Moon Alert

Spector · March 2002

Ocean did this in 84, the one with Wagner playing over the titles. I'm one of those gits that likes playing games on their origianl Spectrums, but this one's a pain. It says you can use Kempston on the instructions, but when you go to play the game, it just says, "Sinclair 2? Y/N", and that's it! So Ocean are lying to me. Can anyone prove me wrong and say that they can get this game working with Kempston?

Ed · March 2002

I just tried the game in ZX-32 with Kempston joystick emulation and it worked fine. However, I seem to remember from a previous post that your joystick interface could emulate both Interface 2 and Kempston. So, maybe the game is giving priority to I2, if it detects that.

If there's a way of switching the Sinclair emulation off on your interface, then maybe try that. Otherwise, surely the game should work with Sinclair joystick emulation with your interface?

Another possibility is that there were different versions of the game released. The one I just tried was from the TZX Archive, so maybe give that one a go. I certainly never saw the "Sinclair 2?" question, even when I changed my joystick emulation to Sinclair.

Spector · March 2002

Yeah, that's a weird one. I'm going to try the TZX version you mentioned. As for the ZX2 option, I thought my interface did this, but not quite. Bizarrely, it has 8 and 9 the wrong way round. Pushing "Up" on a Sinclair Interface is "Down" on mine, yet everything else is the same. Close, but not quite ZX2.

Spector · April 2002

Well, what can I say? If you try Moon Alert on an emulator, it simply asks you if you want 1 or 2 players, and it works with kempston. Try the same file on a Spectrum 128 and it says something before it:"Sinclair 2 y/n?", and it doesn't work. I have never come across anything like that before, where the game has different text when used on a real machine. I'm going to load a snapshot from the emulator version to see if it works on my machine. Truly bizarre.

+CotL-DS · April 2002

I always thought there was something similarly fishy going on with joystick emulation regarding Robotics (Ocean) and Pengy (Micromania).

Ed · April 2002

Aha! I think I'm beginning to see what's happening here. My theory was that this behaviour was down to the program detecting both Kempston and Interface 2 joystick interfaces (even if the I2 emulation wasn't 100% accurate on your DK'T int). Unfortunately, I couldn't find an emulator that could emulate two different interfaces at one time to test that one out.

However, RealSpectrum has come to my rescue. And it does seem that the "Sinclair Interface 2?" question only pops up when you have the two interfaces at once. If you want to try this out, load the game up in RealSpectrum and press F4 to get joystick options. You should find that the only time you're asked the question is when you've selected both interfaces. So, presumably, anyone with an actual Spectrum and a similar device such as the RAM Turbo interface should also be asked that question.

So, that answers that bit at least. Why the program doesn't seem to work in this '2 interface' situation is another matter, and may well be down to a bug in the code.

Spector · April 2002

That could well be the answer Edward. I managed to get round it by loading a z80 at the "1 or 2 players?" question. On the Speccy, it just accepts it as Kempston. Crazy stuff, but it works. Probably not worth the hassle, the game is so-so, though that's a pretty good loading picture they've got there.

Moon Alert

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