SQIJ for arcade hardware updated to v1.5.

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 🙂

 

SQIJ 2018 now out on cassette tape.

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 😉 🙂

New arcade game: Sqij 2018 (for arcade hardware)


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.

As this version is for arcade hardware most people will have to play it on the MAME emulator, but it should run on the real hardware too.

Go here to download the game, read all about the game follow the interesting links to its story.

And not only that: the ZX Spectrum version should be available on physical cassette tape in the near future, but more about that when it’s out 😉

New Spectrum game: SQIJ 2018.

My first release of 2018 is a funny one – basically it’s a remake of one of the very worst games for the ZX Spectrum. Or more precisely: this game is a remake of the original C64 game that unfortunately only received such a truly atrocious Spectrum version back in the day.

But here’s a new version that’s almost identical to the original C64 version – same map and item placements … and most importantly – unlike the official Spectrum version from 1987 this one is actually playable.

Go here to download the game, read all about the game follow the interesting links to its story.

You can also buy it on cassette here. The price is a mere £6.99 + p/p