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ZX Spectrum 'Hobbit' revival sparks developer dispute
Sinclair appreciation site World Of Spectrum recently relaunched its forums, after they fell over last year and users were forced to endure a temporary replacement. To celebrate the relaunch, a member and developer using the handle Kayamon released something rather nice: a re-working of classic adventure game The Hobbit with …
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Friday 22nd May 2015 10:14 GMT Lee D
Re: You appear to be hosting a known malware platform on the site...
Never noticed with my "you have to click on a plugin before it does ANYTHING about loading it" options in my browser.
Hate people who complain about plugins who don't enable the simplest of security options for them.
By the time something asks you about "Adobe Flash" wanting to run on your system, your system has already started to load the plugin into memory in order to obtain that name from the supplied HTML embed.
Turn on click-to-play and then you never see anything worse than a page full of play buttons, and only ever play the single plugin you want, only on the pages you want.
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Friday 22nd May 2015 09:15 GMT Lee D
Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ?
Not more detailed, no.
They may have allowed more OF them but then you're swapping them into and out of video RAM.
Speccy's worked not on a per-pixel basis but on a 8x8 pixel block (sprite, whatever you want to call it) in a fixed position. With assembler messing about you could indeed make it act per-pixel in terms of on/off but you were constrained by the video hardware of only two colours per block (hence the "blockiness" of most speccy games - the detail was per-pixel, but the colouration was in 8x8 blocks.
Look at the dragon's mane in the first picture - top right of it is red because the background near it is red.
From memory, so maybe not 100% accurate but pretty sure I'm right.
You never got more "detail". You only got more RAM. And you had to swap them in/our of graphics RAM just the same.
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Friday 22nd May 2015 13:36 GMT ThomH
Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ? @Lee D
Some of the 128s also allowed the video area to be paged, but I think only the Amstrad ones. That would technically buy you enhanced video capabilities because you could do a hardware double buffer.
In this project, being a text adventure, I guess they could have done a lot better and stored per-line attributes, locking the CPU into just pushing those as the video beam progresses before dealing with keyboard input in the retrace area. Like the ZX81 in slow mode, essentially, but with attributes. But then you're increasing the per-screen storage and probably having to do quite a bit more fundamental of a patch job.
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Friday 22nd May 2015 10:01 GMT DuncanL
Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ?
The original 48k game's graphics were drawn (slowly) as vectors (because there wasn't enough RAM to store bitmaps).
It looks like the new version has taken the bitmap graphics from the PC CGA version and tweaked and coloured them for the Spectrum palette.
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Saturday 23rd May 2015 21:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ?
Lot of balls being posted in this bit!
The Speccy has a 256x192 (4:3) bit-per-pixel bitmap screen with a 32x24 colour overlay that defines the pixel on/off colours for each 8x8 character cell. So it has problems when different coloured things get too close, but no problems with pixel precision.
The only graphical enhancements of the 128K machines (all of them) was being able to page in one of two RAM banks to the display, allowing buffering. But at the expense that you had to page the bank in to the top of RAM first to draw on it, then page it into view.
The only extra definition anyone ever achieved is through carefully timed software making changes synchronised to the TV raster display and increasing the vertical colour resolution, or displaying small coloured bars in the border area, but even the 48K can do this (trust me...).
The original Hobbit graphics were rendered as vectors with a (noticeably slow) fill routine, to save memory. These new ones are hand-drawn and regularly coloured bitmaps, compressed with modern algorithms and only possible because of the extra RAM to store them in the 128K machines. Many have actually been adapted from other editions of the original game.
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Thursday 11th June 2015 08:30 GMT justred
Re: Permission
Yes, the Elf contacted original game author a year ago and obtained permission under certain conditions (to include disclaimer, link to original version, etc):
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/discussion/comment/765351/#Comment_765351
The Dwarf's release ignored these conditions:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/discussion/50480/the-hobbit-128k-edition/p1
The Elf's release adhered to these conditions:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/discussion/comment/823697/#Comment_823697
And the Men didn't care about any of it.
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Friday 22nd May 2015 13:00 GMT thesykes
Have to admit I gave up trying to play the Hobbit. I had the MSX version, which took about 15 minutes to load and each picture about 5 minutes to draw (probably a bit quicker, but age blurs the reality). I just didn't have the patience for that, so just loaded River Raid in 30 seconds and was away.
I did play text adventures, and can still remember encountering a bear blocking a cave entrance on a TI99/4a game (I knew how to pick a winner when it came to home computers). To get past you had to scream, which scared it and it fell off a cliff. You later walked past a "slightly woozy bear". No idea why that sticks in my mind. No idea what the game was either.
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