Planned ports

[AndyF]

I plan on porting the following Spectrum adventure games over as and when I have time:

Madcap Manor
Orc Island
Rifts Of Time
Sealed City
Subsunk
The Traveller
Urquahart Castle

Not necessarily in that order though.

Given other projects in progress I've not done anything with these, beside disassemble their ZX originals for examination.

Also Project X 2 (The O Zone) is near completion anyway, see here > http://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/viewto ... =40&t=5261 for specifics

[richardtoohey]

Hi, there.

I do want to have a dekko at your stuff one day, but the list of things I want to look at is longer than my free time.

So, for now - just curious how you are doing this.

Literally disassembling Z80 code? Or are all these ones produced with a game engine - something like GAC (which I played with BITD) and you try and make the Spectrum files work with a BBC version of the game engine?

I could Google those games and find out a bit more about how they were written, but where's the fun in that?

[AndyF]

They are Quilled games, PAW is a bit too complex (well more honestly its too big to fit into a B) using a utility to turn them back into a semi readable state. Unquill its called.

Its not a simple copy / paste or type in job however as various flags have different meanings between the ZX and B versions, in particular the "current room" flag, so you have to stop and compare them and make adjustments.

Messages do not match up either, certain ones are hardcoded and you have to tweak it for those too, and the vocabulary too needs a tweak as it starts at 0 with one version and 1 with another.

Then if the original ZX was done with Patch or Press its compressed even more, this can sometimes result in missing conditionals in the disassembly, I had this with Microman (Was not possible to get out of the sink, there was no conditional to allow it) so manually added one and a few other things too. However I produced a working version of MicroMan and Galaxias and I think they are reasonable, well sort of.

There's detail in that link in my signature, scroll down to the "Project-X: The Micro Man" section in particular.

Once I have the code I then split it into lots of sections: messages / sys messages / objects / object start locs / object words / locations / status conditionals / event conditionals etc, here's Ozone:

That is the "read" directory I work from, sometimes making notes into those files as I go. They are just chopped up parts of the big .unp file as its impossible to work with one massive text file, too much scrolling.

ozone_build_1.png (77.59 KiB) Viewed 4573 times

And here is the complete directory I work with when building, the manuals and tools I drop into each game folder as I sometimes need to refer to them, its also necessary to fire up ZXSpin to see how well the conversion progress matches the original:

ozone_build_2.png (138.46 KiB) Viewed 4573 times

Things in there include the screen and the loader etc as I decide what I want to do, I just save a snapshot file every now and again as Quill *can* sometimes crash when building. There's no pattern to the saves, I might insert all the words then save or I might do it over three sessions, really depends on how much time I have free rather than anything else.

I unquill them with a 32bit machine as it won't run on this one then just drag them over as name.unp , I read the files with Notepad+ as that's a nice editor too.

Um I'll stop there before I bore you to death

[richardtoohey]

Thanks for the write-up, Andy.

And I will try and get around to looking at your efforts, but only so many hours in the day (and I think my Pi has arrived ... but the courier company has lost it ... ... hopefully only temporarily ...)

[AndyF]

Further ones "under consideration" , read that as 'I have them but am not sure'

Its likely to be next year before any of the ones listed below even grace my disassembler...

Witch Hunter
Time Quest
The Hollow
Africa Gardens
Alter Earth
Spy Plane
Magic Castle
Eye Of Vartan
Devils Island
Alter Earth
The Hollow
Crystal Frog
Return To Ithaca
Earthbound
Colossal Cave Adventure although after reading this it may be in progress anyway.

[AndyF]

Subsunk @ 80% complete now. Although I think its going to be a bit tight for space, assuming I can get it to fit, not too sure really

Just for now decided to whip up the loader with instructions etc and try to sort a pic out, bit fiddly but after a lot of faffing around settled for this layout:

subs1.png (5.17 KiB) Viewed 4463 times

May be weekend before I can get near it again though.

EDIT... Fixed typo in loading screen , "Torrance" not "Torranace" and moved the text around a bit.

EDIT(2) *final* loading screen now, adjusted text location slightly and year / (c) location to author area instead of publisher.

[AndyF]

Subsunk released

Quite where I'll find time to do the next one I'm not sure yet