Urban Upstart - Spectrum to BBC Conversion

[fuzzel]

A busy day in prospect! I had a complaint with Land that you there was only one save game file on the disc so for Urban Upstart you can specify a save game number (0-9). Also I've made the decision that you get the extra point for visiting all the rooms. So now to update the compression routine and recompress all the locations then yet another walkthrough... I think for this game's release I'll post a v1 for testing purposes then, if anyone spots any bugs over the next month or so, I'll reissue a v2 - final version.

[fuzzel]

Well, my improved compression routine for the graphics has allowed me to squeeze the game into memory so here's my conversion of Urban Upstart, a text adventure with graphics, for the BBC micro model B. A couple of caveats apply, I've used &880-&88F so there are no sound effects in the game (although on the original they are minimal) and I've also used &900-&9FF so if you have Econet you'll have to disable it. It should work fine on a standard BBC B with disc interface as I've not touched memory from &E00 to &10FF. A couple of things I'd like to mention. The reason I wrote this game was that, having played Oxbridge by Colin Jack not so long ago, and enjoyed the quirky teletext graphics whilst also being a big fan of Wheel of Fortune from bitd, I decided there weren't nearly enough text adventures with teletext graphics on the BBC so I figured there's a challenge and when I stumbled across AndyF's original postings about Urban Upstart it got me thinking. I'd like to thank the author(s) of Telepaint, a brilliant teletext graphics editor, without which there'd have been no way I'd have been able to create the graphics for the game (although they're by no means in the same league as Wheel of Fortune and Oxbridge). I've also taken the liberty of redesigning a few screens where I found the originals too difficult to reproduce, people being particularly tricky. I've added a little loader file to the game to give it a slightly more polished feel. If anyone encounters any bugs or has any questions, please let me know.

Urban Upstart v1.ssd

(70 KiB) Downloaded 111 times

[AndyF]

Sorry I've not been on this forum for a while Real life intrudes.

I never was able to get much further than what you saw in the pics, I gave up with GAC as it was too memory hungry. Sadly I don't have any Quill or GAC 'data'

However upon reading this topic I was able to find and recover the loading pic you see a pic of, if you want to use it and or modify it to suit your needs you're 100% welcome, please feel free . I'm attaching it as an .ssd anyway:

loading_pic.ssd

(21 KiB) Downloaded 91 times

^ It could do with a bit of tarting up perhaps but its not bad for a Spectrum to BBC "first attempt" (sort of) at a pic conversion.


Regarding the scoring itself I have a fully deprotected U.Upstart Spectrum version somewhere its terribly short of memory in general however it would be possible to make it print the score out each time a move is made perhaps, or I can over the weekend examine the Basic to see what is subtracting the score count.


Richard is right I searched everywhere for UpperGumTree myself , I even considered taking the C64 version apart (its Basic mostly!) to build a ZX and then a BBC version.

Sadly time (and health) intrudes which is why mainly I've not done any 'conversions' for the past few years.

EDIT... Meant to say I do realise the attached pic .ssd is not 'as good' as the one in the first post but its the only one I still have, and the main difference was my branding/name etc. It should do if you want to use it as a base/source to build your own.

[lurkio]

my improved compression routine for the graphics has allowed me to squeeze the game into memory so here's my conversion of Urban Upstart, a text adventure with graphics, for the BBC micro model B.

Congratulations! I've only had a quick play, but the graphics-display speed and the responsiveness to text-input are impressive. Great work!

May we host it at bbcmicro.co.uk?

[fuzzel]

Yes please