Matt_B

Yeah, I know the feeling. One of the games I submitted this year had been lying around unfinished for the best part of a couple of years. I knew exactly what needed doing in it all that time, but only just got around to putting it all into action a few weeks back. (The thought that most people will probably just play it for 30 seconds and pronounce it to be crap doesn't help either.) Anyway, the date stamp thing can be fixed by going to the user control panel and picking a date format in the board preferences tab. I'd guess that it's just defaulting to something that doesn't work at the moment. The main thing the forum needs is a bit more traffic though.

Voting now appears to be open for the 2K competition and the votepack is now online. As ever, the link is: http://minigamecomp.org.uk/ (The voting page still has 1K on it, but the 2K games are in there.)

Hello everyone, I submitted a 2K game for the Spectrum just before the deadline too, so hopefully we'll see them on the website soon. Cheers, Matt

Although not technically that difficult, I think you'd need to be a bit of a visionary to put a mode like that into a computer in 1985. Given that even high end PCs only had EGA cards (and they were pretty new too) at the time, a 16 colour mode would surely have seemed more than adequate. Secondly, using 64K for the display would outstrip the capability of the CPU to update it quickly. A lot of ST games, particularly scrollers, were rather sluggish compared to their Amiga counterparts and this would only make things worse. Unless there was a corresponding boost to the CPU speed, you'd end up only being able to use the 256 colour mode for static displays and such, much the same as with the Amiga's HAM modes. Yep, despite all the Amiga's supposed advantages it only took a couple more years for the wheels to fall off Commodore. The market for sub PC-priced home computers had all but evaporated by that stage.

I'd say keep the Gameboy and maybe the Nomad too. You could store them both and a decent sized library of games in a shoebox, so they're hardly space killers. Also, as portable systems with a very specific feel to them, emulation is less likely to cut it.

Time to do a proper list, I suppose: Blood Money Captive Carrier Command Chaos Chaos Engine Civilization Elite F-19 Stealth Fighter Formula 1 Grand Prix Frontier Grav Knights Of The Sky Lemmings Llamatron Lotus Turbo Challenge II Populous II Secret Of Monkey Island Sensible Soccer Space Crusade Xenon II

Yep, it's a total mockery of a list; just a bunch of anonymous DOS/Windows boxes with a few other machines thrown in as a vague attempt to make it look comprehensive. For my money, the best PC is one that you build yourself out of components that you've hand picked as being best for your requirements. With the exception of games machines, and some other very specialist hardware, that's pretty much always been the case even going back to the days of CP/M.

The STE supported sticks with not just two buttons but about 17. Hardly anone used them though. I guess for games that really required more than one fire button there was always the keyboard

I don't think the OS was that much of a problem with the ST. Say what else you like about it, but at least GEM/TOS is stable and well behaved applications rarely crash. Also, considering that most of the world was running on MS-DOS or worse at the time I don't think it was too bad in the feature department. The single-sided floppy drives were definitely a bad move though. Ah well, we should be thankful for the small mercy that they went for the 3.5" format at least. Anyway, I think people are making too big a deal of the ST losing out to the Amiga. Commodore went belly up within a couple of years of the ST line being discontinued, so it was a rather Pyrrhic victory at best. The two machines had far more similarities than differences and, the way I see it, pretty much lost out together to common enemies.

It was definitely too little too late. A couple of years earlier and it might have stood a chance of getting a decent user base. The ST was definitely the machine to have in 1988 and with a higher spec baseline model it might have held its own a lot longer. However, the STE was launched into a ferociously competetive marketplace in 1990. As well as the Amiga, the STE was up against a raft of fourth generation consoles (Megadrive/Genesis, SNES, etc.) from below and gaming PCs with the 386/VGA/Soundblaster hardware combo were becoming pretty much standard at the high end. It would have taken it a bit more than clever marketing to have survived in that environment and even if it had, the end would surely have only been delayed by a couple of years to when the fifth generation consoles arrived.

