone be willing to make an outstanding cover art for Zniggy to promote a shitty video game? It was all the rage back in the day and it would bait people to buy the product.

I propose the word "zniggy" to be used as general purpose noun/verb and should be used gratuitously. Every time you collect an item or die or pretty much anything happens the screen needs to go blank and have some text slowly typewriter in:

"What the zniggy was that!?"
"Things are getting a bit zniggy!"
"I've got a zniggy feeling about this!"

The game should have a horrible CRT shader built in that you have to play with. As ugly of a color palette as possible. Can the green here >>5620970 be even brighter? The game should be literally pretty much unplayable.

You guys are so fucking annoying. Yes, let's waste our effort making an intentionally shitty game so everyone can laugh for a few minutes and then forget about it for the rest of time. Why make an actual game that might even be good when we can just do this IRONIC HUMOR shit?? LOL!!!!!

>>5621229
nobody is actually going to make anything

>>5621229
Who invited the no-fun shitter?

>>5620591
more like zNIGGER haha

>>5620836
actually made me kek

>>5620719
>no ChexQuest man
>no Twinsen

>>5620694
>Bomberman doesnt evolve into Lode Runner
Pleb.

my sides

are in orbit

>>5621403
This is some znigging I can get behind.

>>5621394

>>5620818
>>5620860
Unity is worse. The Retroarch Speccy core is perfectly usable (unlike the god awful C64 core), so lets fucking code this bastard in BASIC. Then if we actually get anything finished we can bully some old boomer youtubers into playing it on the original hardware.

m8 these zx spectrum games are no walk in the park

>>5621448
this is looking znigtastic

but what about zniggy 2

>>5621216
I love this so fucking much. Here's your (You) of endorsement.

have to implement attribute clashing

lets say if you go to the left (off screen) you also lose with
"That's not the zniggy way!"

>>5620949
>>5621236
>>5621229
No one cares what you think. It's already happening. Drink piss!

Instead of "I got a zniggy feeling" it should be "Oroight now's feelin' wee bit zniggy innit"

>>5621512
you got a loisens for 'at znig?

>>5621537
"damn zniggers" could be "bloody zniggers"

>>5621545
anyone know the fps of the spectrum? is it like 20?

>Racist alt-right website know as "4Chan" creates racist video game

>>5621491
>no free roaming allowed
I thought this would be a willyvania

>>5620591
im unironically scared that the game would be good and the meme would stop being funny

I think Zniggy! should also have areas that would punish you by missing a jump by depleting all your lives while displaying a taunting message followed up by a seizure inducing death screen.

>>5620591
Platago is bascially for making yuroshit 'collect gems and open door' games

It's still languishing on my steam account. If I'm bored i might make a Zniggy! on it

>>5621630
>DIE MORTAL
>seizure screen
want to lol but head hurts

>>5621648
Yeah, ZX Spectrum games could be dicks, Jet Set Willy in particular, couldn't be beaten in it's released state, there was a massive bug that made it impossible to compete, to a point where a competition for people to complete the game only had like two winners who changed the code of the game itself to make it, you know, beatable.

Anyways, honestly, i know being a bad game is the meme and all, but it kinda feels like a waste of time to make something bad when we could make something good instead.

You still see people being shocked at how Katawa Shoujo was made in an ImageBoard and they love that game, and i would rather see at least a decent platformer than a mess.

>>5621623
>>5621698
it needs to be good, but it an ugly, zniggy way.

also it needs to be made to actually run on a ZX Spectrum, not this Unity shit. as soon as I can be assed to figure out how it all works I'll start coding. it shouldn't take more than a week for something this basic, then we can design all the levels and shitty graphics as a collaboration.

>>5621698
All I know is that I've always laughed at seizure-flashes until witnessing that abominable thing.

>>5621698
>Anyways, honestly, i know being a bad game is the meme and all, but it kinda feels like a waste of time to make something bad when we could make something good instead.

Holy shit. What a fucking faggot. Dude, get the fuck out of the thread and go make your own then. You obviously don't have the sense of humor needed to be involved and NO ONE wants your input. Mongoloid.

>>5621724
I'm starting to think there's just one guy who goes around making these low IQ, high anger posts in every thread, on purpose, to shit up the board. Is that you, Xbox anon?

>>5621715
We only talked about Unity because ZX Spectrum emulators aren't that great or easy to use, for some reason, the guys who would make a ZX Spectrum emulator make it hard to even do something like rebind keys, then again, i haven't tried that paid emulator.

That, plus with Unity everyone can play the game and maybe sell it on some storefronts like Steam and GOG, then again, Micro Mages, a homebrew game for the NES, is on Steam and comes with an emulator to play it.

>>5622303
>unity
>need an i5 4690k and a gtx 970 to play a zedecks looking game

nani the fucc

>>5623092
We could use GameMaker.

>>5623505
I would totally make this game as an exercise in using NESmaker, but fuck paying 36 shekels for a program. I also don't know if the program would allow you to arbitrarily clash attributes speccy style.

>>5621590
Probably should have posted this before the "damn zniggers" gif.

Alright, no joke. What the fuck is it with ZX Spectrum fans? How is it that a bunch of Brits are so nostalgic for a shitty microcomputer that can barely even hold memory, to the point where they'll immediately disregard any game that came out later (And therefore, immediately more fun)?

>>5623935
Nostalgia's a hell of a drug.

>>5623935
A lot of people do seem to play other games or no longer play ZX Spectrum except for nostalgic purposes, it's just that there is still a loyal community in Britain and Spain that can't stop making games for it and talking about it.

Though those are only some fans, the Retro Gamer magazine is made by people who grew up with microcomputers but they play everything else and they get many letters of people who do talk about playing ZX Spectrum as kids but moving on.

Still, yeah, it's a system that seems to only attract people who grew up with it, even it's classics like Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy aren't considered that fun nowadays.

>>5623935

I'm so dead inside that the only games I enjoy anymore have a novelty factor, and the Spectrum is good on that front. It's like an alternate history system, full of genres and tropes that never escaped the 8 bit computing era.

>>5624009
I dig the honeycomb UI

something that HAS to be in is the game saying "fuck you" and making you go through it twice a la Ghosts n Goblins

>>5621630
>>5624037
Proposition to combine these ideas and have it so that if you fall in on the 2nd run, you have to re-do the first one again.

>>5623935
Britcucks are retarded, more at 11.

>>5620916
It absolutely needs an enthusiastic but distorted British voice sample exclaiming the game title on the intro screen:

https://youtu.be/HEuaKu0r3o4

>>5624284
"Oi m8, it's Zniggy innit?"

>>5620694

Another perk is that literally anything can be an enemy as long as it's programmed to move back and forth. Search google images for a random object from your game's setting, shrink it, make it 2 colors, there's your enemy.

