Shoot.

It's funny how things turn out sometimes. I had what I thought would be a good, solid game concept and tried to implement it on a Sinclair ZX81 in 16K, and, well it was a little bit more dull than I imagined it, but then as I was using the z88dk again, there were some compromises that I had to make mostly due to speed. Too much on the screen would have made proceedings too slow and boring anyway, so I decided to limit the maximum number of ships in a convoy, bombs and bullets. I also made the screen smaller and set a limit to the distance that each bullet will travel on the X and Y plane. I'm sure any pure Z80 coders could make a better implementation.

It's available from the RWAP Software website, and the source code is on pastebin here. Any comments, questions or feedback is welcome.

Bouncing into the New Year.

Over the past week or so, I've been playing around with C and the z88dk (z80 development kit), and I've finally got something stable enough to run on an emulated Sinclair ZX81 +16K, which I released yesterday and can be downloaded from here - I recommend the EightyOne emulator (just search for it). If you want to see the source code, a partially commented version is posted on pastebin. Bounce is freeware, by the way.

The great thing about programming for a limited platform - and they don't come much more limited than the old ZX81 now, do they? - is that it forces you to focus on the gameplay as the graphical capabilities don't really exist, and there's no sound chip or anything fancy. So, I think I have developed a fun but simple game (with Bounce) in no time at all really, and one that would work well on a portable device, such as a smart phone or something similar, as simple games work well to relieve the boredom of travelling. As the source is in C, this makes all of the logic very portable too!

Well, what next? I think I might do a shooty thing.