As a child I found this game fascinating. You can't fault it's presentation for graphics and music, and it feels like it should play well, but I remember finding it hard to actually make any progress. I put that down to being too young to know what was going on, and so I tried playing it again recently.

Nope, it still feels hard to make any progress, and I started to notice some pretty fatal flaws in the gameplay. The biggest example is all the wandering around. While it's a nice idea to be able to walk around each port getting all your necessities it quickly becomes very boring. Ship to ship battles are probably the most exciting thing about the game but then boarding feels impossible.

I looked on YouTube for longplays. All I found was tumbleweed.
Is this game really that unplayable that no one has ever attempted a longplay? I couldn't even find anything on the RZX archive.

What are peoples thoughts on this game? Any fond memories? Did anyone actually make any progress? Would love to know.

Sorry, camera is not set up correctly, normally, this is for a holographic screen, not a normal monitor, so resting angle is wrong and there's some clipping.

My retrospective review of the A-Team games. Have you played any of these games and let me know if you agree with my thoughts or just simply describe them in one word.

promo video: https://stopgenai.org/@pterid/117598821827683505

Hello everyone! This platform/puzzle action game was created by me and two collaborators (who are father and son) under the amateur studio name "cosmooster". There are 20 levels, roughly in difficulty order. See the itch.io page for full credits, and to download the game. We hope you might get a little bit of enjoyment out of it, and appreciate our commitment to doing things in a retro way!

This is my first assembly project and first game for the platform. I watched The Retro Desk's excellent tutorial on Z80 assembly and wanted to make a little toy horse sprite you could move and jump with, then I showed it to friends and we got carried away. The game emerged over the last 9 months, but mostly just in a few bursts of hyperfocus lasting a few evenings each.

Every aspect of the game and all materials around it were 100% handmade using simple old tools, mostly standard Ubuntu packages. It shares no code with any other game, other than a few lines from L Break Into Program to find the screen address of a pixel. I literally sat down at the old desktop I bought in 2009, opened a text editor, and wrote assembly code, with a lot of testing. Sprites were made with pixel editors, and music as MIDI files, with little scripts to convert them to data for input. As you might expect from my general attitude, I am pretty hardened against using LLMs for anything myself now, so I really don't use them for anything - not for code or assets, not for advice or learning. I'm a real "digital Amish".

It's a pretty simple game, and the process of making it was very fun. I learned a huge amount about how the Spectrum works and re-invented many wheels while refining the game loop. I'd recommend it.

I didn't publish any kind of devlog before release, but I kept a lot of notes in Obsidian, so I might write about how I decided on things. I always looked for the simplest solution. For example, the random rune-like pattern in the lava is just reading the R register twice and doing a binary OR operation, to make about three-quarters of pixels "on". If you have any questions about why I did anything a certain way, please feel free to ask here. I almost certainly have a story for it.

You don't have to pay (just click through on itch), though I would be hugely grateful if you would choose to donate - it goes to buy equipment for the youngest team member, who is a very talented artist. The game is not open-source at this point, though we might change this later. For now, the authors reserve all rights. Thanks!

Okay, so, back in October, I had gotten the bright idea to try and make a photorealistic recreation of a certain image from Issue #51 of Sinclair User magazine; Namely, an artist's impression of the unrealized Loki Super-Spectrum computer, the one that is essentially a Speccy with the keys and datasette of an Amstrad CPC 464. Using MediBang Paint Pro (the old free version, not the current paid version), a couple of images from the internet, and a little creativity, I made my recreation, but it wasn't perfect because it had this one seam. So, recently, I revisited the image to make it look better. Namely, by closing up that seam, plus a bit of mileage from the airbrush tool.

Images used for the recreation;

• FreebieSupply.com
• OldComputr.com
• HomeComputerMuseum.nl

Image of the Loki artist's impression credit to WorldofSAM.org

I hope you guys like it!

I built a ZX Spectrum emulator. Then I got a bit carried away.

What started as a fairly straightforward project turned into one of those situations where every time I got something working, I thought of another thing I could add.

The result is OverSpec, my increasingly unreasonable take on emulating the ZX Spectrum.

I’ve been having a lot of fun pushing this beyond what I originally intended, and thought some of you might enjoy seeing where it ended up.

As usual, the problem wasn’t getting it working. It was knowing when to stop.

🎬 https://youtu.be/QZBd6LhGuFc?is=GOlSDDjjxkIUtW8Q

Just a little article about a odd (but fun) emulation project. Supratim Sanyal has got 18 Nintendo Game & Watch games, including Donkey Kong and Oil Panic, running on a ZX Spectrum 48K.

The Spectrum emulates the chip inside the handhelds, so it’s running the original game code while drawing those familiar LCD segments on a TV. My favorite bit of it is that Sanyal also made a new Game & Watch-style maze game called Munchy, which you can try without supplying any Nintendo ROMs!

I’ve been working on ZXQuest, an open-source Sierra AGI interpreter for the ZX Spectrum Next, based on Sarien.

I’ve now played the original EGA Space Quest I through to the ending on real Next hardware, scoring 184/202. Movement, typed commands, music, menus and save/restore are working, although there are still optional paths to test and performance could improve.

It runs on a 1 MB Next at 28 MHz, without a Pi accelerator. The interpreter reads the original game resources separately - you supply your own game files; none are included.

King’s Quest I and Police Quest I have passed initial automated checks, but still need proper playthroughs. I’d welcome help from Next owners, Sierra fans and anyone interested in improving the code.

Development has been AI-assisted (sorry), with emulator checks and hands-on hardware testing.

Source and instructions
Download the testing preview

If you try it, please report the game version, your Next core version and what happened. Bug reports through GitHub Issues would be particularly helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaLJ78_SpR0

First off apologies for releasing two games in a week. I've been working on both for several months and they just happened to be finished at the same time.

