Retrocomputing
ZX Adventure
Writing a new game, for a 40 year old machine
Back in May 2015, I spent an evening watching retro game documentaries and was inspired to develop a game for the ZX Spectrum... a computer released back in 1982. After all, with everyone talking about making retro games (but actually making modern games with retro visuals) I decided to make a real retro game. In machine code. This talk covers the methods by which a modern computer is able to help developers write, debug, and test new software that runs on old systems. It uses the game "ZX Adventure" as a real-world example.
Old machines had so little power you were forced into writing highly-optimised assembler if you wanted anything to fit into that tiny memory, or execute reasonably fast on those slow processors. Luckily, modern machines make the process of writing software so easy you can spend all your development time on the fun parts - and it's this part we'll focus upon. Starting with the game design, we begin by creating "Hello world" on the obsolete machine, understand the truly minimal requirements, and building up the game piece by piece.
We also touch on the issues of emulation, licenses, and publishing, given that the original Spectrum game has now been ported to the ZX81 for a commercial (and yet still open) release.
Additional information
| Type | devroom |
|---|
More sessions
| 2/7/21 |
Introduction to the devroom, the topics we cover…
|
| 2/7/21 |
Software emulators are wonderful tools to study old computer systems for different purpose from running legacy application to retrogaming. This talk explores the context of digital preservation triggered by on-going work in a Belgian computer museum where emulators help in rediscovering old systems, maintaining/recovering knowledge on their design and sharing the experience with the audience without stressing fragile old machines. This talk aims at exploring and somehow engaging the audience ...
|
| 2/7/21 |
Running old-time OS in a virtual machine often comes with a problem of non-coinciding cursors. A relative positioning device (mouse and trackball) provides the operating system with a vector of the cursor movement instead of its coordinates. As a result, different cursor acceleration formulas are breaking the coincidence of host and guest systems cursor. Fortunately, modern guest operating systems support absolute positioning devices (tablets), which provide real cursor coordinates. Desktop ...
|
| 2/7/21 |
Scan2Run focuses on the digital preservation of computer heritage distributed in paper form (e.g. old magasines with BASIC programs). It may be the only available format Transforming such a listing in a running computer programs and sharing the experience requires quite a few steps: retyping the program, loading it into a vintage computer or emulator, and capturing some results either in textual, image or even video format. Our talk will illustrate our current approach and progress with a ...
|
| 2/7/21 |
The talk will be about how I bought a retro keyboard for a VISTA80 from the Canada Science and Technology museum and reversed engineered it to convert it passively to USB. The VISTA80 was a machine built in Canada and was used to "Create pages of text for cable TV systems or to create running lines of text or titles for television displays."¹ The VISTA80 was manufactured around 1995-1997 and was "One of the first character generators to use a computer chip (Intel 8080A) as a controller"¹. 1: ...
|
| 2/7/21 |
Your computer only supports 16 text colors, and 8 background colors. Why so few colors? And why is there a "Bright Black"? This fun lightning talk will explain the origins of these 16 colors, and why the colors look the way they do.
|
| 2/7/21 |
The talk will be over the current status of the 68kmla fork of the RaSCSI project. To start off, I'll go over what the project is, and is NOT. I'll go over the history of the project, what we've been up to over the past year and what's planned for the next year. I'll also go over some technical details of how it works, how the software is structured.
|
