Games you speed up

edited July 2008 in Games
I was just having a go of Striker because it has such a high rating (8.94!):

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004952

Aside from thinking it was pretty dire (I much prefer the Footballer of the Year games), I couldn't believe how slow it was between matches!

My solution was to speed up emulation with a swift press of CTRL + (in Spectaculator) and then drop it back to normal when I was able to do something.

Which leads me to my question - are there any other games you do this on?
Post edited by Mousey on
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Comments

  • edited June 2008
    Good Question, but can't think of any?

    There's bound to be one or 2 that could benefit being speeded up I'm sure.
    Every night is curry night!
  • edited June 2008
    I rarely do this, so rarely in fact that I think I've only done that about two times in the last 4 years and I do not remember which games they were.

    But when I watch RZXs I usually try to speed things up (just finished watching Nemesis and Darius+))
  • edited June 2008
    I tend to play Saboteur 2 at around 150-170% of normal speccy speed. It's a bit sluggish otherwise.
  • edited June 2008
    Zagreb wrote: »
    I tend to play Saboteur 2 at around 150-170% of normal speccy speed. It's a bit sluggish otherwise.

    In the 128k version doesn't it speed the music up? I seem to remember that it does. Is there any way to avoid the music speeding up as well?
  • edited June 2008
    Football Manager, and all text adventures
  • edited June 2008
    I speed up Football Manager by quite a bit.
  • edited June 2008
    Lords of Midnight and Vulcan don't half fly along at 14MHz.
  • edited June 2008
    Mugsy between levels

    I can only watch a car driving ast a window so many times
    And as for the other animation ,.not sure what's going on there
  • edited June 2008
    Klepto wrote: »
    In the 128k version doesn't it speed the music up? I seem to remember that it does. Is there any way to avoid the music speeding up as well?

    You speed up the emulator you speed up everything.
  • edited June 2008
    ZnorXman wrote: »
    You speed up the emulator you speed up everything.

    Tell me about it! I just drank 27 pints of beer and aged 3 days due to that kind of feature! I want my money back!

    (Erm...what money? I don't know - but I still want it back!) :-D
  • edited June 2008
    :lol:

    Some of the games I speed up: Castle Master, Total Eclipse, Hard Drivin, other solid 3d games.

    I remember reading a thread where someone asked if the emulator could differentiate between regular code and code that wrote to the screen memory. This could be an alternative way of speeding up the games. There are other things that slow down games, but most of the time it's because the Spectrum doesn't have a dedicated chip for graphics.
  • edited June 2008
    I don't know if this counts but my Xbox was modified so I could play emulators on it and use it as a regular DVD player.

    It also came with a stack of PC Engine titles (most of which are poo) but did include Bomberman. Many a night with friends has been spent just playing this game as it's probably the best party game ever. However, the left trigger was often used to skip the sections between the rounds to go straight into the next round. It would accelerate any action on the screen, so it was sometimes used to cheat by some as well as a distraction.
  • edited June 2008
    ZnorXman wrote: »
    You speed up the emulator you speed up everything.


    Yes, and no. You're right, of course, but X128 (and maybe more emulators) allow you to increase the CPU speed but keep everything else constant, which means that in some games only some things increase in speed. Plus X128 also has the ability to speed up the emulated Spectrum fully for exactly as long as you hold down the tilde key (the one under the ESCAPE ket on most keyboards, that makes the "`" character, it's the same key you use to call down the command console in the Quake games), which allows you to skip exactly the part(s) you choose.
  • edited June 2008
    enzo1701 wrote: »
    I don't know if this counts but my Xbox was modified so I could play emulators on it and use it as a regular DVD player.

    It also came with a stack of PC Engine titles (most of which are poo) but did include Bomberman. Many a night with friends has been spent just playing this game as it's probably the best party game ever. However, the left trigger was often used to skip the sections between the rounds to go straight into the next round. It would accelerate any action on the screen, so it was sometimes used to cheat by some as well as a distraction.


    Lots of emulators on the XBox have that feature (the same one that X128 on the PC has, as I've mentioned), mainly those ported by Xport (a very prolific author, whose "official" forum is at:

    http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showforum=96

    and for the general XBox emulator FAQ go to:

    http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=524593

    and for a list of the best emulators on the XBox go to:

    http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=386399

    ). By the way, on the XBox, there are two great Spectrum emulators, FuseX and Didn't XSpectrum. I'd recommend you use FuseX, as not only is it against the GNU ideal (since it doesn't have it's source code available), but FuseX just "feels" more like a Spectrum, and also has a great, very friendly and Speccy-like user interface. It's the best Spectrum emulator on any console that I've ever seen. I just wish someone would port it to the PSP :-(
  • edited June 2008
    I have to admit there are plenty of old speccy games which I didn't mind being slow back in the day but which I find painful to play/watch nowadays because they are just too jerky and slow.

    When I watch an RZX, I often find myself cranking it up to 2x or even 4x speed and many times, I couldn't help thinking 2x feels like that should have been the actual game speed where 1x is just too slow ... a very bad offender recently was Dragonia (a game most of us never heard of until recently, I guess) - in its original speed it was just a sleeping pill. With games as sluggish as this it makes you wonder why the programmer didn't just make the sprite move faster not as in higher framerate - even though in the case of Dragonia this might have been possible because there wasn't much going on in the screen - but in pure pixels distance per keypress.
  • edited June 2008
    ewgf wrote: »
    those ported by Xport (a very prolific author

    Porter surely, somebody who gains his kudos using the work of others and fails to respect their licences doesn't deserve any extra credit.