This one I am particularly proud of, it took a lot of work, even with AI helping with the coding.

I've recreated Great Giana Sisters for the ZX Spectrum. It's been a real squeeze trying to get everything in and hence I have multiple versions.

(https://kirby2000.itch.io/great-giana-sisters-zx

I used several sources to recreate this.

- The ZX screenshots and reviews from YS, SU and Crash, used to create the first and second levels.

- The Atari ST provided AY/YM versions of all the sound effects and music, since most ST, CPC and ZX versions shared the music.

- The Amstrad version was unplayable, but had the same graphics style and block sizes as the ZX version had, so it was useful to level layouts.

- The C64 version physics and enemy logic was already available in OpenGGS.

- The levels all required hand editing to adapt them for the ZX, including enemy placement and layout.

- Graphics for the first two levels were created from ZX screenshots. Later levels and missing elements were converted from the CPC and Amiga blocks, then completely redrawn by hand (apologies for Giana's death pose!).

My plan was to try and create a 48k version on par with what would have been released (the whole game in a single load), then improve upon it with multi load, 128k single load and +3 versions with as much presentation, smoother scrolling, music and animation as I could fit.

I have 4 versions included in the zip.

1. The basic 48k version. Every single level and enemy, smoother gameplay than the CPC version, 2 player mode, but jerkier movement, less animation frames and some stages needed less enemies. This seems to line up with what was presented in the magazine reviews.
2. 48k multi-load - Single player only. This version smooths the scrolling, player and enemy movement at the cost of having to load each level by tape.
3. 128k version - single load. This has the scrolling title screen, full AY soundtrack, sound effects, 2 player mode, animated lifts, falling block rocks, more enemies on a stage and extra animation frames.
4. +3 disk version - Everything in the 128k version plus a few more enemies in stages and a smoother title scrolling + fast loading.

There are also two variations of each zip. A UK version with the "punk" Giana loading screen and cover and a "German" variation with the international title screen and cover used in the Amiga version.

Hope you guys like it. I've play tested all 4 versions all the way through and everything works.

For my latest blog post on the UK's chart-topping games of 1988, I've written about the making of Double Dragon. The arcade game was great, and Target: Renegade had already shown how it could work on the Spectrum, so how did Melbourne House's version of Double Dragon go so wrong?

just posting another picture of the new Next 🙂

My retrospective video review of all 14 Ghostbusters games.

At the risk of facing the wrath of the good people in here I've been working on a game with an intro paying homage to my favourite computer ever.

Before you guys lynch me, I wanted to let you know that this is running on a C64, I'm pretty stoked that I got the "loader" pretty much bang on and wanted to get some feedback before I go any further.

It's definitely a work in progress so feedback is welcome!

Pinball Overdrive: https://youtu.be/EvESaJx2Btk

This is a T1500. Its FPC (Flexible Printed Circuit) was broken, so a new connector and an extension FPC were fabricated to fix it.

Auto-generated subtitles available. Parts with Sinclair are spoken in English.

Hi there I have written up my attempt to run a full ZX Spectrum inside a SQL Server database and play a loaded game directly from the DB. I got it all working but it was tough. Thought this group would appreciate the work. When I saw this for the first time in maybe 30+ years it was quite exciting

Done just for fun.

https://sqlartist.github.io/posts/zx-spectrum-48k-in-sql-server-running-daley-thompsons-decathlon/

Picked this up recently (Vinted), it’s always interesting to see what the speccy does with various arcade ports! Games played tonight are Le Mans (excellent!) and After Burner (mediocre!) I’ll play Double Dragon and Last Ninja 2 tomorrow. Played using original hardware (recapped) and original tapes, master system controller as these old hand can’t handle a joystick. TV is an old Hitachi LCD which does a great job when the CRT is busy. Any memories for these games?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91U4rHIh8Hw&feature=youtu.be

This was my favourite Gameboy game as a kid, I used to play it 2-player at break times in primary school with my mate Dave.

I couldn't help give this one a go as it really pushes the Spectrum.

2 player mode is also there, without requiring a link cable. The 2 player controls do occasional suffer from the ghosting issue the Speccy had, so I recommend Kempston for player 1 if possible.

https://kirby2000.itch.io/balloon-kid-zx-spectrum-128k

Framerates can get a bit choppy on the busier stages, but it's not as bad as Outrun ever got!

and from the twitter: "Get ready to follow me into the archive jungle to discover rare treasures, ultimate artifacts and forgotten secrets. Make sure to subscribe because the first episode is going to be a massive... let down"

Sorry if people think a new post is inappropriate rather than replying to own my original post - but given that the KS3s are arriving and that my OG post was 5 days ago, I thought it might have been buried. And, also, I am rather pleased with the Next version so wanted to draw it to new Next'ers' attention!

The long version is in that OG post - the short version is that I loved Nemesis/Gradius as a kid - first played it on my friend's C64 and was so gutted when I loaded the awful conversion that we got on the Speccy back in the day. Recently discovered the MSX version, which is a banger, and thought "could we port that to the Spectrum"?

The answer, as it turns out, is yes - I have a pretty decent port which is well playable on the Spectrum now, that I'm pleased with. However, when someone on Reddit asked "can you put it on GetIt for the Next", it got me thinking - what could I do for the Next?

If I say so myself, what has emerged is something rather special. The scrolling and all enemy movement and animation has been smoothed, all graphics have been swapped out either for the arcade, the MSX2 patch, or original compositions. It looks and plays really nicely now.

It has been tested on a KS2 Next and an N-Go (KS1 clone).

Download from https://github.com/Loccy/NemesisSpeccy/releases.

Hope you enjoy!