News — Tardis.dk Remakes

Things from the past, things in the future.

July 20, 2021 By Sokurah

I recieved a mail the other day, alerting me to the fact that one of my games couldn’t be downloaded. This usually happens when the plugin that tracks downloads fails and deletes the ID file that contains the real links. I do have a procedure in place that checks daily and alerts me when this happens, but this only happens if the size of the ID file is “quite small”. Well, in this case, for whatever reason, only the last 10 or so entried had been deleted from the ID file, so the ID file was still bigger than the threshold I’d defined and therefore I hadn’t been alerted. Ahh, just another way computers find a way to screw with us, lol.

Luckily, since it’s been quite a while since I released something, so the file hadn’t been updated for a long time and I could just replace it with a backup and now things are working again.

So that was the past things (now in order), but I can also report that after a 2.5 year break from coding I’m finally back to coding and working on a new game. It will be released for the Spectrum Next and the Taito L System arcade platform (like Sqij & Speccies 2 also were). It’s pretty early in the process so far – I’m only 1.5 week into the project, so I’m not saying more until I have more to show … but it does feel good to be developing again 🙂

Filed Under: Misc, News

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

New Spectrum game: SQIJ 2018.

January 3, 2018 By Sokurah

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

Filed Under: News, Remakes Tagged With: Remake, Spectrum, Sqij, Z80

3 new games coming soon.

October 11, 2017 By Sokurah

I tend to only post when I have finished something – so it’s been while (January). However, things are looking up as I have 3 games that are all basically 99% done, so you can all expect 3 new games before the year is over.

One is a PC game (and hopefully Mac too) and the two other games are ZX Spectrum games.

The PC game is a graphical Doctor Who adventure.

The first of the Spectrum games is a remake of a C64 game called Sqij. A VERY poor conversion was released back in 1987 but this remake is much closer to the original game. And actually playable too, LOL.

The second Spectrum game is an expanded 128K version of Vallation – the game I released last year.

When the games are done and ready for download I will make new posts with more details.

The future’s looking bright ?