    It's a shame that MS don't allow the free distribution of it's xbox dev kit now the console is at the end of it's commercial life so the real authors of those emulators could release xbox versions.
  • edited June 2008
    sparkes wrote: »
    somebody who gains his kudos using the work of others and fails to respect their licences doesn't deserve any extra credit.

    Totally off-topic, that reminds me of the hordes of kids who populate a lot of forums these days - they take some cool looking art created by someone else from the internet, photoshop some effects around it, slap their nickname on it and put that up as a signature banner under their posts (of course zero credit to the artist without whose work their banner would look plain shite) ... can't stand them, good to see a safe haven like WOS which doesn't have any of this.
  • edited June 2008
    XTM of TMG wrote: »
    Totally off-topic, that reminds me of the hordes of kids who populate a lot of forums these days - they take some cool looking art created by someone else from the internet, photoshop some effects around it, slap their nickname on it and put that up as a signature banner under their posts (of course zero credit to the artist without whose work their banner would look plain shite) ... can't stand them, good to see a safe haven like WOS which doesn't have any of this.


    Oh, man don't get me started on that one, I know exactly what you mean. You put hours upon hours into your art and what happens? Some a$$h0l3 n()()6 comes along and steals your pic, and makes it as their own, I absolutely HATE it when that happens.

    Anywho, I'm going to try out my new sig which I just finished scanning in. I started this drawing a few years back and am finally ready to show it to the world.

    _________________

    XTMsPicFakedAsMine.jpg
  • edited June 2008
    Football Manager and Dictator are 2 that spring to mind.
  • edited June 2008
    ZnorXman wrote: »
    Oh, man don't get me started on that one, I know exactly what you mean. You put hours upon hours into your art and what happens? Some a$$h0l3 n()()6 comes along and steals your pic, and makes it as their own, I absolutely HATE it when that happens.

    Anywho, I'm going to try out my new sig which I just finished scanning in. I started this drawing a few years back and am finally ready to show it to the world.

    Yeah, I hear ya, mate. By the way, your sig's a bit large, innit? Looks a bit crap too ... so let me show you how to do a good sig picture properly, I have added one now for you to marvel at. Cor blimey!

    __________________
    davidhasselhoffnq2.jpg
  • edited June 2008
    XTM of TMG wrote: »
    Yeah, I hear ya, mate. By the way, your sig's a bit large, innit? Looks a bit crap too ... so let me show you how to do a good sig picture properly, I have added one now for you to marvel at. Cor blimey!

    Wow, you are an awesome pixel-artist! Thanks, I will learn from your drawing.
  • edited June 2008
    Avon wrote: »
    Which leads me to my question - are there any other games you do this on?
    Most 'solid' 3D games... Hard Drivin', Total Eclipse, Carrier Command...
  • edited June 2008
    I generally leave my emulator at 120% speed for pretty much everything, it makes the games play more like I remember them ;)

    There have been a few occasions where I jacked the speed up further: Horace Goes Skiing, just the skiing sections... Chaos, while the computer took its moves... Transylvanian Tower, once, to see if the game was any less pants at a decent rate (Clue: No.)... Renegade, once, running Gerton Lunter's Z80 emulator on a high street store's best PC (yay for geek sales staff) at twenty times speed. the emulator couldn't read the keyboard fast enough for the player to move at all - the game started, ZIP in came a thug and THUMP! you got knocked down, stood up, ZIP THUMP! ZIP THUMP! turning the experience into something like the previously unknown Renegade: Benny Hill Edition.
  • edited June 2008
    Danforth wrote: »
    turning the experience into something like the previously unknown Renegade: Benny Hill Edition.

    LOL! The sad thing is I can visualise that running - must try it when I get home - and download the Benny Hill tune - what's it called?
  • edited June 2008
    Vampyre wrote: »
    LOL! The sad thing is I can visualise that running - must try it when I get home - and download the Benny Hill tune - what's it called?

    Yackety Sax and I hate myself for knowing that but forgetting to take a seaseme seed bar out of my pocket before putting my trousers out to wash, sorry again dear.
  • edited June 2008
    Scrabble! otherwise you're waiting forever for the speccy to make up its mind
  • edited June 2008
    I really liked Elite back in the day, thought it was excellent but its not a game i play much on emulation (not quite the same) but i'm amazed how slow it seems. I'm sure it was faster back then ?
  • edited June 2008
    psj3809 wrote: »
    I really liked Elite back in the day, thought it was excellent but its not a game i play much on emulation (not quite the same) but i'm amazed how slow it seems. I'm sure it was faster back then ?
    Yeah, I found the same when I emulated Damocles (ok, not a Speccy game, but still) - I was astonished at how slow it was to walk around. At the time I thought it was simply incredible, and speed was never an issue. Spoiled by years of FPS's where you can charge around like greased lightning I guess.
  • edited June 2008
    Yeah think it was a great case of 'rose tinted glasses' when looking back at some games.

    Knight Lore i like as it was just amazing when it came out (didnt play it tons used to just find different rooms and was amazed it fitted in 48k) but the slowdown in some of the rooms due to lots of objects/movement was really bad actually
  • edited June 2008
    VENTURAMA - One of my all time fave speccy games, but the boat and lift scenes were painful as a child...and sheer torture in this day and age!! :)
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