Perhaps you could ask people in a speccy development forum about how to make zx emulation normie friendly. The reason why spectrum games are so awful is because any retard who has a semblance of knowledge of the English language could program their own game, and using a tool like unity or game maker would take away from that. It was a combination of both awful hardware and amateur programmers, so making a modern game larping as an old game while you intentionally design a game like a soon to be truck of peace'd brit kinda misses the point.

>>5623984
It's nowhere near as fun to program as the C64 and Atari 8-bit with their custom chips.

Programming the stuff is cake compared to the 80s with the primitive tools they had to work with. Imagine plotting your graphics out on graph paper.

>>5624009
You wouldn't be able to do this intro on a C64 due to its sprite and tile graphics as opposed to the Speccy's bitmaps.

I suggest to anyone interested in getting anything done, make a video instead. Find a bong to narrate the image and someone to animate the "game", much easier than finding someone to actually program it. That way people will actually see it too

>>5624764
>much easier than finding someone to actually program it
It can take weeks of work to get a game engine up and running.

>>5621104
Sound is also a one channel bleeper that stops everything when you use it just like on the Apple II.

>>5621104

You also can't have 2 brightness levels in the same 8x8 block.

It's actually not that big of an issue in games that don't scroll their backgrounds (like the ones that Zniggy is inspired by), but if it does scroll your options are either the Dan Dare 3/R-Type method of limiting scrolling to 8x8 chunks (which looks like crap but at least makes for pretty screenhots), or just making the playable area monochrome.

>>5624764
>>5624870
Thanks for your opinion, but it's going to happen. Chuffed me'a don't care how long it takes or how knackered a'meh be after the journey yuh see here. Prepare for zniggy threads for the rest of your bloody /vr/ existence faggot.

>>5621104

You also can't have 2 brightness levels in the same 8x8 block.

It's actually not that big of an issue in games that don't scroll their backgrounds (like the ones that Zniggy is inspired by), but if it does scroll your options are either the Dan Dare 3/R-Type method of limiting scrolling to 8x8 chunks (which looks like crap but at least makes for pretty screenhots), or just making the playable area monochrome.

>>5624947

You could get some impressive music out of that beeper (see Tim Follin's work on the 48k), but only when the CPU's not needed for anything else, like title screens. Only a few games were foolhardy enough to try using it during gameplay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZYuGUCrkoU

>>5625194

I think you could also change the color attributes between scanlines, a technique known as "rainbow processing". Again, it wasn't feasible for actual gameplay, but it broke up the monotony a bit.

>>5620748
You can make a banging tune on a ZX, just look at that Doom prototype.

>>5625203

That was on a 128k Spectrum, which had an actual soundchip. Most zniggy-core games came out too early to use it.

>>5625206
Fair enough.

You guys should check out AGDx Studio, it looks like it'd be great for making Speccy games in a GUI environment:

https://github.com/tonyt73/AGD-Studio
https://highriser.itch.io/agdx-latest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoktghhM9Mk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22Fr_siCFD0

what do we put on the title screen though? just "made by /vr/"? do we make up some shitty name like katawa shoujo did? Zniggy! Team?

>>5626170
Speccy publishers/developers normally had names with words like Micro-, -Tronics and -Byte in them

>>5626170
Zniggy! STARRING Zniggy
>>/vr/

>>5626192
Megaprose Intertronics

I really want to see this happen. Is there any real development going on?

>>5626329
So far, we are just talking about it and what to use to make the game, i don't even know if the game is supposed to be terrible or not, but i prefer the game to be good for my part.

I mean, we have the character Zniggy i guess, but we still need the actual theme of the game and the enemies, we haven't decided what any room will be like or it's names.

Zniggy could pass in rooms full of meme titles and enemies for all i know, or pass through rooms referencing other Speccy games.

Best case scenario, we pick up retro gaming since it's what this board is dedicated to, and have Zniggy go through rooms dedicated to famous games in history and enemies based on each game though maybe that is too much for the Spectrum?

>>5625194
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51TdK6kv3i4

It's just like when you'd attempt background music on an Apple II.

>>5625252
Well, yeah. You have nice, modern tools to design graphics with while back then you had to plot them on graph paper and convert everything to hex values by hand.

It'll be many, many hours of tediously coding in Z80 assembly language before you can get anything happening.

>>5626419
certainly many speccy games were made in BASIC, right? I thought a lot were distributed in magazines that you had to type in.

>>5626419
Not if you’re using this >>5625252

>>5626419

You're not a true Spectrum developer if the publisher isn't chewing you out because your game took 8 weeks instead of 6 weeks.

>>5626470
Yes, modern tools for designing the graphics assests are nice and all but the actual programming stuff will be very long, boring, and tedious.

>>5625198
If you only do it every few lines (or if you limit how many lines of the screen you draw at all), it's very feasible for an actual game.

>>5626470
Yes, modern tools for designing the graphics assets are nice and all but the actual programming stuff will be very long, boring, and tedious.

>>5626437
BASIC is slow as molasses and writing anything relatively complex in BASIC will be almost as involved as coding in assembly language.

>>5626484
It’s a full development environment, you can program full game logic and event scripting

>>5621324
hahahaha

>>5626537
Scripting engines are ok for adventure games and other stuff with mostly static screens, but arcade action it's not gonna work. We're talking a 3Mhz CPU here.

>>5624009
I thought all speccy games were soulless, wtf did /vr/ lie to me again?

The TRS-80 CoCo was probably the nearest US equivalent to the Spectrum.

>>5626595

They are. That webm has everything there is to see and do in that game.

Even the "best" Spectrum games feel like playing a short demo for 3 hours.

>>5626623

>>5625194
smooth scrolling is overrated
worked fine in duke nukem dos

Making a real ZXspectrum game would be really cool, but as other anons pointed out programming a whole engine in asm would take too much time. So I looked around for some sort of pre-made platformer code we could use as a base, and I ended up finding this:
https://jonathan-cauldwell.itch.io/multi-platform-arcade-game-designer
Apparently, it's a game engine ala GMS/Unity but for ZXspectrum. It lets you edit code, sprites and rooms all in one program, and it seems simple enough to use, with pretty good results. It could greatly cut down on dev time while still enabling us to make a game that could be played on the original machine.
Plus, it even exports to a few other computers. We could shit out the obligatory terrible Amstrad CPC port at the same time for added authenticity. What do you guys think?

>>5627046
its really not that hard for a shit game like zniggy

the hardest thing to do is to understand the hardware gimmicks, which usually result in supremely hacky assembly code.

if you know the z80 addressing modes and zeropage stuff its pretty much standard how to proceed

hmm this agd studio looks very promising
i think I can implement zniggy pretty fast with it

What is the setting or theme of Zniggy anyways, the first picture has trees so is it some kind of forest adventure game?

>>5627132
Zniggy Episode 1
Zniggy in the Forest of Znigs

>>5620916
>You press Up to jump
On the keyboard it makes perfect sence. Now if you are going to make a real Speccy game, jump is something like [Action key]+Left/Right, while just pressing it does nothing.

