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New Game:Killer Bees
I have ported one of my favourite games for the Phillips G7000 to the ZX Spectrum. Killer Bees, I spent hours playing this as a kid. The original games was written by a guy called Bob Harris in the US in 1983. The original game is very fast paced, hopefully with the help of Jonathan Claudwell's AGD I have captured what makes the original version so unique.
A tap and a manual can be downloaded here
Press
1 for keys - QAOP and Space
2 for Kempston
3 for Sinclair
For more info on playing the game be sure to read the manual.
Have fun
GazJ82
PS - My wife is going to be so glad I have finished this :)
A tap and a manual can be downloaded here
Press
1 for keys - QAOP and Space
2 for Kempston
3 for Sinclair
For more info on playing the game be sure to read the manual.
Have fun
GazJ82
PS - My wife is going to be so glad I have finished this :)
Post edited by gazj82 on
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I reached level 9 on my first go with a score of 15802.
Egghead Website
Arcade Game Designer
My itch.io page
Has this feeling of earliest games. You say 1983, I'd even say 1978 :)
On my first go I got a score of 12544.
Regards,
Shaun.
But man... the level 9 is too hard!!! I can?t imagine next levels.... :)
needed one go to figure out what I was doing, 2nd go scored 15737 (level 10)
Download the latest version of Bomb Munchies Ver2210 4th July 2020
But I am a little disappointed, when I read the title at first I thought it was a Wu Tang Clan simulator ;)
I tried my best to port it as accurately as possible. But if you like it I would suggest trying the original. It is superior. A quick you tube search will show why.
the philips g7000 was called the odyssey 2 in the US. It helps in web searches. They also made a voice unit for the console. So there are two sets of sounds for the original game. With and without the voice module.
well the instructions do say if the tape doesn't load properly then you should... inspect'a deck
(they don't really)
Is it meant to be that the ray only kills one swarm to each side? I did try lining two up but it only killed the first one. However, you can kill two swarms if you get between them.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
Couple of ideas that may help to gain replay value :
On every level don't rebuild the number of bees to the same size, instead add a lot more to make the swarm bigger, along with this, allow the player to leave a few of his bees to be still on the same spot by pressing a key : this would make red devils stop for a while to devour them, so you could arrange the chase to get some devils aligned and shoot at them taking them out in a row
JSpeccy-win32-portable
And why not put in the forum AGD?
and i particularly appreciate the little touches such as the spawning animation of the player ( the number of bees increasing until the full swarm is there, at the start of each play) or the aimation of the gravestones...are they still sprites when they are at full height?
thanks for this:)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1694367894143130/
I will put it on agd forums when I get a couple of minutes.
I remember as a kid seeing them in my local LEB (london electricity board) , think it was ?80 or something at the time.
I had loads of games for it back then, my Nan's brother was a sales rep for Phillips so we got some good deals :) My Auntie had one too, eventually that got given to me, so I had a lot of software for it.
Unfortuntantly my Mum decided to car boot the lot without telling me :evil: It still annoys me too this day!
I've got another one now, but I'll be a long time getting back all the carts I did have for it.
@zapiy
Nice website, added to bookmarks!
The game is great, nothing extraordinary but different and quite addictive :D
Howdy, Ralf,
The Philips/Odyssey2 hardware *was* designed in '78. The visual feel of all the games we did reflects that. The hardware provided specific video elements and it was close to impossible to do anything with these elements other than what they were intended for.
This was in contrast to the Atari system that was the market leader. The Atari video hardware actually did less than the Odyssey2 video hardware. The Atari design was a simple one-dimensional graphic controller that relied on a decent (for the time) CPU. The Odyssey2 design was a more sophisticated graphic controller that left the CPU free to handle game play. While that sounds like a good thing, what it meant was the Odyssey2 had a crappier CPU and that the programmer didn't have the kind of control over video that would allow him to do anything out of the ordinary.
Believe it or not, Killer Bees did trick the hardware into doing a few things out of the ordinary. I'll leave those for a future post, though (gotta go to work).
Bob H
(realizing your question probably refers to the emulator, but thought you might find the following interesting)
On the original hardware the gravestones were made from two parts of the character generator ROM. If I recall, it was the bottom of an "X" sitting above the bottom of an "A".
The hardware only had four sprites, in the sense that you could put any arbitrary bitmap in them (in one color). Those were used for the bee swarms. In addition, we had 12 positionable letters-- sprites except that you could only choose patterns from a fixed ROM that contained uppercase A-Z, 0-9, some punctuation, and two 2-stage animations of a walking stick figure.
Two of these characters were dedicated to each of the robots (or when dispatched, gravestones). It was possible to trick the video controller into using only the bottom part of a character. So the robots use the bottom of an "8" for the helmet and the bottom of the stick figures for the legs.
Thus 12 characters would let me do 6 robots. I think there ended up only being 5 though because I ran out of RAM to track them (as I recall we had something like 64 bytes total of RAM, or maybe only 32). In early tests I had 7 robots, each of which was on for 6 frames, off for 1. The eye didn't find this objectionable (at least on an NTSC TV), and in fact it gave them a cool pulsing appearance. But in the end I had to sacrifice that because I ran into the overall RAM limit, needed to use RAM for other game elements.
Bob H
Memory:
CPU-internal RAM: 64 bytes
Audio/video RAM: 128 bytes
BIOS ROM: 1024 bytes
just curious did you code on a unix assembler ? I read a few places elsewhere.. I'd like to muck around with it. I saw you can use an old version of tasm to do stuff with on it.
did you ever keep the stuff relating to your work on it ? probably been asked this already I'm sure.