Yeah, with those early machines it was inevitably about lookup tables, and producing the illusion of doing work which was otherwise impossible in the number of cpu cycles you had available. I did lots of this sort of thing for the C64, where similarly CPU cycles were short, and then you end up scratching around trying to find enough spare memory...
It's great to see people still exploring and pushing the boundaries of what these machines are capable of. Coding this on a more modern machine, getting the effect right, then back-porting to the Spectrum seems like a smart move and would have been a game changer during the prime of these machines!
bzzzt•5mo ago
Lots of commercial Spectrum games were coded on a 'more modern' machine, often an IBM PC with a better keyboard and a cross assembler to generate Z80 code.
bzzzt•5mo ago
My thought exactly when I saw the 8088mph demo. Made me wonder why we put up with those ugly CGA graphics in the 80s ;)
Flow•5mo ago
Did you ever play Nebulus? The ZX Spectrum version looks as good as the C64 version, just less colors. Nebulus is from 1988.
gxd•5mo ago
philjohn•5mo ago
pjmlp•5mo ago
somenameforme•5mo ago
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zByAew6AKJ8
mock-possum•5mo ago
cesaref•5mo ago
It's great to see people still exploring and pushing the boundaries of what these machines are capable of. Coding this on a more modern machine, getting the effect right, then back-porting to the Spectrum seems like a smart move and would have been a game changer during the prime of these machines!
bzzzt•5mo ago
bzzzt•5mo ago
Flow•5mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAud8w5mTa4