Remakes — Tardis.dk Remakes

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

Homemade RIP OFF cocktail table arcade machine.

September 10, 2018 By Sokurah

Sometimes people surprise you – and this happened to me recently. Earlier this year, Stephan D from Germany, wrote to me to tell me that he loved my remake of Rip Off and asked if he could build a Rip Off cocktail arcade cabinet and use my game and logo for it? Naturally I said yes.

I have always loved vector games and back in 2007 I decided to remake Rip Off (which was one of my favorites) for the PC. It was enormously fun to make and I’m especially proud of the state-machine behind the enemies that decide their behaviour. And nothing beats my sigh of relief when I had to optimise my code at the end of the project – because it slowed to a crawl when there were many enemies on screen at the same time … and it worked. But I digress.

Back to Stephan now.

Two months passed and he sent me a new mail; “the cabinet was done” and attached 5 pictures. The one at the top with a “Tardis Remakes” logo instead of the Cinematronics logo (the rest are below). And not only that – the cabinet is also made to allow two players playing at the same time. Awesome! It’s only one of two games I’ve made that has a two-player mode, but this was never intended to be placed in a cabinet – especially not a cocktail one, so there is no option for flipping or rorating the screen … but I guess that if Stephan is okay with that, so should I be 🙂

It’s pretty great to know that my game is running in an arcade machine out there. Someone even remade it, LOL, but the best moment was without doubt back in 2009 when I received a nice mail from Tim Skelly (the coder of the original arcade game) calling it a “good job” and taking time out to write a bit more to me than I could have hoped for

Here’s the rest of the pictures of Stephans cocktail cabinet. If you click them, a window with open a bigger version of the pictures.

Cool, right? 🙂

Filed Under: Misc, Remakes Tagged With: Arcade, Homemade, Rip Off

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

New arcade game: Sqij 2018 (for arcade hardware)

May 4, 2018 By Sokurah

Another day, another release. This time it’s SQIJ again. The previous game I released was a Spectrum version of this C64 game, but here I’ve taken the Spectrum game and coded an arcade version of it – and because the Taito arcade hardware is much more capable than the humble ZX Spectrum – this game is now looking as good as it’s ever going to.