Itt: americans reinventing the dizzy

>>5627350
Zniggy is a fine gent m8
british through and through

Zniggy Episode 2:
God Save the Queen

I think we need to establish some key gameplay elements and background story.

The forest theme is nice. Im thinking something like Abes Oddworld for gameplay. Its a sidescroller where you navigate rooms solving puzzles to find and save Znigs, which have been enslaved by the evil corporate overlords. You have no offensive capabilties, the enemies kill you quickly, but you can trick them into walking into traps made for the slaves, and find znig bombs which you can throw to daze enemies.

>>5627481
how about the main villain stole all the znigs to sell them on ebay for triple their normal value

>>5627086
The Spectrum doesn't have custom chips like a C64, so there's not that many gimmicks in there.

I honestly wont have any motivation to work on this if its just jet set willy and the player drowns in a fucking toilet as a reward.

>>5627580
Thanks for the fucking spoilers.

>>5627586
youve had literal decades to finish the game kek

Or better, code it for the Spectrum 128 where you have over twice as much memory and an actual sound chip.

>>5626631
Sold in the UK, didn't amount to anything as the computer market here was oversaturated.

>>5626586
It's not a "reeal klassic zedd ecks speccy" game if it doesn't run like molasses, all while full of screen tearing, attribute clash, and a sub-25 frame rate. Maybe 10fps, so you get nearly five whole frames to run the slow-shit game and draw everything.

Honestly, I'm describing Boulder Dash here, apart from the attribute clash (since it moves in 8x8 blocks and all items fit neatly into each 8x8 block) -- I like the game, but I'd much rather play it on a system that's not the fucking Speccy.

>>5626631
Has comparable graphics to the Spectrum, slightly better sound, and a god-level CPU.

>>5627350
That's pretty much the joke.

>>5627830
>It's not a "reeal klassic zedd ecks speccy" game if it doesn't run like molasses, all while full of screen tearing, attribute clash, and a sub-25 frame rate. Maybe 10fps, so you get nearly five whole frames to run the slow-shit game and draw everything.
But this was with still coding everything in asm.

>>5626631
Unlike the Speccy, the CoCo was never really a mainstream machine with the support of major software devs behind it.

>>5627046
This looks easy as piss to use. Let's get to it, lads!

>>5620591
For starters

>>5627046
It took a couple years for that C64 SMB and that game was already designed whereas with this we'd have to not only program it, but design the levels and assets from the ground up.

Don't mind me, just trying to make our dreams come true over here.

>>5628063
Holy shit anon, you're a legend
What can we help with?

>>5628078
I've been trying to get it compile right for about an hour now and I can't figure it out. I followed his tutorial, but I can't seem to get it to compile without errors. It says it's missing a label for event 09, but doing autogenerate for missing scripts doesn't seem to fix the problem. We might want to look at using something like Game Maker, actually.

>>5627046
>We could shit out the obligatory terrible Amstrad CPC port at the same time for added authenticity
Amiga port with loads of garish colours and copper bar effects.

>>5627046
You're overestimating the difficulty of programming for these old systems. They're far simpler and more transparent than what we have today. The Z80 is especially nice to work with. Someone who already knows the hardware could put together a Zniggy in less than a month and it's not that much harder to learn from scratch.

Regardless, I definitely think it should be a proper Speccy game and not intentionally bad. The desired jankiness is already guarenteed by the hardware.

>>5628251
It's not so much difficult as it is tedious. Though as someone else said, the Speccy doesn't have custom chips like the C64 or whatever, the graphics and sound hardware are really simple.

The game could be done faster if you limit its size to around 16k which still allows you to do a lot of simple, but fun things. I'd guess probably after the early period in 82-83 that most Spectrum games used the entire 48k of memory.

>>5628251
It's only funny if it's bad numbskull

>>5628264
Bad things can be funny. Something made bad intentionally is never funny.

>>5628297
I'll bet a hundred bucks you're fat

>>5628297
Probably true.

So is zniggy supposed to be a nigger or not? Honest question, what inspired the name?

>>5628529
It's supposed to sound kinda like Dizzy.

>>5627481
Evil corporate overlords...hmm, so would the enemies be guards, watchdogs, drones and such?

I was kinda thinking hunters being involved as well, actually i was going with the idea that Zniggy is part of a really rare species that a lot of hunters want to hunt, so the objective of the game is to get a safe haven for animals and avoid traps, hunters and fellow creatures they use to track you like dogs with the main hunter being badass enough he has wolves working for him, maybe werewolves as a homage to Ultimate.

>It has to be good
>It has to be made on a real Spectrum
>when you don't understand why people are laughing at you

We can code it in basic,
it will be slow as shit but its faster code.

>>5628650
faster to code, i mean

theres a C compiler for the z80
worth a try
https://www.z88dk.org/forum/

im guessing it will be shit like

Are you zniggers really going to make this? I'd play it.

>>5620916
All good, except for
>12. Random crashes occuring during gameplay for no apparent reason
>14. Game over means kicking you out from the game forcing you to boot it and load all over again
That's too much.

>>5621236
Lel.

>>5620916

Should also have an obnoxious form of copy protection in which you have to pick the letter and number shown on column A, row X on page 44 of the manual.

how the fuck do i even load programs into this retarded shit emulators?

>>5628968
what fucking emulator do you retards find that is so hard to use?

download Fuse, or if you have Retroarch, the Fuse core.

>>5628163
>copper bar effects
The fuck is that?

>>5628989
Something everyone who ever had an Amiga knows well
Something any child who didn't can easily learn about on the google

>>5628972
Using some garbage namd speccy
literally cannot do shit with it
i will try fuse

Ok, I compiled some z80 assembly file i found on the internet and now I can load it as a binary in the FUSE emulator
but now what?
it doesnt do anything at all
and what the fuck is start?
is it the start address in memory to place the bytes in?
is it the byte inside the file to begin at?
wtf is this shit

>>5629025
ok its where the code goes but how do I get the machine to set the program counter to 8000 and begin execution

>>5629028
with 128k i can type USR address have no idea what to do with 48K

>>5629051
I would have thought USR would work on the 48k

man cant find documentation on shit for this hardware
what are the keyboard ports so i can check button press
how do I go back to basic etc.

>>5629092
https://www.worldofspectrum.org/documentation.html

>>5627350
I'm italian

IN A, (C)

why wont this assemble? wtf

>>5628581
Zniggy is just a weirdly shaped british man.

>>5629134
its a valid fucking instruction and this shitty z80 PC assembler refuses to assemble it

https://www.chibiakumas.com/z80/
if anyone can read pure autism, maybe this can help

>>5629239
problem is cant find a compiler which actually works as it should, even the tutorial i am following
http://www.breakintoprogram.co.uk/computers/zx-spectrum/keyboard
which is british (kek)
and claims to use the same fucking compiler
wont compile any of his code at all

zx spectrum is such a fucking mess, at least the gameboy community has proper support

very helpful m8¨
fuck ur mum

I was shitting on Chibi Akumas site, but he actually makes it pretty easy. He's pretty much got everything set up for you to just program and make shit.

https://www.chibiakumas.com/z80/Z80DevTools.php

>>5628652

>>5626506
Having said that, BASIC would make modifying the code easier and especially doing algorithms (though games only need basic integer arithmetic).

