stardot.org.uk

I've made a version of the Jonathan Griffiths book Creative Assembler, as scanned originally by Chris Dewhurst in 2006, as an EPUB3 file so I could view it in my PocketBook eBook reader. I've tidied up the diagrams (I've redrawn them as SVG files), and fixed some scanning errors (a lot of v's were p...

Many, many thanks for your help. I'm actually half way through turning Creative Assembler into an ePUB file with a working contents/index pages. I'll also redo the diagrams as SVG. I'll upload it here when I've done it in case anyone else has an eBook reader and wants to read Creative Assembler.

I've just got an eBook reader (a PocketBook), largely so I can read my collection of BBC Micro related PDFs from 8BS, RetroSoftware and Stardot. Some, like the BBC Micro User Guide and Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide, work absolutely fine. However I've noticed others, like the New Advanced User G...

Sometime later, on a subsequent visit, I had a chat with Richard Hanson and he thanked me for the machine loan and then told me that a number of people in the industry had said that it was wasn't worth re-releasing Elite as it had sold all the copies it was going to. However, they had sold in exces...

The graphics are looking gorgeous - I can't wait to play this!

The thing I felt sad about is the competition winner never got a certificate. I had designed it before the game was released but sadly it got overlooked. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/ynMKV3m9QMrvCpjhuwgZq8TsL38URPEPp7L6xtTGB6hgR_AOUxybWz3mSYTSJNKr9CdaKl1gqQE4d5z47H2hl5tbpCNGoQFSQZUWLh7abgimJ2zI...

I'm more interested historically in what was actually used. Which is why I so appreciated Kevin Edwards including the original disk images on his Github! David Lawrence (who co-wrote Pipemania and Repton Infinity with David Acton) wrote an article about this in an Acorn User, but I can't remember f...

Wonderful piece of detective work. I remember this change really annoyed me at the time as some of my Repton 3 levels relied on the original behaviour and no longer worked in Life of Repton (the first Repton 3 variant I got on 5.25" disc).

I haven't been able to find much out on this other than Planetoid is the renamed version of Defender after Atarisoft got the hump. But, am I right in thinking there are two versions of Defender: one with a single game loader (length 0A 0A08) and one, like Planetoid, with two loaders (length 04 0500...

It's no problem. Richard Russell's BBC Basic for SDL fails for the same reason - I really should rebuild this computer to have a dual boot - close source drivers and open source drivers and then I wouldn't be such a nuisance!

I bet it's a game-breaker. Repton 2 had one. Repton 3 had one. I bet this has one! No, it isn't. I completed the game two days after I bought it and entered the competition and it was the "you can get stuck in the wall" version. I really love SpyCat, and it's a shame Peter Scott didn't ge...

I have to use the proprietory drivers for my Radeon card as I need to use GPU rendering in Blender. Sadly, this means Clock Signal, like BBC Basic for SDL, fails to work. I'm using Kubuntu 18.04 with the amdgpu-pro-19.30-855429-ubuntu-18.04 driver. /usr/share/libdrm/amdgpu.ids: No such file or direc...

What I did for the graphics for the unreleased Secret Realms was a bit more sophisticated than what I did for Lost Realms. I drew each graphic on a separate layer (with a special name) in an XCF file. I used a GIMP plug-in (Save layers as images) to export my XCF layers as PNGs. (In fact, I tended t...

I remember "The Train Game" by David Lawrence in Acorn User. Maybe it was that?

http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=2838

As far as official ports from other systems were concerned, the ones I actually played the most were "Uridium", "Tapper", "Pipemania" and "Sim City". Uridium is like a tricky game - shutting out the OS, writing all the routines from scratch and filling the Bee...

Just checked. There's an easy way of seeing the change in the spirits' behaviour. Load the original version of Repton 3. Then load the "PREHIST" level set from Repton Thru Time. Two spirits at the start of the level will circle for ever as the behaviour of spirits has been changed. If you ...

My understanding was that the original tape version of Repton 3 for the BBC Micro was impossible to complete due to the fungus timer bug, that was fixed and Superior offered a replacement. However, in "Around The World in 40 Screens" the game engine was changed yet again so that the behavi...

I am surprised Gyroscope by Melbourne House isn't there. I had been beginning to think I had been exaggerating how bad it was but the recent high-score challenge proved otherwise.

billcarr2005 wrote: ↑Mon Sep 16, 2019 9:11 am The discs were trivial to copy with the protection intact anyway...

Funnily enough, I never actually wanted to copy them, I wanted to get the graphics out of the games' code to play with.

I remember the "Hac Man" columns inside the Micro User often used to publish cheat pokes for Superior Software 5.25" disc games. The problem was that this code made it absolutely trivial to copy the Superior disc titles (things like the Superior Collections 1 and 2) that you had prote...

I've just found an article I downloaded as a PDF from Electron User, August 1986 Pages 41-43. It's by the author of Citadel, Michael Jakobsen, and talks about methods he used to make the Electron version of Citadel faster. It may be of interest to OxC0DE.

Yeah Labyrinth programs the video controller with non-standard values, specifically the horizontal timing is too long for a PAL display. My TV even used to have some small problems with it back in the day. ISTR it made one of my Cub monitors whistle very faintly - I doubt I could hear that high now...

I'm sure you've already found it but there's another article in the November 1990 issue (pages 78-79) which talk about the interrupts he uses to shrink the screen and hide the screen memory etc. Tony Oakden seemed to know the Electron inside out - his games do all sorts of interesting things.

I don't know if this helps but Tony Oakden wrote a couple of articles for The Micro User about techniques he used in his games. Vol 8. Number 10 December 1990 on Pages 80-81 talks about his keyboard handling routines.

Oh yes, you're right. I've sent Keith a message - he normally responds pretty quickly. I noticed that the code he uses for the keyboard is quite involved on the Beeb, so I might forward him Rich Talbot-Watkins' article on RetroSoftware about the BBC keyboard .

Feel free to merge or delete if this has already been mentioned, but there's an excellent website called Chibiakumas which contains tutorials on multi-platform game programming. Keith, the author, has created a Beeb game called Grime - simultaneously with numerous other 6502 systems. He has a very i...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1m44vH ... s6V0Fa-A4f
Hopefully this will make it a bit clearer - there was going to be an Amstrad CPC version, programmed in CPC Mode 1, which is analogous to BBC Micro Mode 1, so the graphics would be higher res than the BBC or C64 versions.

I'm curious as to what the Speccy owners thought of Repton and Repton 2. My friend Edward bought Repton Mania for his little brother George and he loved them. The thing I always wondered was what happened to the Amstrad CPC version of Repton 3 (as shown on the cover of Repton 3) - the graphics look...

Repton was released in 1985 when a lot of BBC Micro games were still pretty terrible. On the BBC Micro it had full screen scrolling, huge graphics, very nice music and the animation of the main character was particularly well done - most non-ported BBC Micro games back then suffered from "progr...

When I first got my BBC Micro it was Micropower's Stock Car and Bandits at 3 o'clock. Later on, as Rich says, Skirmish.

Also worth a look is Uggie's Garden which can be a lot of fun.