I tried to recoloring my favourite game Dan Dare.. hope you like it. :)
Excellent work. I've uploaded it to the official site, together with Arjun's palette for King's Valley. That brings the total to 30 titles with their own palette. Can we make it 50 by the end of the year? Get recolouring everyone!
Here is recolouring Knight Lore..
I had a few problems to place the colours in loading screen properly, but finally everything fits and this is result.. :)
I must be doing something wrong. Knightlore and other games I have tried look the same! I don't see 64 colours in Knightlore or even 32. I just see the same game but with a different colour for the scenery (all the same colour)
What were you expecting, exactly? It lets you redefine the colours of the attributes. If the original game only used one attribute for everything, then you can only redefine that one attribute.
Admittedly, a monochrome game isn't the most obvious choice for recolouring.
I tried to make original Dan Dare 1 look&feel close as possible with one exception.
Dan and Treen sprites are not green, becouse i found that this light purple shades gives much better result.
Loading screen is not prefect as it should, but I didnt want to spoil the look of playin area..
Am very pleased how the game looks right now, much better than original palette with too much red and green.. my best recolouring job so far. :)
On the Ulaplus home page already exist one version, but i am doing everything from the scratch, not changed this, also good one..
I tried to make original Dan Dare 1 look&feel close as possible with one exception.
Dan and Treen sprites are not green, becouse i found that this light purple shades gives much better result.
Loading screen is not prefect as it should, but I didnt want to spoil the look of playin area..
Am very pleased how the game looks right now, much better than original palette with too much red and green.. my best recolouring job so far. :)
On the Ulaplus home page already exist one version, but i am doing everything from the scratch, not changed this, also good one..
I'll upload this one as an alternate version then. Keep up the good work!
Edit: Well that's 42 palette files so far, although not all are game specific, and to be honest I was just kidding with Adventure A-D.
the only good effect of colouring monochrome games has been with the 256 colour mode in EmuZwin
This mode, introduced with Spec256, would be almost impossible to achieve in real hardware. I'm afraid mono games aren't going to benefit a lot from ULAplus, but there are lots of other games out there that will benefit.
the only good effect of colouring monochrome games has been with the 256 colour mode in EmuZwin
here is Knight Lore
<.snip.>
but it's very hard to do and only a few games are available.
and I was working on Action Force II, as it's in my top5 listing :)
But don't expect anything anytime soon, I'm working on this since 2 years, and little by little eg. Today (because of ash's post) I've done "boris" the plant and Binman only.
the only good effect of colouring monochrome games has been with the 256 colour mode in EmuZwin
here is Knight Lore
but it's very hard to do and only a few games are available.
In all honesty, I much prefer the normal, monochrome graphics of Knightlore to those recoloured ones, judging by that picture, as it lacks all atmosphere. And I'm surprised you could get it running, as I could never get Knightlore to run with 256 colour mode, although admittedly I was using EmuZWin, instead of Spec256.
The 256 colour version of Head Over Heels, though, looked very nice indeed (on EmuZWin, never tried Spec256).
This mode, introduced with Spec256, would be almost impossible to achieve in real hardware. I'm afraid mono games aren't going to benefit a lot from ULAplus, but there are lots of other games out there that will benefit.
Personally I'm looking forward to games designed from the ground up to use ULAplus. I daresay getting them to use various tricks to get loads of colours onscreen *and* have them degrade gracefully on a non-ULAplus rig is going to give rise to a few headaches... but I reckon the end result will be more pleasing than the 256colour stuff. Technically very impressive I'm sure, just not very Spectrumlike.
Personally I'm looking forward to games designed from the ground up to use ULAplus. I daresay getting them to use various tricks to get loads of colours onscreen *and* have them degrade gracefully on a non-ULAplus rig is going to give rise to a few headaches... but I reckon the end result will be more pleasing than the 256colour stuff. Technically very impressive I'm sure, just not very Spectrumlike.
Agreed. The only way to have the games work on the standard ULA as well when all 64 colours are in use would be to have two separate attribute sets, and select the appropriate one based on whether ULAplus is detected. Otherwise even if you zeroed out the FLASH bit, colours would still be assigned on a random basis.
Some of the recolouring doesn't work for me, how some artists used certain colours as shading variations does not translate well when a 64 colour pallete is introduced.
Although it is fun to look at I doubt I'll use the new palletes for older games.