>>5629051
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/zxmanchap26.html

>>5629025
Doing a Hello World program on the Speccy is also annoying compared with most machines because there's no actual text mode.

On C64 you can just do this. On the Speccy you'd have to create a bunch of bitmap patterns for each character and output them to the video RAM.

*=$c000
ldx #$0c
loop:
lda mess,x
jsr $ffd2
dex
bne loop
rts
mess:
db 'Hello world!'

>>5629463
It's like the Mac or Amiga.

seems to work?

>>5629602
was expecting the machine to freeze though

>>5626506
Sinclair also used their own OC donut steal BASIC which is pretty different if you're used to Microsoft BASIC.

>>5629602
Can you make it that it plays a warning if you inserted it into a tape deck like those CD player warnings on some CD-ROM games?

>>5629640
Need to figure out how to do basic shit like read input and put graphics on screen first.

>>5630137
The graphics work something like the C64's hi-res mode, but obviously there's no sprites.

Once you figure everything out, it's mostly a matter of using XORed bitmaps to move objects around the screen and using box bounds checking for collision detections. As the Spectrum has no hardware sprites or scrolling, the CPU has to brute force everything, but luckily the Z80 is more powerful than the 6502 and makes this stuff easier.

Question, once the game is done and it gets talked about in some random homebrew sites unless we somehow get some Youtubers and gaming sites to talk about this game, which i doubt, can we do a wholly different sequel that seems to have little to do with Zniggy in general.

Heck, we can just copy Monty Mole and make a standard adventure game or a wholly different platformer that is nowhere near as fun or creative.

As far as game control, there were three different widely used joystick standards and most games would let you pick which one to use.

>>5630556

>mfw when a game let you use a joystick but everything besides basic movement requires the keyboard

>>5620952
Just one bitmapped video mode the machine is running in at all times, no char mode or anything, at a resolution of 256x192. The bitmap screen is a bit funky to use, its layout is explained here.

http://www.breakintoprogram.co.uk/computers/zx-spectrum/screen-memory-layout

The attribute data works more-or-less like it does on the C64 with each byte holding the colour value for every 8x8 block on the screen.

The bitmap screen is at $4000-$57FF with the colour attribute data just above that. Unlike most other micros, it's in a fixed location and can't be moved from there. Everything from $5B00 onward is free for use other than the CPU vectors at $FFFA-$FFFF.

>>5630137
>Need to figure out how to do basic shit like read input
I/O is port-mapped, if you're used to the memory mapped I/O on the C64, it may be a bit awkward to get used to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MyhSc2KCIc

The Spectrum got a port of Montezuma's Revenge, retitled Panama Joe. Too bad your character looks like the Chuckie Egg guy and the framerate is kind of low. Also the character walking sound is missing when even the Apple II version had that.

after fully reading the Sinclair BASIC manual I realize it's totally impossible to do anything with it. I had this idealized vision of these old micros being a sort of programmer's learning kit where anyone could make a game with it, right out of the box. I see now the BASIC system is garbage and if you wanted to make anything worthwhile you would have had to buy the assembler for it.

>>5630868
>he learns just now that you can't make anything good on an interpreted BASIC with a 3Mhz CPU

can someone post the original zniggy pic?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hphc1XV10Hc

An hour and 45 minutes of this shit.

>>5630967
The best part is those BASIC type-ins from magazines where you spent hours typing the thing in only for it to not work because you made one typo on line 645 or worse, the listing itself had a mistake in it.

>>5630968

The "ZedEcks" seems like such an interesting computer with a ton of Atari/Coleco-esque games in its library. Though these games probably seem interesting if you didn't have any experience with the platform first hand, and since I'm American I never even seen one. It also seems like earlier, simpler games hold up better than more ambitious titles, which push the computer far too much and make obvious just how weak it is.

>>5631130
It's the opposite with the NES.

>1985 NROM game versus Kirby's Adventure
I wonder what I would rather play...

>>5631143
Late NES games, and Kirby's Adventure in particular, have the unintended side effect of how narrow the color palette was, and everything is blocky because the NES assigned palettes to backgrounds in 16x16 chunks. So you have screens like pic related that's majority orange with some blue here and there.

>>5631143
That's not fair because NES carts used mapper chips to expand the system's capabilities.

>>5631147
Nice cherry picked screenshot, not all of kirbys adventure looks that bad. Also nes had limited color palette so of course it shows, but it doesn't mean it looks bad or limited to two colors, like look up Mr Gimmick, Sword master or metal storm.

>>5631147
they released some magic hardware in the cartridge chips so that you could bypass the 16x16 attribute colors, and do colors per 8x8 tile instead for the NES. Cant remember what MMC controller it was

>>5620591
Don't forget to add plenty of cryptic bullshit that you'd never find out with a guide, a 20 minute loading screen and typical ZX Spectrum colour attribute clashing like in pic related.

nice know how to do place color attributes now

>>5631648
There was a lot of nice stuff you could make the NES do by adding a special chip to your cartridge (at some, but not a prohibitive increase in cost).

I remember Sunsoft's music very fondly.

>>5620868
I enjoy the visuals

I don't know why ever since I was a kid I always loved platformers and such with small sprites. Even nowadays I can't bring myself to play some titles because the characters are 1/6 of the fucking screen

>>5628149
Game Maker is still one of the best current tools for 2D projects that are halfway between hobbyist and commercial

Well I can't take this shit anymore
assembly is so fucking gay
and the zx spectrum is really fucking gay

heres the code
https://pastebin.com/aH02yMQ7

compile with mexican pasmo --tapbas

>>5632016
i mean the shit you have to do put a single pixel on the screen is retarded

>>5632016

>>5632082
yeah it works
but its shit slow
all it is supposed to do is test putting pixels and colors down
and the pixel function isnt even complete

if we are going for a more abe oddworld type game
i think this aesthetic is perfect

>>5628063
I'll start working on the sequel Zniggy 2 Dungeon Quest.
Who is Zniggy's arch-rival?

make the number munchers guy a secret boss.

>>5632016
use z88dk
write in C
https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk/wiki/Platform---Sinclair-ZX-Spectrum

there's some links to example code/games near the bottom, too

>>5631648
MMC5 but it was expensive as balls and only a few games used it.

>>5632029
>i mean the shit you have to do put a single pixel on the screen is retarded
Welcome to 80s hardware. Enjoy your stay.

>>5630752
After studying this for a bit, it's starting to come together.

>high bytes are the pixel pattern, but reversed for some reason
>low bytes are the memory location of screen RAM to be written to

It's on average no more or less fucked up than any other micro of the time.

