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Any chance you could squeeze me in from 6-10pm please?

(I'd be mildly interested to know what 3.5 has that's needed by Prince of Persia - I suppose I'm mildly surprised that a game has much to do with the OS. I'm sure it all makes sense, to those in the know.) I suspect it’s probably some area of extended RAM that I’m abusing without permission and can...

A Master 128 without MOS3.2 is a recipe for madness.

I never did get to bottom of why POP doesn’t like 3.5. Mostly because I couldn’t work out how to get a configuration of a Master Compact but with DFS in an emulator.

Just a quick update on this, I decided rather belatedly to just contact the author of vasm to report the bugs. Lo & behold he fixed them all in less than 24 hours. #-o I wish I had done this sooner. There hasn't been a new official release of 1.8i yet but you can grab the nightly sources with all kn...

Great blog post Chris, a really interesting read. Thank you.

I guess even Kevin Edwards’ tape copy protection system decided that would have been step of evil too far!!

It’s a fab demo. Makes me wish I had an ARM3 machine, or a mega overclocked ARM250!!

Atari 2600 is a wonderful but highly idiosyncratic machine. Even though it runs just over 1MHz 6502 and has apparently low resolution, there are many aspects of the hardware that are very difficult to translate to the Beeb’s architecture and bitmap screen, not least the 128 colour palette! I think s...

I have just had a very quick look at this... it's incredible! I think its possibly your best demo yet. I did find what I think is a bug in the BASIC loader though. It wouldn't run on my Compact because it is looking for host types 3 (Master) or 6 (Archimedes). When I changed 6 to 5 it worked perfec...

This is actually quite a cute optimisation challenge. A naive approach for 'sprites' might PLOT individual points in each colour but then you're only going to get 255/6 ~= 42 pixels maximum, not enough for an 8x8 sprite, and doesn't even account for selecting colours with GCOL etc. Instead you'd hav...

I asked the question because I'm writing a program that displays multi-coloured graphics/tiles/sprites to the screen and Acorn put such an emphasis on following the guidelines and doing things legally. One of the main arguments being that such well-written programs would work on a second processor....

If you're only really interested in sprites/tiles of a limited variety of sizes, you could have a different VDU code and routine for each one. E.g. VDU &F1 could indicate that you're about to plot an 8x8 sprite, VDU &F2 for a 16 x 8 etc. Your custom handler would then read the screen offset and spr...

Dethmunk also made me a small MODE 2 proportional font for Prince of Persia. The glyphs are 2/4/6 pixels wide, so 1/2/3 bytes wide in MODE 2, which is quite convenient.

Much to my surprise on discovering the code, but Stunt Car Racer plots a 7-pixel wide font to squeeze a bit more out of the available screen real-estate.

If you want to do anything interesting, then the short answer is: no!

The long answer is that Acorn didn’t think / care about sprites, so you’re limited to standard PLOT calls I’m afraid.

The most important part of the fire alarm story is that nobody noticed for about 10 minutes during the DJ set.

I'm glad you all like the demo, it was a lot of fun to make!

What an amazing line up of talks! Thanks for organising and for all the speakers taking the time. Looking forward to it.

Oooh, looking at the talks being lined up, I would like to attend this one please!

I'll raise you this code : INC &70 ; 5c BEQ inchigh ; 2/3c BNE skip1 ;3c .skip1 BNE done ;3c .inchigh INC &71 ; 5c .done ; constant time ; 13c ; total ; 10 bytes if I have my maths right =D> Very nice! There's always another cycle to be squeezed when you need it most. [-o<

The more masochistic cycle-counter might do... INC &70 ; 5c BNE skiphigh ; not taken ; 2c INC &71 ; 5c BNE done ; 3c (unlikely to be incrementing &FFFF or use BRA) .skiphigh ; branch taken ; 3c NOP ; 2c NOP ; 2c BNE done ; 3c (unlikely to be incrementing &FFFF or use BRA) .done ; constant time ; 15c...

Hello all. Another day, another demo? We are spoiling you at the moment, it seems. :D The NOVA demoparty is going online this year, due to Coronavirus, so we thought we'd make an invitation to let everyone know about it. It's quite different in style from the BEEB-NICCC demo, but we hope you enjoy i...

This is a bit of an old thread, but if anyone is interested, I've gone through and added Paul Brink's comments to Kieran's Elite BeebAsm source. I've submitted them in a pull request at https://github.com/kieranhj/elite-beebasm/pull/4 I'm hoping to use this as a base for creating a version of the E...

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Great game! I'd forgotten how good the music was.

Hello all. Looking forward to the virtual meet up and sharing some of the interesting stuff we did to make our 3D demo for the BBC. I’m hoping to attend for most of the afternoon and into the evening.

danielj wrote: ↑

Thu May 07, 2020 6:42 pm

That's a beaut - signed?

Sadly not. You’d think so after all that bloody work.

trixster wrote: ↑

Sat May 02, 2020 4:24 pm

It's a Sam Coupé which is often thought of as a pimped or super spectrum. They're rather uncommon these days as only around 12000 were made apparently.

Nice! You do like your rare machines...

I just received this. Newly issued US hardcover edition.

Thanks for the info. I suspect the LZSA decompressor is faster than Exomizer so you’ve probably made the right trade off. I will get round to throughly testing them both one of these days!

Interesting stats Chris, thanks for sharing. I must have a look at LZSA! Did you have time to compare the same image with Exomizer 3 by any chance?

Your game is looking really nice! Great job, there's certainly a lot of hard work that's gone into it so far. =D> Try using the Exomizer 3.0.2 executable (from the website Simon linked) on your images and see what the file sizes come out as: exomizer.exe level -M256 mode1_screen.bin@0x0000 -o mode1_...

After reading the CCH’s plea for support during their Coronavirus closure, I ordered a year’s membership in advance - starts the first day you visit after they reopen. Nice to try and give them some cash flow in this challenging time. I want them still to be there when this is all over! More info on...

UPDATE! Version 1.1 has just been released! This has a number of bug fixes, including the Model B lock up problem, but most importantly Video NuLA support. :D A huge thank you to Tom Seddon for doing 99% of the work to get the NuLA version not only running but optimised and polished. I have to say ...