But I am looking forward to are any new tiltles using the new colours and I do agree with the idea of releasing enhanced/non enhanced versions. Athough I can see that the colour choices available will have a big effect on how the graphics will be drawn. It may come to the point of not only two independent palletes depending on the hardware but two distinctly different tiles sets for the backgrounds as well. What would be a shame if future releases just end up as recolourings of the existing non enhanced palletes.
does that make any sense?
is there a Sevenup/zx paintbrush with the enhanced ula capabilities yet? I want to have a go at some art/backgrounds/sprites to see what I can produce.
Some of the recolouring doesn't work for me, how some artists used certain colours as shading variations does not translate well when a 64 colour pallete is introduced.
I have the feeling that you don't have much freedom when recolouring older games.
For example, you have red bricks and you want them to be grey bricks. But if you change colour of bricks to grey you will suddenly discover in another game location that you have grey fire.
So most often the new ULA palettes I have seen do only a slight changes - change yellow to gold or pink to violet to keep everything logical.
I agree that to make it really impressive you probably should design a game specially for new ULA. However such a game would look terrible on standard Spectrum, so you will end with two attributes sets, as people already said.
For example, you have red bricks and you want them to be grey bricks. But if you change colour of bricks to grey you will suddenly discover in another game location that you have grey fire.
So most often the new ULA palettes I have seen do only a slight changes - change yellow to gold or pink to violet to keep everything logical.
Quite true. I recolouring four games till now and most of the time i spent to bring new colours in logical order..
Some games are much more suitable for recoloring than others.. for example Dan Dare 1 has very good original palette and i do some changes just as experiment..
On the other hand, Dan Dare 2 has a very bad choice of colors and it was really a challenge to fit almost every new colour combination in the right place..
Now i have impression of a completely new game. :)
Of course, the best thing would be when more games appear designed specially for ULA Plus, with more than 16 colors on the screen..
How hard (or expensive) would it have been for the original 128K Spectrum to have incorporated this, without risk of existing 48K games being made incompatible in any way?
I've always thought that the 128K Spectrum was a wasted opportunity - of course the extra memory and sound chip were great (although even the people were saying that the AY8192 was old hat, and maybe the memory contention could have been avoided?), but I hated the 128K's new editor, and of course there was no (real) speed increase with the CPU, no graphical engancement (aside from the ability to flip the screen memory from 16384 to 49152) and nothing to really wow anyone. But this ULAplus feature could have made a real difference. So could Sinclair have done this with relatively little trouble, or what?
Was the 128K Speccy just a rush job to get more money for Sinclair, as I suspect, or did Sinclair (wrongly) believe that it was a major step up from the 48K/+ models, and that it was enough to compete against the C128, the CPC 646+ and the upcoming 16 bit machines, such as the Amiga and the Atari ST?
How hard (or expensive) would it have been for the original 128K Spectrum to have incorporated this, without risk of existing 48K games being made incompatible in any way?
Not very. Although it's of course a lot easier with hindsight to see what the 128K was lacking than it was in the mid-1980s :-)
In 1985 Sinclair Research was already in big financial troubles. Failed projects like Sincliair QL or these electric cars made them thinking more of survival than creating new hardware.
If I remember correctly Spectrum 128 was designed in Spain. Could anybody confirm or reject it? It was just a slight modification as making something really better would involve designing a new computer from scratch.
Later Amstrad models were also done with principle "Let's make a new model and some cash with minimal amount of work". Amstrad had its own line of computers and Spectrum wasn't a priority for them.
If a really new Spectrum had apeared in the 80ties, it would probably not take the path of new ULA (lots of colors while keeping the attribute limitation)
but would make about 16 colors but different colors for single pixels, like Amiga, Atari ST or PC EGA.
If I remember correctly Spectrum 128 was designed in Spain. Could anybody confirm or reject it?
It was designed by Sinclair in the UK by a team that included a member of staff on loan from Investronica. However, the design spec was provided by Investronica.
Later Amstrad models were also done with principle "Let's make a new model and some cash with minimal amount of work".
That's not true at all. A lot of work went into the original +2 and even more into cramming the OS from the PCW into the Speccy. Cliff Lawson is a very smart man.
If a really new Spectrum had apeared in the 80ties, it would probably not take the path of new ULA (lots of colors while keeping the attribute limitation) but would make about 16 colors but different colors for single pixels, like Amiga, Atari ST or PC EGA.
Not sure about that. The way BASIC works (PAPER, INK, BRIGHT, FLASH 8 or 9) makes me wonder if Altwasser considered expanding the palette when it became cheap enough to do so and Vickers wrote the BASIC in accordance.
Later Amstrad models were also done with principle "Let's make a new model and some cash with minimal amount of work".
That's not true at all. A lot of work went into the original +2 and even more into cramming the OS from the PCW into the Speccy. Cliff Lawson is a very smart man.