>>5632425
MMC5 apparently was a copycat of the Konami VRC6 and was generally software compatible with it, but the IRQs worked slightly differently. However, most code written for the VRC6 only required a few modifications to work on the MMC5.

>>5630868
Maybe on a machine with a real BASIC or real hardware in it. The C64's BASIC is cut-down shit, but you can POKE at the video chip and sound chip and get smooth scrolling sprites and automatically handled sound effects relatively easily.

The Sinclair has both fuck-all in terms of hardware and a shitty BASIC.
You might be able to get something that resembles a TI-calculator game going, maybe.
also, if you're using BASIC, just target the 128k Spectrum

>>5632481
C64 BASIC is still too slow and you can't use interrupts. The Speccy is like the Apple II in that it doesn't have any IRQs but they're critically important for C64 coding.

Ok, I improved the code by tremendous amounts

https://pastebin.com/cR4N4ufV

it should be fairly straightforward to use now

i still have no idea how to do the border
or why the fuck there is text on the bottom
saying OK or whatever and it ignores whatever
you try to do at that part of the screen.

>>5630987
Why do I keep seeing this image trying to pass off this ugly-ass yank as a Brit?

PROGRESS

this took way too long

>>5632979
>>5633000

>>5632430
>>5632470
Try for example the Apple II where every three bits in the video page defines a pixel, the leftmost bit controlling whether you get a purple/green or orange/blue pixel, and the pattern of the pixels determines which color is displayed. And to top it off, the pixels are displayed on screen reversed to how they appear in memory.

>>5629639
I'm used to Atari 800 BASIC

>>5633141
In that case you might be more familiar with how Sinclair BASIC does character variables as they copy the HP BASIC system much like Atari BASIC does, whereas Microsoft BASIC copies the DEC BASIC system.

>>5632430
Modern PC video cards use completely linear video RAM where one byte=one pixel. You also don't need to worry about the technical details of anything since you'll just be calling DirectX functions that do all the heavy lifting for you. 80s machines almost always use some snarled video RAM setup that can be a huge headache to utilize, and of course you also have to manipulate it in assembly language.

znigg

>>5633159
thats not running on the speccy is it?

>>5633161
of course not. That's pico-8
I'm gonna make a zniggy fangame with it, and it's so easily pirateable that any anon can make a level for it

>>5633167
i was just about to reee incredibly hard because i spent fucking dozens of hours on just getting some flashing purple pixels on the screen with the speccy

The C64 is more forgiving since although the bitmap mode is nearly as convoluted as the Speccy's, when you're doing a game, you'll almost always use char mode.

>>5631752
Game Maker is fine for commercian game production, Undertale and Deltarune are made in Game Maker.

>>5630974
I remember a couple of Atari magazines had checker programs that would checksum each line to identify typing errors.
Of course you need to at least type in the checker program correctly.

https://www24.zippyshare.com/v/uf6TL3X2/file.html

post highscores

Clive Sinclair intended his computers as teaching tools. He was infuriated that most people just used them for games.

>>5633190
do you have a penis

>>5633314
clive sinclair is dead, no?

>>5633332
No.

>>5632016
>stuff i suck at is gay
>here's the cringe code

>>5633341
Assembly is definitely homosexual

>>5633341
He's probably just not used to 80s machines and the PITA they are compared with modern stuff.

>>5632907
>>5632979
>>5633000
You're making good progress, I'm going to try to get familiar with how the Speccy works and see if I can get something going using your code as a base. I've made a tower defence game for the VIC-20, so it should be nice having more than 10x the RAM to work with.

>>5633341
fuck off larper
either contribute or allow people to complain
at least he is trying

>>5633421
The VIC-20 can have 32k RAM with expansion so it's not actually that far.

Doing Leisure Suit Larry for the Speccy would be a lark, although a Spectrum 128 would obviously be needed and you'd probably end up with something close to the Apple II version.

>>5633502
Game would suck trying to do with cassette storage, although at least you'd have a real sound chip unlike the Apple II.

The Apple II versions of Sierra AGI games were painful. They ran in DHGR mode, had no sound, were slow as fuck, and had some gameplay elements cut due to memory constraints.

Now the Speccy 128 would generally be a better machine than the Apple II barring the use of cassette storage since real sound chip and you might not have so many memory limitation issues since Z80 code is more compact than 6502 code.

>>5633526
Also the Speccy's graphics are far less greedy than the Apple II's DHGR which takes a whopping 16k.

>>5633486
True, but you're trading off being able to run the game on any VIC-20. Also, I've just learned the ZX spectrum has more than 3 registers, which is fantastic, but addressing with 2 registers seems more annoying than just indirect addressing.

>>5633536
If you want to nitpick, the 8k and 16k RAM expansions were common because Commodore produced and sold them themselves. Larger RAM expansions were third party and much less abundant, hence it was rare to find VIC-20 software that could use them.

The Z80 is a very very nice CPU, especially the block move commands and partial 16-bit registers/arithmetic. It's easy to see why it became an industry standard.

The Speccy is pretty simple and there's not a lot of hidden features or tricks to master like with the C64.

>>5633190
Those games are both shit.

>>5633987
Hotline Miami, Hyper Light Drifter, Nuclear Throne, Risk of Rain, Nidhogg, AM2R, Gun Godz. Gamemaker shares Unity's problem that there is a lot of really good stuff made in it, but only the garbage is OBVIOUSLY made in gamemaker. The good stuff, you look at and you can't even tell.

Allright todays goal will be understanding interrupts

>>5634363
The Spectrum generates an IRQ each VBLANK, so 50 times per second. $38-$39 contains the address of the IRQ handler (analogous to $314-$315 on the C64). External devices on the expansion port may also generate an IRQ or NMI (the basic system hardware doesn't have anything that can produce an NMI).

>>5620694
>it'll likely fail
That's only cause no one on these boards have any real artistic merit, but they can apply GameGenie codes to a ROM and call it an "extensive hack" that's totally not Nesticle-grade.

>>5634398
Fuck off RHDNigger.

Good luck Anon, you'll learn to enjoy assembly programming soon enough.

I need some sort of a tool that allows me to convert shit to 1 bit per pixel images
so I can just inject it into the assembly file

cant get the damn interrupts to work

>>5635379
Elaborate. What is/isn't working?

>>5630752
>Everything from $5B00 onward is free for use other than the CPU vectors at $FFFA-$FFFF

Z80 doesn't work like a 6502. There's no vector table up there. On Z80s, the reset vector is at $0 and the IRQ vector is in $38-$39.

Thus Z80 machines always have to have a ROM at $0 to provide the reset vector and 6502 machines always have to have a ROM at $FFFF.

