It’s been quiet here as I continue to flit between retro projects, failing to get any to a state which I can release or write interesting things about. My new year’s resolution to finish things seems to have stalled. There will be another slice of Spectrum history soon, as I wrap up the last threads of the Timex branch of the story. In the meantime, we’ve had a little bit of excitement, as the excellent Mr. RetroShack included a link to my article about Investronica.
My project to build a Mistrum Spectrum clone is moving slowly, despite choosing to take what I’m sure will be an easier root. Lazarus Long has already done the hard work of translating the original schematics into a PCB design1. I have had these manufactured and am slowly populating them. The issue of replacing the PROMs with something more modern – and more readily available – remains, but I think I’ve made some progress there.
Meanwhile much of my spare time has been spent absorbed in the Zen of assembly language programming, working on some retro game projects.
Tomb Robber is a Teletext mode Roguelike I started for the BBC Micro years ago. I haven’t worked on it recently. I mention it here so that maybe someday I’ll go back and finish it. I recall I was in the middle of replacing the combat mechanics when I last walked away from it.
Station Twenty One (provisional title) is a platform shooter for the Spectrum 128K. I chose to target the 128K partly to fit with my general wish to revisit all the old systems I once owned and write something for them, but mostly because the memory paging and multiple screen support allows me to easily do flicker-free graphics and thus appear competent. Having a proper sound chip is also nice. It’s just a shame that means it won’t run on the Mistrum.
Development is still in the early stages, but the main game mechanic is in place. All that’s left is to add some enemies and build out all the maps.
And because I can never have too many things on the go at once, I’ve also entered JagJam 20242. I never owned a Jaguar at the time, despite still being a full-on Atari fanboi when it was released. Looking at the prices on eBay it’s unlikely I’ll own one nowadays either. But the challenge of its unorthodox architecture3 was just too much to resist.
As with so many retro platforms, it’s amazing to see the effort put into maintaining usable dev toolchains. I’ve been playing around with Atari’s demo of the Jaguar’s 3D capabilities using the jaguar-sdk4. A tidied-up and rearranged version of this code is available on GitHub5.
Now to make a game from it.