I remember Amstrad getting a lot of stick in the press (and the playground!) around the time of the Sinclair acquisition/relaunch, as it was supposed their Speccies would show the poor build quality associated with their budget hifi range...
I guess the improvements of Amstrad's models were less... obviously shiny... than the Sinclair in-house step from 48k to 128k and three channel sound, being more about bugfixing and efficiency. Less for the press to get excited about.
I remember Amstrad getting a lot of stick in the press (and the playground!) around the time of the Sinclair acquisition/relaunch, as it was supposed their Speccies would show the poor build quality associated with their budget hifi range.
The Amstrad-made Spectrums had a much higher build quality and general robustness, exceeded only by the Timex clones. They missed a trick on screwing up the sound circuit on the +3, but that pales in to insignificance by comparison with hogging more than half the I/O ports which was entirely Sinclair's fault.
I'd second that most of the Amstrad Spectrums weren't a simple "least effort possible" effort. The PCB for instance got a complete redesign. It's a lot of work designing a PCB today, even with the great tools we have now (many of which are free). Of course that work would get paid for many times over, but it's still a non-trivial task. Amstrad also brought back *decent* manuals - the manual for my +3 is a million times better than the glorified pamphlet that Sinclair had Dorling Kindersley make for the Spectrum+ and later. (In fact I'd say the +3 manual is probably better than the Orange Book).
... Indeed... Orange book cover had a much nicer cover though. From a distance it looks like a photo, but the cover was hand painted and reminds me of a scene from some UFO movie...
Comments
http://download191.mediafire.com/coujzwdoebyg/fzmiqumxwyl/dan+dare.tap
http://zx-pk.ru/
Excellent work. I've uploaded it to the official site, together with Arjun's palette for King's Valley. That brings the total to 30 titles with their own palette. Can we make it 50 by the end of the year? Get recolouring everyone!
I had a few problems to place the colours in loading screen properly, but finally everything fits and this is result.. :)
http://download324.mediafire.com/fnnwwjl7mzjg/ynynygy33iz/klore.tap
http://zx-pk.ru/
Uploaded. I've put the King's Valley and Dan Dare palettes in the right place as well.
Note: This file does not contain the game or any copyright content. It's just a palette file.
I don't see 64 colours in Knightlore or even 32. I just see the same game but with a different colour for the scenery (all the same colour)
Admittedly, a monochrome game isn't the most obvious choice for recolouring.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
Not necessarily. These are just palette files, so Knight Lore will still be mostly mono.
http://download744.mediafire.com/o31xpftw41cg/jw5zzzyaijf/DanDare2.tap
I tried to make original Dan Dare 1 look&feel close as possible with one exception.
Dan and Treen sprites are not green, becouse i found that this light purple shades gives much better result.
Loading screen is not prefect as it should, but I didnt want to spoil the look of playin area..
Am very pleased how the game looks right now, much better than original palette with too much red and green.. my best recolouring job so far. :)
On the Ulaplus home page already exist one version, but i am doing everything from the scratch, not changed this, also good one..
http://zx-pk.ru/
I'll upload this one as an alternate version then. Keep up the good work!
Edit: Well that's 42 palette files so far, although not all are game specific, and to be honest I was just kidding with Adventure A-D.
here is Knight Lore
but it's very hard to do and only a few games are available.
This mode, introduced with Spec256, would be almost impossible to achieve in real hardware. I'm afraid mono games aren't going to benefit a lot from ULAplus, but there are lots of other games out there that will benefit.
and I was working on Action Force II, as it's in my top5 listing :)
But don't expect anything anytime soon, I'm working on this since 2 years, and little by little eg. Today (because of ash's post) I've done "boris" the plant and Binman only.
In all honesty, I much prefer the normal, monochrome graphics of Knightlore to those recoloured ones, judging by that picture, as it lacks all atmosphere. And I'm surprised you could get it running, as I could never get Knightlore to run with 256 colour mode, although admittedly I was using EmuZWin, instead of Spec256.
The 256 colour version of Head Over Heels, though, looked very nice indeed (on EmuZWin, never tried Spec256).
Enjoy. :)
http://download860.mediafire.com/njykxrsgzcvg/ekdjfjfkztm/DanDare3.tap
http://zx-pk.ru/
Thanks again. Now uploaded to the ULAplus site.
Personally I'm looking forward to games designed from the ground up to use ULAplus. I daresay getting them to use various tricks to get loads of colours onscreen *and* have them degrade gracefully on a non-ULAplus rig is going to give rise to a few headaches... but I reckon the end result will be more pleasing than the 256colour stuff. Technically very impressive I'm sure, just not very Spectrumlike.