>>5635392
nothing it just freezes

>>5635431
I think the assembler is fucking up
its not putting anything where i say it should

source, compiler and graphics here:

https://mega.nz/#F!UGI3gSwC!YoLqSMWpN9WiOE5xRVkZ9Q

well well
u can move zniggy with o, p, q, a now
although he only goes right

code is shit of course

>>5635848
ive designed the tiles for a top down board, collect the gems game, avoid the baddies

The next step is (in authentic British shovelware fashion) to make a shit port of Zniggy for the C64 by converting all the Z80 code line by line into its 6502 equivalent instructions and copypasting the graphics to run in C64 hi-res mode complete with everything still in 256x192 resolution and a large unused border area, all running at 5 fps.

>>5628256
Mastering custom chips is a lot more of an art form than just XORing bitmaps around a frame buffer.

>>5635930
its difficult enough man
i dont think i will even attempt doing per pixel movement

>>5632925
>utah
>the only state where weirdos obsessively keep track of their family tree to prove they're English
That retard would fit in perfectly across the pond

Alright this is the point I've made it to, now just need to figure out what to do for the actual gameplay. Judging by the original picture, I imagine the gameplay loop will be collect gems that you use to unlock rooms to collect more gems. Probably have some simple enemy patterns that move horizontally and vertically. Then maybe each room can have graphics and a map designed by a different person?

>>5636070
Damn, that's looking pretty good. Nice job so far
>Then maybe each room can have graphics and a map designed by a different person
Yeah, I was thinking of something like this too. Having different anons contribute to the game would fit very well with the theme of old spectrum games having crazy rooms and nonsensical enemies.
Is there a way we could find out how much graphics and rooms could fit in the game? If so, we could make a spreadsheet and let people reserve available enemy or room spots.

>>5636070
I’d like to see a classic Miner Willy style collect-em-up where each screen will have one or more flashing objects to collect in hard to reach spots

>>5636089
Each room is 32*24=768 bytes for placing the tiles, but that's worst-case. Each tile is 8 bytes and I doubt anyone would need more than 20 per room, so we're up to 928 bytes. Enemies will likely have the same behavior with different sprites, so even if are enemies are 16 wide and high that's only 32 bytes per enemy.
Overall, in the unoptimized case we can assume around 1 kb per room. We have 40kb to work with but let's say 10kb of that is used elsewhere. So, we can fit around 30 rooms without having to worry about optimizing at all. I don't even think 30 people would be willing to contribute, so we don't really have to worry about space.

>>5632925
I don't know why, because it's easy to find ugly brits.

>>5636070
Also, I was thinking of the map in a more Jet Set Willy style where you can use gems to unlock adjacent rooms in whatever order. It could even get crazier with non-euclidean room exits ala the maze in Zork

>>5636070

>>5636115
>So, we can fit around 30 rooms without having to worry about optimizing at all
Shamus on the original Atari version had 128 rooms in 16k.

>>5636070
which anon is this? is that running on a speccy emulator?

>>5636179
It's a tradeoff, I'd rather have more customizable single rooms than a lot of the same rooms.
>>5636186
My only earlier post was >>5633421 and yes, that's running on the Fuse speccy emulator

>>5636209
I mean, yeah, Shamus did have mostly same rooms throughout. Also I don't get how the C64 version ballooned to 30k.

>>5636227
It was distributed on magnetic media instead of a cartridge like the Atari so the programmer didn't bother coding it as efficiently.

>>5636237
>>5636227
*BZZZT* Wrong.

The C64 Shamus has five different mazes you can select--the original layout from the Atari and four new maze layouts for 512 total rooms. That's why it's almost twice as large. :^)

The VIC-20 version has a quite different maze with only 32 rooms and the IBM version also has some slight differences in the maze layout.

>>5627550
The ULA was a custom IC though, even if it was just several basic functions integrated into one chip.

>>5636070
You done this for the Spectrum in straight up assembly? This really fucking smooth for a Zedex game.

>>5636432

The framerate will likely tank as soon as there's more enemies and gameplay elements.

>>5636448
Fair enough, it will truly give it that authentic "zedex" experience. I would love to contribute to Zniggy!, maybe this could help me brush up on my pixel art.

8-bit machines do require quite a few programming gymnastics due to the limited memory space, for example you'll have to do a lot of self-modifying code because you just won't have enough room to provide a separate routine for everything in the code loop.

>>5636595
Unless consoles because they use ROMs so self-modifying code isn't possible (I guess Famicom Disk System games could in theory do it).

>>5636607
Interestingly enough there were some Atari 2600 games that used self modifying code for bank switching, since you can point the stack pointer to ram. One of the more notably games to do this was E.T., and Howard Scott Warshaw used it in his other games

I seem to vaguely recall a NES Dev thread mentioning something about doing that, but can't remember.

>>5636237
Shamus for the A8 also came on disk/tape. They have some slight differences from the cartridge version particularly where the game stores its pointers.

>anon number 3 programming zniggy
>assembler I started with is a piece of shit
>find better assembler
>code no longer works
alright I'll just leave it up to the other two guys, fuck boomers

>>5636070
>>5636089
if the spreadsheet idea happens we could also contribute enemies and such

I noticed that I forgot to set the color of Zniggy! to bright, now it looks much more Znig!ish. Also reduced the map size so we have room for lives and score and such.
>>5636432
Yeah it's all assembly, but this guy >>5636448 is right. You can already see flickering when Zniggy! is high up due to how terribly written the sprite draw routine is.
>>5636518
>I would love to contribute to Zniggy!
Please do, although we need to maybe create a grid (8x8?) and start allotting rooms to people so it has some form of cohesion.
>>5636704
Were you the guy working with the interrupts? I've been using the Mexican pasmo assembler and it works well enough.

>>5636747
Why not use git?

>>5636749
>You can already see flickering when Zniggy! is high up due to how terribly written the sprite draw routine is.
Assuming you do your sprite routine during the VBLANK (which is tied to the IRQ on the Spectrum so easy to use), you shouldn't have any flicker.

>>5636798
I need to redo how the entire sprite drawing is done, right now it redraws the tiles around the player then draws the player, which, mixed with the already bad sprite routine, is too slow.

>>5636749
What colors are in the ZedEcks' palette? As far as I know the ZX assigns a single color to any 8*8 area, which is why more complex games suffer from intense attribute clashing. I am assuming there are technically "two colors", one being the actual color and the other being black, correct? Here's something I've done a few years ago for a hypothetical sequel to the nefarious Donner Party hack.

>>5636826
You can choose two colours, one for the paper and one for the ink (foreground and background). I think only the ink has the full array of 8 dark + 8 bright, while the background is just 8 dark.

>>5636798
That and it's PAL so you get something like 7000 cycles to use (though Z80 instructions have really long execution times)

>>5636798
On C64 it's a lot trickier since there's no easy way to tell when the VBLANK starts (no flag for it or anything).

>>5636860
The C64 doesn't have a VBLANK flag because you don't really need it seeing as to how the VIC-II has scanline interrupts.

Traced over ladybug clipart to make a sprite for the game.

