Untitled Spectrum game project - Design overview

Just a short post to outline the main points of how the game will be structured.

Concept
Pretty basic; It'll just be a scrolling platformer with a limited number of weapons. The player will have the ability to swap weapons around depending on the situation. The backstory such is it is will simply be the usual crashed spaceship on a hostile planet and you have to work your way through to the end. I'm going to try very hard to work within the limitations of the 48k machine so although it would be nice to throw a few puzzles in, I'm not sure if I'll have the memory available.

Gameplay path
Starting on the surface, enter through caves and work your way down

Graphics style
In many ways this will be a Joffa tribute, but his graphic style was so unique I'm not even going to try and replicate it - It would just look crap. I'm experimenting with different looks to see which suits my way of working best. I have some drawings and sketches from years back and if I can dig them out I might try using them to help

Sound
Will be minimal, depending on how many cycles are left in the frame after updating the screen.

Untitled Spectrum game project - intro post

I'm working on a little game for the Spectrum to get back into coding again so I'm going to try and document the process here to help me keep track of it and refine some of the ideas.

I have a hitlist of techniques I want to cover:

• PWM multi-channel sound
• 'Multi-threaded' game engine (separate display rendering, map decompression and tile management tasks)
• Graphic effects in the border
• Smooth scrolling (25fps)
• Multicolour effects in the display file area

It's ambitious I suppose but if I don't aim high then I've nothing to work towards.

Anyone for Raspberry Pi?

This has got me really interested. If they can even get close to the suggested price point they have a hit on their hands and potentially an Arduino-killer.

Looks like it would be a superb platform for anyone interested in embedded systems or end-user applications. You could tie anything into this, from ethernet interfaces to GSM and GPS mobules. You could even quite easily by this for the curious child in your family (or the inner one!) who's interested in computers and electronics without worrying about the cost.

If you have any ideas please let them know so that they can target it properly and make a success out of it.

To test: Moving the Windows XP prefetch cache onto a flash drive

Need to test this to see if it works. If flash drive is not available at boot time (i.e. USB flash drive) it might possibly cause an error.

Disable the prefetch cache with the following registry modification:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher=0

Reboot to make the change take effect.

Move prefetch directory to the new location and replace it with a hard link to that location. To force a rebuild of the cache:

Now enable the prefetch cache and reboot again:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnablePrefetcher=3

Notes:

"rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks" will rebuild the prefetch cache and do a defrag of the system files listed in Layout.ini (and should recreate that file if it was deleted)