Steve Wetherill

A Big Change Of Plans! Astro Charlie has a close encounter If you have read my previous updates, you'll know that Nodes of Yesod for the Speccy Next is based on a C codebase. I've discussed details of my progress in that direction in previous posts, tool selection, and various other considerations. I have to share with you that I've had a rethink and there's a big change of plans! As I intend to make this version of Nodes freely available, and since it follows that there's no direct benefit to me financially, building the game has to be a fun and enjoyable endeavor. While I've enjoyed certain aspects of getting a C codebase to compile and run on the Next, I've had a few nagging doubts. C was always going to be a 'heavy' way to do things on an 8-bit Z80 (even with a faster clock), and paging code in and out of 8K or 16K banks does not make things less complicated; however, more than that, I need to personally get something out of this, it needs to be ...

Manic Miner to Command & Conquer with Steve Wetherill - The Retro Hour EP322 Check out the link below for a wide-ranging interview I did with Dan and Ravi at the Retro Hour podcast!  Here are some examples of topics covered: On Matthew Smith and the "Megatree" game "Matthew also, toward the end of my time at Software Projects, he and Marc Wilding and Stoo Fotheringham were teamed up to build the "Megatree" game, which was supposed to be Matthew's next thing. So those guys were actually working out of the house that was owned by Software Projects that I was living in, so I would sort of pass them in the morning as I left to commute to the office, because I was working out of the Software Projects office, and then I would see them in the evenings when I got back." On the Atari ST "I just like the fact that it was basically, you know, there's a 68000 chip, a bunch of memory, and a screen buffer that lives at a certain address in memory, and t...

In this third developer diary update for Nodes of Yesod: ZX Spectrum Next, I'll talk about progress on the coding and tools side, and give a preview of progress on the art side. Coding Update In previous posts, I have mentioned the sprite exporter tool that I'm working on and that once I had "something on-screen", progress would 'spiral out' from there. Let's get spiraling! Here's a snapshot of Astro Charlie captured on the CSpect ZX Spectrum Next emulator. This image is composed of 6 x 16x16 hardware sprites (Astro Charlie needs 6 sprites because his animations are over 32 pixels tall and up to 32 pixels wide, needing 2 x 3 hardware sprites.  Astro Charlie, rendered on CSPect as 6 hardware sprites My plan is to cache his sprite animations in the 16KB of dedicated sprite VRAM and then dynamically update the cache on-demand. I am sharing this image in its raw form, which looks off because I am using the default sprite palette which is limited to 4 dis...

"Colin, let's take a day off from Denton Designs, get the train from Liverpool to London and clear up this Crosswize situation with Telecomsoft, face to face." Crosswize was late. It was supposed to be completed in time for a Christmas 1987 release, but here we were in January 1988, and it wasn't finished. Not quite. It needed to be finished. For one thing, I needed the final payment from Telecomsoft. I was running on fumes, financially. For another, I had, with Colin Grunes, started work at Denton Designs in January and was working double time trying to wrap Crosswize at night and be present for my new job at Denton's during the day. I had poured everything into Crosswize, I tried to make something special. The systems I had developed to deliver the smooth graphics and fast action were technically the best thing I had ever done. This came at a price though, and the ridiculous number of hours I had spent at the keyboard, eking out incrementally more and more per...

Cockneys Die!!! After Odin's demise, I was left with decisions to make. After months of running on financial fumes to complete Sidewize, I had no significant monetary reserves; not to put too fine a point on it, I was skint. I did have an idea for a follow-up to Sidewize however, and I didn't feel inclined to go into a full-time employed position again. There were a couple of local options. Gary Bracey @ Ocean pitched Colin and me on the Platoon movie license, but we declined because they wanted us to move to Manchester. I didn't drive, commuting was out of the question, we couldn't consider this option on the terms offered. We talked to Elite in Birmingham, who immediately offered us a deal when they saw the Sidewize demo, but like Ocean, they wanted to do licensed titles, and that didn't appeal at the time (the schedules for licensed titles tend to have zero leeway, which is bad enough if you're *not* being paid on milestones). A local company, Reptile Industr...

How did Sidewize accomplish the "raster-chasing" required to update the display 50 times per second? Read on! [note: jump down to The Results to see the videos, otherwise let's dive in!] Twitter user Ville Krumlinde  mentioned in a Twitter comment that he had captured the screen draw update sequence for a number of Spectrum games and recorded the updates to video. He mentioned that he had hacked an existing Spectrum emulator to do this, without going into specifics. This got me thinking about how I might do that for the "raster-chasing" games I've developed,  specifically Sidewize and Crosswize. I do have my own Spectrum emulator, it runs on Windows and Pocket PC (and PalmOS, but that is another story). It has not seen the light of day for over 15 years (and my Windows-foo is rusty), so the prospect of compiling it again was a bit off-putting. Then it occurred to me that the Spectrum emulator I have been using for the ZX Spectrum Next version of Nodes of Ye...

A ZX Spectrum Next, in its natural habitat A quick progress report on Nodes of Yesod for the Spectrum Next. The good news - I worked on it! I managed to spend a couple of evenings last week working on (or more accurately, toward) the game. I am in that preparation phase where I think I have a handle on how to do things, but can't do those things until the other things are done. Such as having some data in a useful format. Most effort has been spent against wrangling graphics, specifically sprite graphics. I already have all the art I need, in (or close to) the appropriate (pixel and color) resolution. The main challenge with the sprite graphics is to wrangle them into a format suitable for the Next hardware sprites. It will be cool to really lean into the custom hardware on the Next, but the problem is that there are way too many sprites to fit in the internal 16KB of VRAM. For example, each animation frame of the main character, Astro Charlie, is nominally 24 pixels wide by someth...