I had based it off Monty on the Run's enemies, but taking a closer look at Jet Set Willy's sprites, they're much more wacky and vaguely Python-esque while not strictly fitting the game's setting. It might be better to just list off randomXD enemy ideas for >>5636070 to implement, because making deliberately shitty 16x16 2 color sprites is the easy part. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Ywx6uVn9E

>>5636834

The background can be any of the 16. The limitation is that the whole attribute cell is either bright or dark, so you can't mix a bright color with a dark color.

>>5636749
>>5636070
Wtf how did you get so far? Did you use any of my code at all, because I barely have any shit at all working

>>5637123
fucking depressing how much better he is than me coding assembly

My assembly skills are limited to changing the background color and displaying the word "butt" on the screen.

>>5629250
try AND A, 1?

>>5636070
ree how the fuck did u code up that so well
u have source?

>>5637190
Yeh he's thinking 6502 where you'd go AND #1.

>>5636928
How are those mountains done, then?

>>5638372
They're high intensity white and purple.

>>5638372

Carefully.

>>5636704
Well I went back to the old assembler and kept working.

Code for inspiration or ridicule:
https://pastebin.com/nxsWAdzV

If we can get Zeus working that would be ideal, it can create TZX files with loading screens and auto-load, and it has a built-in emulator. I couldn't figure it out though.

>>5636704
I GOT IT WORKING

Everyone needs to switch to Zeus, it's way better than that Mexican assembler

Code for inspiration and ridicule:
https://pastebin.com/HQpg8UYf

>>5638873
how does the logic of drawing when he isnt aligned to the character cells work?
i dont understand how to do it, when the pixels you want to draw cross a byte boundary in the x direction, or start in the middle of a byte

>>5638905
>load the sprite data into D
LD D, (HL)
>zero out E, this will be the overflow when shifting the sprite data in D
LD E, 0
>put the x offset into B
LD B, C
>fastest way to zero out A
XOR A
>OR will set flags so we can check with JR
OR B
>if there is no offset, skip the bit shifting
JR Z, NoShiftSprite
ShiftSprite:
>shift bits to the right, bit 0 is put into the carry flag
SRL D
>RR shifts bits to the right and also puts the carry flag into bit 7
RR E
>do this B times
DJNZ ShiftSprite
NoShiftSprite:
>move sprite data from DE into BC
LD B, D
LD C, E
>load the screen address back into DE
POP DE
>put the first byte into the screen
LD A, B
LD (DE), A
>move E to the next byte
INC E
>put the second byte into the screen
LD A, C
LD (DE), A

the basic idea is to take the sub-byte offset and bitshift the image data that amount.

>>5638572
So you CAN display 2 colors per tile, I thought it was just color on black. Unless it's a little more complicated than that.

>>5638990
black is a color, my friend

you can pick any two colors from here:
>>5636834
but they must both be from the same column

>>5638996
Right. Each color attribute byte has a flag controlling whether it's high intensity or not.

>>5633310
What game did you copy off of?
This game looks somewhat entertaining.

Can Zniggy run on Temple OS yet?

So its a platformer then?
Definitely?

>>5639476
Seems to be what most people are going for

>>5639476
what else would it be?

Next step is to adding some sfx. Remember: There's only a one channel bleeper which the CPU has to drive so you can't have background music or anything, just a couple of clicking noises in-game. You could do a title screen or game over music though.

Spent all day rewriting the sprite drawing routine to get it fast enough for multiple enemies, too tired to do anything else so hopefully I'll have something more interesting tomorrow.

>>5639648
nice, when will you post your sprite routine?

and also, what the fuck, you can do this on fuse too? the timex sinclair is still a zx spectrum or is it too advanced for zniggy

>>5639680
zniggy would never use american technology

>>5639648
Looking good. Can you program an underground section?

>>5639546
>Remember: It's not allowed to be good at coding

>>5640489
I mean it only has one sound channel, I'm not sure if you can do much with it. At least the Atari VCS has two.

>>5620916
>forced/artificial delay on the buttons input
Low framerate takes care of it automatically. Non-framerate related input lag is mostly a modern thing.
>background music
Most didn't have any. It should have music on the title screen only, and during gameplay only sound effects. And the game pauses while sound effects plays, but seeing as it runs at 12.5fps, you hardly notice.
>Random crashes occuring during gameplay
More of a modern thing. Only systems were so simple they didn't have much to go wrong. If you want unreliability, implement a "turbo" tape loader than takes so many attempts to load successfully that you might as well use the ROM loader.
>One live, no continues
You get three lives, obviously. But you're right about the continues.
>Game over means kicking you out from the game
Only really happened with multi-loaders.

OP here
you made me fucking cry from laughter, I love all of you
What's the post limit here so I can make a new thread?

>>5640536
>What's the post limit here
500 posts and threads autosage when they reach two weeks old.

>>5621552
>fps of the spectrum
50fps (on horrible flickering 50Hz CRTs), but in practice there's no hardware scrolling or sprites so you don't have the CPU time for 50fps. 25fps was considered "smooth".

>>5640534
http://www.chibiakumas.com/z80/ZXSpectrum.php

Like I said earlier, it literally works just like the sound on the Apple II--you have a one channel bleeper and can produce different tones depending on how fast you toggle it.

>>5640569
Full 50 fps animation is only possible if you got nothing else going on. The second you have a lot of animation going, it's going to slow down.

Original home computer games did usually tend to be better than licenced or arcade ports which were (with rare exception) utterly horrible.

The Rare guys were onto something when they said the quality and presentation of Nintendo games was mindblowing against the nearly-nonexistent standards for British home computer games.

>>5640530
I am sure you can do a buttload with one channel. Maybe not (You) but someone who knows what they're doing can do amazing things with a single 1 bit channel.

>>5640729
You can, just not when you have other stuff going on.

>>5621324
roflmaobbq

>>5640919
I think you mean (You). I manage just fine. I know youngsters can hear high frequencies but do you really need to devote all those cycles to get tones in the mhz range? Even a young dog can't hear a fraction of that.

>>5640919
It can be done but you usually end up with a staccato kind of sound like with the Apple II Dig Dug.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51TdK6kv3i4

>>5640615
>famicom games are developed by a team of professionals being paid a proper salary and each of them was well studied in their department
>zedecks (and other micros) games were developed by three people at most, many had to multitask, and were paid peanuts from greedy licencors, if at all
>wOw I cAn'T bElIeVe HoW fAmIcOm GaMeS aRe So PoLiShEd!!!1111

>>5640992
>famicom games are developed by a team of professionals being paid a proper salary and each of them was well studied in their department
Usually, but then again you had the occasional Micronics and Bits Laboratory which were more akin to European home computer developers.

Most of the American stuff from the 80s like Sierra, Origin, Microprose, etc games were actually made by proper studios with professionals.

>>5641004
Even so, I reckon Super Monkey Daibouken or Ghostbusters had more of a budget than most ZX or C64 conversions. And in their credit, Micronics tried to make faithful conversions of arcade games, Athena in particular looks almost like the arcade game.

