"Gabriele Amore Releases Two Donkey Kong Homebrew Games for the ZXSpectrum"

[JamesD]

This looks like they might still be a work in progress, but they look pretty good already.
The sound is horrible but they look pretty good... for the speccy anyway.
http://www.vintageisthenewold.com/gabriele-amore-releases-two-donkey-kong-homebrew-games-for-the-zx-spectrum/

 

 

[CatPix]

The first one looks pretty detailled and colorful, that's nice!

Nothing wrong with the sound a far as speccy standard goes

They looks like standard 48k games, it's always nice to see them.

Lots of Speccy homebrews assume people will have a ZX 2/3 or a modded Speccy with 128Ko or RAM and added AY sound chip.

[carlsson]

Oh, that is great news coming from Gabriele!

[am1933]

Both games have the authentic look of an old colourful Spectrum game, nothing used to piss me off more on the Speccy than the sacrifice of colour by developers on most of the later games.

[JamesD]

Both games have the authentic look of an old colourful Spectrum game, nothing used to piss me off more on the Speccy than the sacrifice of colour by developers on most of the later games.

One of the things I really don't like about many speccy games, is that they look like someone painted a background and they have B&W outlines animated over the top.

Let's face it, why bother with color at all in that case?

These make pretty good use of color on the Spectrum.

[carlsson]

I think the change from when everything moved by one character at a time, to when everything moved by one pixel at a time, is where ZX Spectrum programmers gave up colours as the colour clashes would be unbearable. If it had better colour resolution or hardware sprites layering on top of backgrounds, that never had happened but also had made the computer more expensive to begin with.

[CatPix]

It's an issue tied to how the color works on the Spectrum (and in fact, on some other computers of the era, including the C64)

The Spectrum video display define a monochrome plan where you have your background, etc, and over this, you have a grid of colors. You can attribute what you want to each cell, but only one color per cell... Of course, the resolution of the color grid if way inferior to the screen resolution, I think, if I recall right, that a cell color is like 6 or 8 pixel square.This is why many Spectrum games have this clunky aspect, because the background is more detailled than the color grid allow it, and because in theory, you can only have one color on those cells.

There are ways to overcome that issue, as those color clashes are rarely seen on the Thomson games, and on the C64 that both have the same system, but the Spectrum rudimentary video circuit and lackluster 48Ko of RAM (for both graphisms, program execution AND data since the Spectrum games are on tape most of the time) mean that unless you're on an expanded system (a Spectrum 2 or 3, with 128 Ko or RAM and a 3" floppy drive) you do'nt really have room to manage to make something better.

Edited October 22, 2016 by CatPix

[carlsson]

Not entirely true. The Spectrum works with 8x8 cells, where each cell can have its own background and own foreground colour, for a total of two colours in the same cell.

 

The C64 on the other hand, has a multicolour mode which reduces horizontal resolution to half (160x200) but allows for background + three foreground colours in each cell with 4x8 double width pixels. Also you have the hardware sprites which often add more high resolution graphics to the screen. I don't know about the Thomson, but for sure it isn't lack of RAM that sets the colour limitation on either of these. At least not unless you consider how the graphics system was designed to begin with and how many bytes it has to work with as a memory limitation.

[JamesD]

I have less trouble with color clash than I do with total lack of effort.

[CatPix]

Thanks for correcting. I don't know about programming so I only have vague notions of it.

RAM can be an issue in that the more data you wan to be on screen, with each his colors and such, the more RAM you need.

And given how poorly mnay Spectru mgaes were developped, there was certainly waste of ressources on all places.

[carlsson]

On the Spectrum, you can change the location of the graphics data, so if you precalculate characters there could be a limitation on how many sets of such characters you can keep in memory. That could impact animation, but not really colour resolution. Some demo programmers may use timing tricks to change colours per raster line which increases the colour resolution, but those tricks rarely are usable in games where you can't control the environment as well (user input, not predefined movement).