Updates — Tardis.dk Remakes

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

SQIJ 2018 now out on cassette tape.

July 30, 2018 By Sokurah

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any news, but I’m now happy to announce that my latest ZX Spectrum game is out on cassette. I just received my own copy a little while back. Here’s a picture (click to enlarge).

It’s available from Psytronik Software here and the price is only £6.99 + p/p.

Hurry and get yourself a piece of (revised) Spectrum history 😉 🙂

Filed Under: Remakes, Updates Tagged With: cassette, Spectrum, Sqij

Two updated games: Vallation 128K & Doctor Who for OSX.

November 13, 2017 By Sokurah

I have two “new” releases today – The 128K version of Vallation and the OSX port of my Doctor Who game.

The 128K version of Vallation has many changes and improvements over the 48K version that came out a year ago.

And not only that – it’s also finally out on physical cassette. It’s a stuning release and duplication and handling is done by Psytronik Software. Go here to read more about it.

The second release is the OSX port of my Doctor Who Graphical Adventure game, that came out about a month ago. Now it can be played if you’re on a Mac computer too. Go to the games page to download the game.