>>5639680
There was one last bug I had to take care of before posting. Here you go:
https://pastebin.com/PfkLS8s3
I apologize in advance for how terrible the code is.
>>5640260
I can as in I have the ability to, but what's in there now is just proof of concept. If you want an underground section, design one and put it in.
Now that the basics are in, we should all decide how we will do the whole collaborative design thing.

>>5641026
They would have still at least had access to the arcade source code and art assets which home computer devs didn't.

>>5641030
I think Micronics had to estimate games as well, however where they differed is that they sometimes had help from SNK or Capcom staff, whoever was hiring.

>>5641027
Do you think you could 'port' some of these earlier concepts?
>>5620818
>>5620868
>>5621403
>>5621448
>>5621491
>>5621537
>>5635884

Capcom didn't initially develop Famicom games in-house because they treated home consoles as kind of a joke. The first arcade port they did themselves was Commando, but it's a glitchy mess owing to their lack of experience with the Famicom.

>>5641048
Well the first few examples are pretty much the same as what I have now, while the last top down example wouldn't really work. But if you just mean the graphics and map design, I could easily add that in.

>>5640991
That's done by dedicating a portion of each each frame to just generating a tone. It's very easy to do and, if you design the sound track for it, can sound great. There are other methods that let you do more but they're much more complicated. This would be perfectly adequate for the purpose of this project. And of course you can still do more complicated sound when you don't need to process input and update the screen as frequently, ie intro, enter/exit level, death, etc as quickly as the main gameplay.

>>5640991
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3q2j7LpFb0

Bilestoad plays (or tries to anyway) Fur Elise as the background music but it's out of tune. This game was really almost more than the hardware could handle between the huge characters, music, and scrolling backgrounds.

>>5641580
jesus fuckingchrist rainbow dildo

>>5641667
Apple II graphics never look right on emulation anyway, but here it is on real hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7j20nY8OQU

If you were to do Bilestoad on the Spectrum, you'd probably have everything a single color to avoid clash/attribute issues. It would look nicer and cleaner anyway since the Spectrum has solid colors and not artifact ones like the Apple II.

>>5641715
I unironically hate dealing with that fucking framebuffer, tiled displays with sprites and hardware scrolling are much easier

>>5641726
All 8-bit systems are like that. There was a post back earlier in the thread that explains how the Apple II's graphics work and it's almost as fucked as the Spectrum's. Also see how low the framerate in Bilestoad is.

>>5641729
maybe for us/british computers, but the nes, sms, msx, gameboy etc didnt use a framebuffer

>>5641736
Computers with hardware sprites/scrolling would primarily consist of the C64, Amiga, Atari 8-bit, and TMS 9918-based machines. Any other computer would pretty much just have a frame buffer and rely on the CPU to do all the lugging and until VGA and its completely linear Mode 13 arrived on PCs, this usually consisted of some contorted setup.

>>5641741
Didn't the X1 have them as well?

>/vr/ learns how to dev retro games in few days to make dumb meme real

i'm proud of you all

>>5641054
Micronix did the earlier set of Capcom ports, and by god were they awful.

>>5641858
Yeh but the Speccy is just tedious and not as fun or rewarding to code for as the C64.

>>5641059
I'm tempted to make the last, top-down example into a Zniggy puzzle game offshoot (from the main Zniggy series of course.) But maybe we should focus our efforts on one game.

>>5642735
Im the guy who made those tiles, Still working away on my end. Not going to be a topdown game though, I went for a sidescroller too. So there will be at least two zniggy games, which is not bad.

>>5620916
>(preferably only first two bars looped into infinity)
devilish

Are you guys actually making a game??

>>5643903
It's either that or an incredibly elaborate ruse.

>>5643919
u raff u ruse

>>5643903

At this point the thread has turned into /agdg/: 80s Edition. As in there is a game being worked on, but don't expect it to come out.

At this point we have something resembling a game. Next step is I'm going to work on a tool that can convert images to rooms so anons can just design rooms in paint and post them to fill in a map slot.
>>5641871
The speccy isn't that bad, but I've never used the C64. The VIC-20 was fun though.
>>5643903
As far as I can tell
>>5644152
Hey, I resent that. That being said, if nobody contributes rooms I'd probably shelf this.

>>5644516

>>5644516
post source so we can compile and try it

>>5644613
https://pastebin.com/tE5ffhLM
There's still a bug regarding room transitions

>>5644624
How hard would it be to implement scrolling rooms? I mean there will be attribute clashes, but it would be very neat.

>>5644516
THERE GOES MY HERO

>>5644787
that silky smooth 50 fps would drop to 10 fps

>>5644787
>scrolling
This isn't some shit game for your Nintendo mate

>>5644516
It's beautiful, lad.

But that's also a problem. Zniggy is supposed to be fucking ugly as shit.

>>5644787
I could probably manage to do it by creating a large buffer containing a rendered section of the room, but it would take up more memory than I would be willing to give.

I won't be able to add much today, so I'll leave you guys with what I've managed to get out of the on board sound beeper (caution to headphone users):
https://mega.nz/#!HKwBFKYI!Chfh6781YenGhAt6bcZDgsc3GtWpWNnGD8NsRYrDGxk
Someone should record some British voice audio for the game that I can put in when the game loads and when you get a game over.

>>5646286
I'd stick with single rooms because scrolling is just more huge headache to deal with.

>>5646286

Maybe to things manageable for you, could you implement a limit on the number of unique tiles each room has.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFtSlUG4G5Q

Summer Games pulls it off although it is slow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxLPuND19uY

The Apple II version doesn't try to scroll the whole screen in the marathon running section, but then again I did mention that the Z80 has more brute CPU power than the 6502.

>>5646468
Did you mention it? Pretty sure I would have laughed at you then. At any rate, here's a double lol, wew lad, and top kek kid for you to make up for missing it if I did. Also a brute CPU power chuckle for using the term brute CPU power.

>>5645286
stop being retarded there are many zx spectrum games that use smooth scrolling, but limited to one direction only.

You faggots got a github or some repository for this? Would be interested in keeping up with the game progress after the thread 404s

meh
getting pretty demotivated
scrolling the map itself looks impossible
i dont know how they did it in stormlord

>>5647629
fucking this

>>5647629
The is a (You)s powered thread. There will be no progress made if there's no thread with a steady stream of them.

>>5648550
This isn't your fathers NIntendo. There is no "plz scroll screen left " command. They didn't do it in stormlord. They did half of it.

>>5649225
Stormlord has a large status bar to cut down on the amount of scrolling needed. This was also commonly done on C64 games even though it does have hardware scrolling.

>>5648550
You don't have to have scrolling if it's too much work. You can just have a flick screen setup. That's fine.

>>5648550

I'd just give up on the scrolling. Most Spectrum platformers - hell, even a lot of C64 platformers - were flip screen, especially the early games that gave the system its Zniggy reputation.

Whether this game is "supposed" to be good or bad is still an open question, but what it's definitely not supposed to be is ambitious. It's okay if you don't extract every last ounce of potential from the Spectrum.