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Re: ANN: Tipshop updated Monday, 31 January 2011

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  Re: ANN: Tipshop updated Monday, 31 January 2011 greenaum@yahoo.co.uk (greenaum) - 2011-02-01 17:25 +0000
    Re: ANN: Tipshop updated Monday, 31 January 2011 spike1@freenet.co.uk - 2011-02-01 19:31 +0000
      Re: ANN: Tipshop updated Monday, 31 January 2011 Guesser <alistair@alistairsserver.no-ip.org> - 2011-02-01 20:28 +0000

#2507 — Re: ANN: Tipshop updated Monday, 31 January 2011

On Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:24:37 +0000, Gerard Sweeney
<gerardsweeney@ntlworld.com> sprachen:

>* La_Sole sent in POKEs and a solution for Indiana Jones and the Fate of 
>Atlantis.

On the Speccy? Really? Was it a SCUMM-style game? I didn't know the
Speccy had any. OT1H, there's no disk access, OTOH, screens didn't
take up a lot of memory. OT3H, colour graphics weren't really the
forte of a machine, for games that rely on picking objects out the
background.

From this logical deduction, I deduce therefore that it wasn't a
SCUMM-style graphic adventure. Were there any on the Speccy?

Irrelevantly enough to follow, anyone play "They Stole A Million"?
Great GUI-style game, where you bought and hired maps and specialists
to rob various shops and museums. From there, a quick load, to the
blueprint section where you give everyone their plan of action, with
timing down to the second. 

Then the real run! Only this time the cops can turn up! 

Bloody great game, 48K with no addons for the 128 AFAICR. Also wasn't
it handy to have a machine with such a high baud rate loading from
cassette? 128K could load with the same system, still in a reasonable
time. On my old Atari XE, you made damn sure to enjoy what you were
playing, since it'd taken 40 minutes to get the bugger in. 

I wonder why that was? Perhaps they took tech from older computers,
single-boarders that only had 2K to start with, and 300 baud modems.
The Americans built their systems with the idea everyone would use
disk drives anyway.

And why WERE disk drives so expensive in Europe? Where's the logic?
Obviously they didn't have the volume of sales. Cos they were so
bloody expensive!

Again, Clive took a step back, thought about the problem in it's own
terms, and invented a proper tape loader, and then microdrives, a
brilliant adaptation of technology and need to a price. And managed to
make a fair profit on them, too! His use of the CPU to bit-bang
absolutely EVERYTHING seems a bit obsessive. You'd think there'd be a
dozen gates spare on the IF1's ULA to put in a proper serial port.

Still, it worked. Even feeding the microdrives' tape head pretty much
straight to the CPU, bit-banging a few K a second, and managing the
format, the record structure, the block map, in the main 48K with the
Z80 doing all the work.

Aaaahhhh.... don't you miss genius? 

OTOH Intel have taken the same tack, but in an evil direction.
Everything about IDE, USB, and their awful on-board graphics, is
pretty much run on the CPU. Cheap alternatives, using on-board low
£-per-MIPS microcontrollers in the chipset are popular among everyone
else. Intel invest in 2 complementary areas, fast processors and slow
software.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

"hey let's educate the brutes, we know we are superior to them anyway,
just through genetics, we are gentically superior to the working
class. They are a shaved monkey. If we educate them, they will be able
to read instructions, turn up on time and man the conveyor belts,
sorted."     #     

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#2516

And verily, didst greenaum <greenaum@yahoo.co.uk> hastily babble thusly:
> From this logical deduction, I deduce therefore that it wasn't a
> SCUMM-style graphic adventure. Were there any on the Speccy?

Why not just download it and see what type of game it is for yourself?

-- 
|   spike1@freenet.co.uk   | "I'm alive!!! I can touch! I can taste!         |
|   Andrew Halliwell BSc   |  I can SMELL!!!  KRYTEN!!! Unpack Rachel and    |
|            in            |  get out the puncture repair kit!"              |
|     Computer Science     |     Arnold Judas Rimmer- Red Dwarf              |

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#2541

On 01/02/2011 19:31, spike1@freenet.co.uk wrote:
> And verily, didst greenaum<greenaum@yahoo.co.uk>  hastily babble thusly:
>>  From this logical deduction, I deduce therefore that it wasn't a
>> SCUMM-style graphic adventure. Were there any on the Speccy?
>
> Why not just download it and see what type of game it is for yourself?
>

or even just look at the infoseek entry and screenshots 
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002472

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