Agreed. The only way to have the games work on the standard ULA as well when all 64 colours are in use would be to have two separate attribute sets, and select the appropriate one based on whether ULAplus is detected. Otherwise even if you zeroed out the FLASH bit, colours would still be assigned on a random basis.
Although it is fun to look at I doubt I'll use the new palletes for older games.
But I am looking forward to are any new tiltles using the new colours and I do agree with the idea of releasing enhanced/non enhanced versions. Athough I can see that the colour choices available will have a big effect on how the graphics will be drawn. It may come to the point of not only two independent palletes depending on the hardware but two distinctly different tiles sets for the backgrounds as well. What would be a shame if future releases just end up as recolourings of the existing non enhanced palletes.
does that make any sense?
is there a Sevenup/zx paintbrush with the enhanced ula capabilities yet? I want to have a go at some art/backgrounds/sprites to see what I can produce.
I have the feeling that you don't have much freedom when recolouring older games.
For example, you have red bricks and you want them to be grey bricks. But if you change colour of bricks to grey you will suddenly discover in another game location that you have grey fire.
So most often the new ULA palettes I have seen do only a slight changes - change yellow to gold or pink to violet to keep everything logical.
I agree that to make it really impressive you probably should design a game specially for new ULA. However such a game would look terrible on standard Spectrum, so you will end with two attributes sets, as people already said.
Quite true. I recolouring four games till now and most of the time i spent to bring new colours in logical order..
Some games are much more suitable for recoloring than others.. for example Dan Dare 1 has very good original palette and i do some changes just as experiment..
On the other hand, Dan Dare 2 has a very bad choice of colors and it was really a challenge to fit almost every new colour combination in the right place..
Now i have impression of a completely new game. :)
Of course, the best thing would be when more games appear designed specially for ULA Plus, with more than 16 colors on the screen..
http://zx-pk.ru/
I've always thought that the 128K Spectrum was a wasted opportunity - of course the extra memory and sound chip were great (although even the people were saying that the AY8192 was old hat, and maybe the memory contention could have been avoided?), but I hated the 128K's new editor, and of course there was no (real) speed increase with the CPU, no graphical engancement (aside from the ability to flip the screen memory from 16384 to 49152) and nothing to really wow anyone. But this ULAplus feature could have made a real difference. So could Sinclair have done this with relatively little trouble, or what?
Was the 128K Speccy just a rush job to get more money for Sinclair, as I suspect, or did Sinclair (wrongly) believe that it was a major step up from the 48K/+ models, and that it was enough to compete against the C128, the CPC 646+ and the upcoming 16 bit machines, such as the Amiga and the Atari ST?
Not very. Although it's of course a lot easier with hindsight to see what the 128K was lacking than it was in the mid-1980s :-)
If I remember correctly Spectrum 128 was designed in Spain. Could anybody confirm or reject it? It was just a slight modification as making something really better would involve designing a new computer from scratch.
Later Amstrad models were also done with principle "Let's make a new model and some cash with minimal amount of work". Amstrad had its own line of computers and Spectrum wasn't a priority for them.
If a really new Spectrum had apeared in the 80ties, it would probably not take the path of new ULA (lots of colors while keeping the attribute limitation)
but would make about 16 colors but different colors for single pixels, like Amiga, Atari ST or PC EGA.
It was designed by Sinclair in the UK by a team that included a member of staff on loan from Investronica. However, the design spec was provided by Investronica.
That's not true at all. A lot of work went into the original +2 and even more into cramming the OS from the PCW into the Speccy. Cliff Lawson is a very smart man.
Not sure about that. The way BASIC works (PAPER, INK, BRIGHT, FLASH 8 or 9) makes me wonder if Altwasser considered expanding the palette when it became cheap enough to do so and Vickers wrote the BASIC in accordance.
I remember Amstrad getting a lot of stick in the press (and the playground!) around the time of the Sinclair acquisition/relaunch, as it was supposed their Speccies would show the poor build quality associated with their budget hifi range...
I guess the improvements of Amstrad's models were less... obviously shiny... than the Sinclair in-house step from 48k to 128k and three channel sound, being more about bugfixing and efficiency. Less for the press to get excited about.
The Amstrad-made Spectrums had a much higher build quality and general robustness, exceeded only by the Timex clones. They missed a trick on screwing up the sound circuit on the +3, but that pales in to insignificance by comparison with hogging more than half the I/O ports which was entirely Sinclair's fault.
The +3 manual is the Orange Book, plus some details about the 128 BASIC and +3DOS.