A long long time ago (in a galaxy very similar to our own) I wrote for small-press fanzine “PD Power”, published by Prism PD. It was all about the ZX Spectrum, specifically the Public Domain software scene – this was after the demise of wonder-zine Your Sinclair, which kind of marked the end of the commercial side of the machine. I actually had a column (oo-er) in the magazine, some of which I actually wrote, all about the Spectrum +3 – I was a little miffed when I saw other people writing under my name, but these things happen when you’re as popular as I.
So, I’ve recently been playing around with some of my old software and I found the sources for the articles written by me, in Word-Master format. Rather than lose these forever, except to the small number of people who saw the magazine, I thought I’d re-post the articles here, complete with (in some cases) lawyer-unfriendly typos – really, in the first article about replacing drive belts a typo actually stated that “Prism PD and I, Icabod, accept any responsibility for, well, anything really.” – Uhm… so far nobody has taken me up on that claim, and I’d like to now publicly withdraw my comment. Phew.
Anyway, the first of the articles is below the break, and is that very same 3″ drive-belt replacement article.
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I’m always interested to see what people are working on, and I think it can add to some excitement and expectation – sometimes unfounded, but often it gives a good idea of what’s to come. For example playing beta versions of games – sure they may be a little rough around the edges, but they allow you to get a feel for the final product, which will hopefully be released in a more polished state. Concept artwork too is nice as you get to see in essence what is going on in the head of the designers (which may be a little scary at times, but rarely is it dull). I’m working on a demo at the moment for which I’ve prototyped some code (in Windows C++ as it’s quick-and-easy) – I’ve then been able to pass that along to LaesQ so he can see what my plans are and compose some appropriate music.
But this post is about a different kind of production, for which you can see an early beta representation here. It’s a joint production from myself and Mrs.Bod, and you can probably tell that a lot of development work is still required. The expected release date is the end of September 2008, although as this is the first production of it’s kind from us it’s liable to succumb to delays – possibly into October. So, a little late for showing at Sundown. We’ve not yet decided on a title (people seem keen to provide suggestions), but we’re expecting the soundtrack style to be of the “loud and crying” vein.
On February 15th 2008, the fourth raww.orgy began. Pronounced “raw dot orgy” (in a similar fashion to my main website being pronounced “raw dot org”), it’s one of only two demoparties to take place in the United Kingdom, the other being the multi-format, and much larger Sundown. Prior to the first raww.orgy, which took place in 2005, there hadn’t been a demoparty in the UK since 2000. Always planned to be a small gathering of ZX Spectrum sceners, the party has grown in popularity among the scene with a large number of remote entries to the competitions. This is a small report and analysis of the 2008 party.
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February 22, 2008 – 10:45 am
Well my latest release has been, uhm, released – it’s the player from last weekend’s raww.orgy demoparty. It’s a simple enough idea – a single program to both show the graphics entries for the competition, and to also play the music. For those who have seen the previous party-players, yes it’s based on the same code but this year I made a few important changes.
The build mechanism has been altered to be a bit more “streamlined”. That’s to say it’s much easier to add a new production to the player – a process which is very important considering the scattered receipt of competition entries. In fact it’s not even required to change the main code – you can just add a header file and include it prior to running the makefile and all will/should work.
The next and most impressive/pretty change was regarding the screen fades – inspired in part by the fade-in effects at the start of Stick Up Game I decided to replace the previous players’ screen fades with something a little prettier. The routine uses a 7-bit grey-scale image of values from 8 to 120 as the base for the fade. It then shifts a call-table on each frame, and for each attribute block it does a re-re-directed call to a function. The process for each attribute block (and there are 768 in a screen, for those who don’t know) is something like this:
- Get the value of the grey-scale image at this attribute position.
- Use the grey-scale value to look into the shifting call-table.
- Call the function, which could do any of the following:
- Fade out the normal screen attribute.
- Copy the new screen data to the screen.
- Fade in the new screen attribute.
Using this system it’s incredibly easy to add a new “fade” design. As they’re based on grey-scale images rather than hand-coded, you can simply design a new wipe in a graphics editor, adjust the levels so the values are from 8 to 120, and then save it as a raw 768b file. The results can vary – at one point I had about 14 fades compiled-in to the player, so I purged the ones that didn’t work so well.
The player is available from the party-page – you should check out the “results” version as it’s got some corrected music in it, and don’t forget to check Pouet if you like it. If people are interested I’ll upload the code for the player – it’s quite a nice piece of work. But then I would say that.
February 19, 2008 – 9:24 am
Here’s the thing – I don’t read Russian. Like many non-English languages, I simply don’t get it (if it were a programming language I’d have learned it in about a week). However being a ZX scener there are a lot of websites with news and comment in Russian (or a variation of it). So I make use of online translation tools, which is great – as I can’t find translation tools for Czech, Slovak or Polish (three other big scene languages). But there are problems using translation tools, they tend to interpret things in different ways…
I just had a demoparty – quite a small thing, but quite popular on the scene. On a forum there’s a comment from Elfh…I tried translating it using the two main online tools. Here’s the results:
Using Babelfish it’s: “on the whole, raww.orgy in this year it succeeded”
However,using Google it comes out as: “ In general, raww.orgy this year failed”
I’m no cunning linguist, but surely there should be some consistency?
February 12, 2008 – 6:28 pm
While I was in the process of upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, I figured it may be a good time to switch themes… to the bland one you have in front of you. I think it looks nice, even if it’s a little simple, and it’s not changed much since I tested it out all those months ago. Maybe when I can be bothered I’ll add something like graphics, which I said I’d do and haven’t, but I actually quite like the simplicity of this design. I should probably check it works OK with the latest version of the Sandbox theme, which is what it’s based on. Hmm.
November 25, 2007 – 4:38 pm
In a manner similar to that of the Gasman, I thought I’d upload the screenie I did for this weekend’s ASCii competition being held over in Izhevsk. The competition I took part in was to design a logo for the party. I did it in quick time, making the decision to take part on my way home from work on Friday afternoon.
I produced it using a number of tools, mostly SevenuP (a Windows-based ZX screen$ editor), with Photoshop used to create a pixellated mask for the main logo.
It came in fourth place, out of 7. That’s exactly in the middle, meaning my entry was the most average, and the one against which all others are compared. No. Really.