LO armour class and maxed out luck helps, but some of the guys in the front rank are going to get taken out whatever you can do. All they can really do is buy time for your wizards. I'd guess the problem is that you're not hitting with the hardest the back rank has to offer. MIBL is a great spell against large groups of fairly weak enemies, but there are much stronger attacks against individual creatures. Use one of your wizards to hit the demons with DMST as it does a huge amount of damage to them. REDE is also more poweful against Vampires, so you should use the second wizard to cast it against them. The third should hit Mangar with a DEST spell, and can usually kill him in the first round

The bard is most useful at very low levels - his songs are the best magic you have at the start of the game - and also at very high levels - where specialist fighters are little better against the enemies you face and the bard has better items. He's certainly a bit of a passenger in the middle though. Ah well, it's his story and he keeps the soundtrack ticking over. Rogues aren't that bad at fighting once you get them to the higher levels. They just don't have the abilities in the first game to justify their place, although their role is much better thought out in the sequels. For what it's worth, I've heard of people taking on the first game with a party consisting of only one proper fighter, a rogue, a bard and three magic users. Once you get wizards with tons of hits and LO armour classes, you can even dispense with fighters all together. I prefer a couple of decent once though just because they save you from using up valuable spells to get rid of weak enemies. Anyway, it's very easy to ramp a character up a few levels by statue and berserker bashing, so there's no reason why you can't keep a few alternates on ice and bring them in using the party merger program should they become necessary.

Price is a good rough guide, but some weapons have special abilities that add to the cost but not the hitting power. I'd say three fighters of any type, a bard, a conjuror and a magician to start off with. Once you get the bard strong enough to survive in the front rank, drop one of the fighters and get another conjuror. Each of the fighter types has their pros and cons, but I usually settle on a paladin and a warrior for my final party. Hunters and monks have nice abilities, but don't gain as many hit points which makes them vulnerable to magic, poison, etc. I never found a good use for a rogue in the first game, so they're not really worth a slot over a good fighter. I've done it in the high teens but I guess it just depends on how long it takes you to get a trio of good wizards. The final battle isn't usually much of a struggle though, as Mangar succumbs to many of the high level magical attacks fairly quickly. He's only got 58 hit points, I believe. Getting to the top of his tower with an intact party is usually the tricky bit. You've got it in one. It's also my vote for the best moment in the game: You go through a door and end up facing an entire army! There are some tougher encounters in Mangar's tower that might yield more experience, but you can't use the teleport to "recycle" them as easily. I've not got much of a clue either, but you certainly don't need them to win the game.

To be fair to the Coleco guys they were all last minute entries, so they didn't really have much time to push the format to the limit. I was quite impressed at how playable the games turned out under the circumstances. For my money, the best entry was the Pong game for the Sega. OK, it's possibly the least original idea in computer gaming, but it's far and away the most playable of the bunch and that ought to count for something.

I had a Microdrive. It was nice to get the loading time for games down to ten seconds, but hardly any software of note was released on them and in most cases you needed fairly good hacker skills (or special hardware like a Multiface) to transfer them. Anyway, I'm sure the prospect of a box full of C90s with 20-30 games on each of them sold a lot of Spectrums and C64s. I guess the thing is that QC goes completely out of the window when any product is a huge success, and production needs to be scaled up to cope. Commodore weren't really an exception in that regard, and got their act together again fairly well.

Guttang Gottong and Quarth (aka Block Game or Block Hole) are a couple of good puzzlers that I've whiled away many an hour on. Parodius and R-Type are both excellent shooters on the GB too. IMHO they're better than the same titles on most other 8-bits. The Zelda games are also worth a look, as they're really only RPGs in name only. There's hardly any monster bashing or stats raising to be done and are more of a mixture of adventuring, puzzles and jump-and-dodge gaming. Links Awakening DX is the pick of the bunch but the two Oracle titles aren't far behind.

