Assembler — Tardis.dk Remakes

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

Vallation updated – now at version 1.1

July 14, 2016 By Sokurah

There were a couple of bugs in the game – they were rare…but they were there and not long after the release of version 1.0 I received many messages about those bugs. Nothing like gamers to break you game, right? 😉 😀

However, after a lot of debugging and even more testing I’m fairly confident that the bugs are gone now …but I’m sure time will tell if I’m right. 😉

The link on the page has been updated. Download version 1.1 here.

I’ve only changed code in this update – not the layout of any screens or enemies. That being said – some screens could use a bit of tweaking…like the one below. I guess that despite my thorough testing it never occurred to me to enter this screen from above. If I had I would’ve known that it would most likely be the last thing you did. I’d be impressed if anyone can pass there.

You’d better come in from the bottom or you will NOT make it.

Good news though. We have found someone to distribute the game on physical cassette and we have decided to put the “normal game” (this one) on side A of the tape, but I’ll start working on an extended 128K version for the B-side, with more levels, more graphics, more enemies and some major changes to the gameplay, so I will go through all the levels (again) and make extra sure there aren’t any (almost?) impossible screens like this. More news about this in a couple of months or so.

Filed Under: News, Remakes, Updates Tagged With: Assembler, Spectrum, Vallation, ZX

Vallation 1.0 released

July 6, 2016 By Sokurah

*Finally* – something new to show. 🙂

This is my latest game – it’s a new game for the ZX Spectrum and written in 100% assembler.
It’s a remake of a C64 game from 2013 by Jason Kelk (see more information on the games page).

In the game you’re flying your little ship through an enemy base (read: maze) and trying to escape and avoid being killed in the process. The base consists of 4 levels and a total of 101 screens. So, basically it’s a Cybernoid clone. 😉

The plan from here is to make a very limited run of physical cassettes and I will post more once I have more details about that.

Show me some love if you like it and send me a mail at r_e_t_r_o_h_e_a_d@tardis.dk (remove the underscores).

Enjoy.

Filed Under: News, Remakes Tagged With: Assembler, Spectrum, ZX

Released: The Speccies (1 & 2).

September 16, 2013 By Sokurah

Okay, finally made it – The Speccies has arrived and are now released into the wild.

The Speccies is a puzzlegame for the 48K ZX Spectrum. It’s coded in pure Z80 assembler and contains 101 levels of brain-torturing‎ fun.

The game is not only released as a digital download but also available as a strictly limited run of physical cassettes for the ZX Spectrum – see below and mail me for information if you’re interrested.

We (the artist and me) had problems with parts of the the physical product (mainly the deluxe version) so we decided to hold off the release until after the summer vacation, then we got some better music for it which introduced some last minute bugs, and before we knew of it much more time, than we had anticipated, had gone by. On the plus side that means that – since the game had basically been completed for several months – there was time to submit it to Retro Gamer Magazine and ended up being reviewed and scoring 85% at about the same time the game was released…so that worked out nicely. 😉

During all this time of doing nothing – and being on vacation and not feeling like doing anything – I came across a Flashgame that I liked and I thought “wouldn’t that make an excellent 16K Spectrum game?“, so I began coding that anyway. I reused a lot of stuff from the first game, which saved a lot of time, and by doing that I was able to code this game in 4½ days. It’s not fantastic, it’s not original, but it’s a simple fun puzzle game and I had lots of fun making it…and feel quite satisfied with what I achieved in the time I spent. And so The Speccies II was born. It is included on the tape on the deluxe version of the physical cassette that we sell (all sold out, btw) but it can be downloaded for free as well.

Here’s a picture showing the menus and an ingame screen from each game.

This picture shows the three physical versions of the game being sold; the single cassette version, the double case version and the Ultimate-style deluxe version and in the background – the poster we also produced.