Oh dear, another year…

January 1, 2025 By Sokurah

First of all: Happy New Year to everyone still visiting 🥳🎉🥂 You’re a hopeful bunch. I hope I don’t disappoint you … another year 😜

The news is, however, that not much progress has been made since I posted last, exactly a year ago 😢

The Spectrum Next project that I was working on a year ago – and had 75% (ish) completed – hasn’t progressed any further. Well, perhaps a little, but I haven’t worked on it since mid-January (2024), so it’s can’t be much. I still intend to finish it though … but apparently I need a bit more time, lol. Hopefully it won’t be another year before I update this damn thing again, haha.

Me being me, I have started several other projects in 2024 … and not finished those either (well, except for one). I’m turning into another Mini0n (only few [RR] people will understand that reference). But because of the change in my job – which I mentioned in my last post – I don’t spend so much time on games development as I’ve done before … but I still love it and hope to be a bit more productive in 2025.

The one project I haven’t abandoned (yet, lol), is a small project that I started about 2 weeks ago, so it’s still early days on that one. It won’t be a “mega-game” and it will definitely not be popular with an IP-troll in the industry (so it can’t be sold), but I’m mostly making it to satisfy a personal itch, and so far I’m having fun with it. Stay tuned.

Now, the only thing I can claim to have finished in 2024, is an update to Dingo – my Spectrum game from 2011 (that also recieved an update in 2016). In this case I was contacted my Allan Turvey and asked if I wanted to re-relelase an updated version of it, for inclusion into his latest Midnight Brew Collection of games. That is an honor, as Alan is a solid and very capable coder with a sense for quality and what it takes to make a good game. So Dingo was updated and the new version (1.5) is now a 128K version that adds a bunch of AY music to it. It will still run on a 48K machine though, just without the new music.

For now this updated version is exclusive to the Midnight Brew Collection 2024 and can only be obtained by buying that, but that will also get you 4 other fantastic games, so it’s a great purchase indeed.

Filed Under: News, Remakes, Updates Tagged With: Dingo, ZX Spectrum

Oh dear, another year passed, another 2.5 years of nothing.

January 1, 2024 By Sokurah

Yeah, oh dear, it has been 2.5 years since my last update and then it had been 2.5 years since I had worked on anything, so basically that means at least 5 years of developing nothing.

Well, thats not entirely true. I have developed lots, started lots of projects – and several of those up to being 75% complete, before abandoning them (perhaps only temporarily, who knows) for something else … or relaxing, but the point is: I haven’t completed any projects I’ve started since 2018 … and I’m honestly not very happy about that.

That’s crazy, what happened? I used to be so active from 2004 to 2018, but in truth my job has changed and I’m now much busier at work than I was before, so I’m more tired in the evenings and go to bed earlier – and instead of coding I spend my ‘down time’ (usually) watching television.

I do miss coding though, and I am working on (another) new project for the Spectrum Next that I hope I will finish soon – it’s certainly more than 75% complete by now, so that’s a good omen, lol.

I’m not sure when it will be ready, but I’m sure I’ll post about it in as many places as I can 😉

Happy New Year 🥳🎉🥂

Filed Under: Misc, News, Updates

Update 2020 #1: I’m still alive :-)

November 2, 2020 By Sokurah

Wow, today it’s precisely two years since my last update. Not much new to report, though – I haven’t been terribly active lately … hence the absence of updates. In those two years I’ve started coding 3 games for the Spectrum Next … and abandoned all of them again. It appears I’m lacking the motivation to code at the moment. Oh well. I guess I just need a bit of time away from it, so unfortunately I’m not writing about a new game, but rather updates on a few older projects.

The 48K version of Vallation came out in 2016 and the 128K version about 1.5 year later. The 128K version was intended to be exclusive to the physical release of the game by Psytronic, but I always wanted to make it a free download too, after a while. Well, that’s now. I’ve added a download link to its page, here. Get the physical version on tape anyway, if you don’t have it 😉

More good news: My webhost was sold a while back (a year ago, perhaps two?) and changed name in the process. That also meant that the servernames changed, which resulted in the online scoring in my games broke. It took me a while to look into, but luckily I had coded the highscore functions rather cleverly, so all I had to do was change the server scripts. Which I’ve done now and the online scoring should work again.

However, there is also some bad news. I’m usually a Windows user, but I bought a MacBookPro in 2011 to be able to port some of my games to OSX. However, some time later Apple updated OSX and dropped legacy support, which means that my OSX games doesn’t work on newer versions of OSX. The language I coded the games in hasn’t been updated, so unfortunately it’s not possible to recompile them anymore. I will leave the games online, but be aware that they won’t work on the current versions of OSX.

Alright, that was it for my 2020 update. Let’s hope I find a project to work on, so it doesn’t take two years before the next update 😉

Filed Under: Misc, News, Updates Tagged With: OSX, Spectrum, Vallation

SQIJ for arcade hardware updated to v1.5.

November 2, 2018 By Sokurah

Another day, another update.

Nah, I’m making fun, of course – there are usually months between updates. But there is an update today and that’s the important thing.

Back in June I released my version of SQIJ for Taito’s arcade hardware and that’s the game there is an update to now.

If you only intend to play this game on the MAME emulator you won’t see a difference, but if you are among the very little handful of people who might want to burn this game onto EEPROMS and run it on the real hardware, then there is a big difference. See, the MAME emulator is not the most accurate emulator – it only emulates the hardware “well enough” so that the games work, but don’t actually emulate the hardware 100%, which means that it’s very easy to code something that works perfectly in MAME, but fails once it’s deployed to the real hardware as the hardware has some weird idiosyncrasies in its design.

And SQIJ did have a number of problems on the real hardware. None that were actually game-breaking (mostly visual stuff) but after A LOT of debugging and tweaking the game finally runs completely identical on emulation AND the real hardware.

This would not have been possible without the huge assistance from my good friend Adrian, who – to be fair – did most of the work making this update possible. So a BIG thank you to Ade.

Enjoy 🙂

 

Filed Under: Updates Tagged With: Arcade, Assembler, Sqij, Taito, Z80
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