Steve Wetherill

The ZX Spectrum Next in the flesh! How it started In May of 2017, I committed to deliver a remade version of Nodes of Yesod as part of a £620K stretch goal for the successful (the campaign raised £723,390 in total!) first ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter campaign, something Victor Trucco (originator of both the ZX Spectrum Next design and the TBBlue predecessor) tweeted about: How it's going Let's talk about that.  In between May 2017 and the date of this post I have made not one but two major job changes, entailing moving between cities hundreds of miles apart. Twice. Perhaps understandably, the side-project of creating a remake of Nodes took second place to these new IRL priorities. Yeah, excuses. Pretty good ones though, as these things go. That said, some progress has been made, and the update is that I have recently picked up the project again and will start to post the occasional update here (and on my @stevewetherill  Twitter) as and when there is progress to report. Fo...

"Why don't you come over to the Odin office and see what we're up to with this Nodes of Yesod game?" said Stoo Fotheringham. And so I did. Nodes of Yesod "Welcome to Nodes of Yesod, from the Odin Computer Graphics team!" As I read that, I hear the Nodes of Yesod music  (by Fred Gray) start to play in my head! When I started at Odin, the game Nodes of Yesod was already underway, plenty of the cool graphics (Astro Charlie, etc) had been created, and there was a playable demo (on Spectrum, possibly on C64) already. I have an indelible memory of that somersault animation on that bright blue moon's surface. I think Marc (Dawson now Wilding) was working on the title Stairways  on C64 (released under the Thor label), which was actually the name of a heavy metal club we frequented in Birkenhead. I'm pretty sure Marc cranked the game out very quickly, and if nothing e...

Here’s my entry for a Z80 coding competition I entered just a few years ago, in 2016! The challenge was to come up with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum game in 256 bytes without using ROM routines, so the entire game is self-contained - input handling, rendering, data, code, everything. For reference, 256 bytes is about the size of this ray gun sprite, which is 16x16 pixels at 1 byte per pixel (256 colors): Here’s my entry, “Infinite Blocky Runner“ (see below). I've posted the source code for this on my Github  here . At the very least, this effort fits in (exactly) 256 bytes. I know of a couple of issues (the progress bar at the top will probably wrap in odd ways, should you progress far enough). There’s no audio, no difficulty progression, but you can at least die and restart. The code was developed using the ASM80.com site and is formatted using the somewhat quirky code formatter there (so I make no apologies for the layout). I was able to develop and debug entirely using the site. The ...

Manic Miner Amstrad CPC - Title Screen A quick follow-up to my  Software Projects  post - in January 2021 Retrogamer Magazine published a brief Q&A I did with  Graeme Mason about Manic Miner on the Amstrad CPC. The Q&A, reproduced below, largely correlates with my previous post and  mentions a couple of specific details not covered there. Retrogamer: How did you come to work on Manic Miner? Steve: I was nominally working on Manic Miner from the day I was hired; however, Software Projects couldn’t figure out which platform. We looked at the Tatung Einstein, the Spectravideo, and MSX, but for whatever reason, those did not get off the ground. When the Amstrad CPC came out, tools and documentation were readily available (I spent hours poring over the Amstrad technical docs) and I was finally able, along with partner in crime Derrick, to get started. Retrogamer: Had you worked with Derrick before? Steve: No. This was my first job in games and I met Derrick at ...

SOFTWARE PROJECTS The first games I developed were for a British computer system produced by the ubiquitous (if you're British, anyway)  Amstrad plc : the Amstrad CPC-464. The games were " Manic Miner " and " Jet Set Willy ", both "ports" from the original Sinclair Spectrum versions. I had spent the second part of 1983 without gainful employment after discontinuing my Electronics & Electrical Engineering studies at Manchester University after the second year. I was putting the Z80 programming I'd learned at college to use in an attempt to create machine language games on the Spectrum. I had obtained the Spectrum initially to pursue my interests in electronic music (it was easy to cobble various hardware bits onto the Spectrum expansion port). Still, the availability of games for the system was too tempting, and inevitably, I ended up spending more time playing games, disassembling games, etc. I burned many, many midnight hours poking away at th...

Nodes of Yesod on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum ca. 1985 This is an interview I did with El Mundo Del Spectrum  (original link in the Spanish language) in 2012. The interview mostly discusses my early Sinclair Spectrum career and goes into my then-current (circa 2012!) work toward the end of the article.

Eldritch The Cat team circa 1990. Left to right, Dave Collins, Mark McCubbin, Stefan Walker, Marc Wilding, and Steve Wetherill. Photo courtesy of Marc Wilding. Back in 2015, Frank Gasking approached me about doing a piece on the "game that wasn't", Heart of Yesod , for what would become his excellent book, The Games That Weren't . This is a somewhat meta post then, a making-of-the-not-making-of, as I share with you Frank's Q&A that was used in his preparation for the piece in his book. I've also included a transcription of the original pitch document that accompanied the tech demo that I created for Heart of Yesod, along with scans (courtesy of Colin Grunes) of the dot-matrix printed originals. Heart of Yesod was to be a 1989 16-bit follow-up to Nodes of Yesod and Heartland. Sadly, it went no further than a tech demo and pitch doc. Read on for Frank's Q&A!