It's all in the wording, I guess. Atari 400 = substandard hack-job. Atari 8-bits = 800XL (and possibly console?) goodness. For what it's worth the 6128 was the definitive Amstrad CPC machine; it replaced the 664 which was unable to run CP/M+ and was quietly dropped after a year. I suppose the 6128+ is better still, with hardware support for sprite graphics and DMA sound, but that's largely academic as it was released far too late into a market that was already crawling with 16 bit machines. Still, I doubt that will affect the poll.

If you're gonna tell me Mercenary on the C64 was weaker than the Atari version, I'll smack you upside the head Mercenary is a damn good game on all formats so I'd guess the main benefit of the Atari version was that you could get it first. Still, maybe some Atari fans would have their own opinions there? Yes, I have heard about it, and remember being most impressed at the time. I'll blame Lemon64 for listing it as a 2D game otherwise I might have found it when I looked to see what there was. I'd question that it's true 3D in the sense of, say, Elite or Mercenary. It's more of of a hybrid of sprites and 3D really, but I guess that's just playing to the C64's strengths which was a sensible thing to do. Yep, I'm no fan of arcade conversions on the Spectrum and I avoided them like the plague back in the 80s. For the most part though, there are similar games that were designed with the Spectrum's capabilities in mind that both look and play a lot better. Still, I suppose if it's that specific arcade game you wanted you'd be much better off with the C64 version more often than not.

It's not just single games we're comparing here though, it's entire genres. The C64 produced one decent original series of isometric 3D games (Last Ninja) and no original true 3D games of any great merit. All the other good ones on it are conversions from other formats, which are generally weaker than the originals. No amount of pontificating about the capabilities of the hardware is going to change that, although it might give some insights into why it happened that way. Anyway, I'm quite willing to admit - and I've already stated as much - that 2D games make up a much bigger proportion of the games people play even on the Spectrum, and the C64's capabilities were obviously put to good use there. There are also a huge chunk of games (possibly about 30% of the favourites on all formats) that use neither 3D graphics nor sprites i.e. strategy and adventure games, and they can be just as good on any of them. Anyway, lest there be any confusion, my position has always been that the best 8 bit gaming machine is whichever one that your favourite 8 bit games run on.

Yes, I think we should try and judge the machines in question on their absolute best performances rather than the ones where they came rather short of the mark. Botched conversions produced by programmers who'd bitten off more than the could chew and/or working to ridiculous time limits happened on all machines. It could be a lottery which computer ended up with the best implementation of a game and rarely came down to things as mundane as the capabilities of the hardware.

But look at the C64 versions of isometric games. They don't have any more colour than the Speccy. The only difference is that the C64 versions are slower. ...and the Amstrad CPC ones can be just as fast and run in 4 colour mode too. Whilst you can put some slower games down to poor conversions - heck, there were enough of those that went the other way too - this pretty much applies to all of them. Anyway, I'm not trying to write off the C64 here. It had superb performance in most 2D games, which accounts for the bulk of 80s arcade genres. The point is just that it could be left wanting compared to other machines when the VIC2 wasn't much help.

You can actually do some 16 bit maths with the Z80 although it's limited to add, subtract and shift with the hl, ix and iy registers. It's all done on an 8 bit internal bus though so these instructions tend to take a fair bit longer than the equivalent operations with the accumulator. They share an 8 bit external data bus, but the 65816 certainly has a 16 bit internal data bus. I'm not sure about the 6809 though as I don't have a schematic to hand. Edit: I found one and the ALU in the 6809 appears to only output to the 8 bit bus, so I'm guessing it uses a similar trick to the Z80.

