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I'd also noticed that a way to quickly end a game was lacking, so it's already implemented in my latest development version which I attach. Press SHIFT+Esc or SHIFT+R to end the game. The main other change in this version is that I've shrunk the screen width from 320 to 288 (i.e. 36 MODE1-characters...

Thanks tricky, and an excellent observation: of course VideoNuLA would be perfect for this. Is it supported by any emulator that I can run on my MacBook? Designing the patterns was never going to be my strong point in any case (colour-blind), but they're just defined as an 8x8 texture that gets rend...

For reasons I can scarcely explain, I decided recently that it would be a fun weekend project to make a Beeb port of the old Flash game Open House published by Lifetime TV. This is a sort of light puzzle game where you drop bits of sectional sofa onto a grid and score points when you complete a cohe...

From said transcript of the Curry interview: By the late 1970s Clive Sinclair could see that a microcomputer had consumer appeal and started development, but it got taken away as an unnecessary expense by the NEB. It was taken away to Newbury Electronics and became the NewBrain, which became the bas...

Another consequence of the way this is implemented in BASIC is that if you send an incomplete VDU sequence, you can get unexpected behaviour from a subsequent BASIC command that tries to use the VDU drivers. For example MODE1:VDU22:MOVE18760,2573 will change to MODE1 and print "HI" on the ...

We investigated this in another thread. The original screen seems to be impossible but the ProAction rerelease was subtly modified so that less drilling is required.

Have you tried playing the BBC version? We established in a previous thread that it is more challenging in some places (notably level 24).

Kneel before my google-fu: https://github.com/aimeerivers/merlin-web

(deployment doesn't appear to be up, but source code is presumably all there)

The best I can suggest in that direction would be the "unlimited safe fall" cheat that I listed in the first post in the thread. It would be possible to change the fall limit without making it infinite, but it's messier that you expect because dying after a fall is determined by the number...

Interesting. This looks like data corruption (e.g. using a bad pointer to access the room data) and I know the Electron version crashes after a while in various unpredictable ways that bespeak of someone having randomly scribbled on memory. I also thought that the BBC version did too, but was fixed ...

I know we have detailed understanding of the various R∞ file formats (as you'd imagine from the existence of the decompiler), but is there full documentation anywhere of how the main game loop uses these files, in the detail that one would need to reimplement the main game in a modern language and r...

Ok, let me try again but the corrections are going to be equally confusing: Rob Pickering title: you're completely right, I'm completely wrong, I'm referring to the known game Box Clever, and I had thought it was a Microprimer title but somehow misread from your site that it was MAPE. Number of menu...

Fuzzbuzz (don't know how to deeplink to flaxcottage.com) is a package containing three educational games, that's currently marked as "unknown author". I want to point out that the first game, "fuzzbuzz", is actually Boxes by Rob Pickering (published by MAPE), and the other two ar...

The game is Randall Rabbit by Anthony Houghton, also from Electron User, July 1988.

To get rid of the MVN and second BIC you just need to make sure that all the masked-off bits in your sprite data are already 0. IIRC, !Paint has the irritating habit of leaving the RGB data as whatever it was before when you mark a pixel transparent. You can probably fix this in !Paint by changing a...

The demo level in !AsylumDem is a miniature level — only 1 neuron instead of 8 — that uses the same graphics as level 2 (Psyche) of the full game, but I believe the level design is completely distinct from anything that appears in the full game.

We could now consider this "fast enough" to move to dt of 1 - which means we could drop the dt calculations entirely. This now takes us to 142ms. We can remove sx as it's only used as a temporary variable and we get to 140ms. The next steps I'd be looking at woud be lookup tables for the ...

I feel like there are some bugs in the physics here, which likely explains BigEd's concern (can't tell whether they were also in the Spectrum original): 970 ax = fx/spaceprobeMass% 980 ay = fy/saturnMass% Surely you'd want to divide both co-ordinates by spaceprobeMass%. 1000 sx=vx*dt+(ax*0.5)*dt^2 1...

Every item in the game can be legitimately collected other than the telephone behind a helicopter in the underground, though collecting this by other means doesn't change anything. Another posted in the thread cited a computer positioned after a series of ladders. I can confirm that this CAN be col...

You'll find NJ_'s site https://bbcmicro.computer/how-many-made to be very informative.

On it there's a nice graph from which you can see that Issue 7s started being produced in June 1983.

A funny thing I've just noticed while looking at the way the map data is stored, is that the top five rows of screens are not stored contiguously to the lower four. There's also a major vibe shift between those two parts of the map, since the lower four rows (the beanstalk) are pretty calm and spaci...

WIth another modification to the game to allow long falls without dying, plus another small cheat (removing the time limit on the final section of the game), I was able to play from the giant's dining room back to Jill's cage and receive a win screen. (See updated list of cheats in the original post...

I've always thought that Jack Attack was an imaginative and engaging game that was understandably but somewhat unfairly maligned due to its slapdash coding (and let's not speak of its appallingly slow Electron "conversion"). And, perhaps, lack of coherent instructions. The rumours on previ...

I still don't quite understand why the example I posted doesn't work with X% MOD 256 but does work without, given that the location pointed to was well under &10000 anyway. It'd need to be under &100 in order to just work, wouldn't it? What I don't understand is jgharston's explanation of w...

And the original Micro User listing does indeed have C%:

https://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=4366

This game seems to automatically kill you after about 4 seconds / 20 frames.
I believe the reason is that the last statement on line 10, should read Otherwise the timer is not being reset correctly.

March 1990 is missing from the atarimania.com page, too.

Knight Quest (https://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=1070), which is a BASIC game in MODE 1, crashes with a "No room" error if you pick up the object in the first room and then leave the room. Lowering PAGE would be an obvious solution, but $.QUEST seems to intentionally set it to &1100 so...

Inferno also had a review in Computer and Video Games magazine, September 1987 ( archive.org ). Evidently it's a game made with Graphical Adventure Creator: ► SUPPLIER: VANADIS SOFTWARE ► MACHINES: BBC DISK ► PRICE: £14.95 inc P&P: MAIL ORDER FROM: 37 JEUNE STREET, OXFORD ► REVIEWER: JOHN 'LOONY...

I can't find any evidence of this game in the usual sources: "Danté's Inferno" from Vanadis Software.

(Source: Acorn User, December 1987)