I suppose there's no escaping it, but yes, even CPU power is going to be dependent on the hardware implemenation. A 77% lead is hard to throw away on memory contention though, although I suppose the Acorn Electron lost half of its clock cycles due to a poor implementation. You'd be quite right to in the case of Jack Schofield. He was notoriously defensive of the BBC and antagonistic towards the C64 and the Spectrum. There were plenty of better 3D engines used in later Z80 games. Have a look at Carrier Command, Starstrike II or Starglider on the Spectrum or Amstrad for a few examples. I used to think I knew about optimizing Z80 code, but I'm coming to realize that it's just as much of a black art as with the 6502. Use of the stack for memory copy, adding and multiplying using the 16 bit address registers, switching to the alternate register set, using undocumented ops and getting random numbers from the refresh register are all tricks I've picked up in the past six months. It's a 16 bit machine too, although I suppose you could debate that when it runs 6502 compatible mode. Yes, there's a whole story behind that. Basically, the developers of the Spectrum software - Nine Tiles - offered to come up with a specially optimized version of BASIC for the new machine. However, Sinclair wanted them to do it on the cheap so they just ported the ZX81 ROM over in the end, adding a few new commands to access the hardware features. It wasn't even a finished version that ended up in the machine.

I was actually thinking of true 3D games such as Carrier Command, The Sentinel and Mercenary. For what it's worth I thought the Amstrad CPC did isometric games the best, although my fellow WOSsers may brand me a heretic for saying that. The standard loader on the Spectrum ran at around 1500 baud but it was only really designed for a 16K machine where it could usually load a game in under a minute; maybe two if you wanted a title screen. A typical 48K game took 3-4 minutes to load, which wasn't great. However, you could do much faster custom loaders, some of which ran at 3000 or even 4500 baud, to get the loading time down to around a couple of minutes although they could be a lot less reliable. 128K games could be bad news, I suppose, as some that didn't have custom loaders could take upwards of 10 minutes; however that has to be seen in the context that the machine was designed to load an entire game at once avoiding the need for disk access or tape multiloads. Anyway, did the C64 really manage much better than this? I thought games typically took several minutes to load from disk on the machine, let alone tape where the standard speed was around 300 baud? This made custom loaders a necessity rather than a luxury. You've obviously never seen Invasion of the Body Snatchas then. It's a Defender clone that, if anything, is just too fast to be playable. On the other hand, I suppose it's very optimized for the Spectrum making it quite different from the arcade version. It also required external hardware for the sound effects, although could be hacked to use the AY chip on a 128K machine. I'd take the point about scrolling shoot 'em ups though. The C64 ought to do better, and usually does because the hardware gives huge advantages here with scrolling and sprites where the Spectrum has to do it all in software. 3D games are a much fairer test of raw CPU power, as no machine had any accellerator features for them back in the day.

I'd love to see the article if you could dig it up, but I can't help but feel that it would have been flawed. I can't think of any reason why the Atari 800 wouldn't be a fair bit quicker than the C64; the CPUs are almost the same and the former is clocked a lot faster. Unless there are some horrendous memory contention issues that I'm not aware of, it's an open and shut case. In any case, if you want a realistic benchmark, just try playing Mercenary on both machines. Even the Spectrum ought to come out faster than the C64; A 3.5:1 ratio in CPU speeds ought to be more than enough to compensate for the efficiencies of the 6502; I know for a fact that the Spectrum has 32K of uncontended memory, so the only possible explanation would be a naive translation of code without any re-optimization and that would work both ways. Again, you can play almost any 3D game on both machines and the Spectrum version will have a visible edge in speed. By the way, the Spectrum's CPU power might not be that great overall, but since the screen only used 6.75K of RAM, where most of its competitors had to address around 16K, that gave it a huge advantage in games where the hardware implementation couldn't do most of the work. It also gave programmers good reason to break out of the sprite/scrolling trap and develop more innovative graphics engines. Anyway, the BBC was definitely the fastest machine of the era with a 2 MHz 6502 CPU and no memory contention. It was just too expensive to compete against the other machines in the marketplace and the attempt to produce a cheaper model ended up with the flawed and incompatible Electron. You can't knock the games for it though; Elite is almost synonymous with 8 bit gaming in the UK. Edit: I think I've found the article and, althoug the CPUs do get a mention, its just benchmarking the BASIC implementations on the machines: http://www.gondolin.org.uk/hchof/reviews/yc-atari800xl.html Is that the one?