That went away when CPUs started doing out-of-order instruction execution. The main strength of the Java platform is the JVM, much more so than the language. For many applications there's not much performance benefit in using C over Java these days. For most applications Scala is a much more appropriate language than C++. Easier to tune and fewer lines of code to maintain.
Habit. Like a few others. I drifted into the scene years ago, eventually got utterly bored with all of it, even the actual speccy itself, and drifted back out again. In fact I only usually read the chit-chat subforum now and the only reason I even saw this thread was cos it was on the forums index!
Habit. Like a few others. I drifted into the scene years ago, eventually got utterly bored with all of it, even the actual speccy itself, and drifted back out again. In fact I only usually read the chit-chat subforum now and the only reason I even saw this thread was cos it was on the forums index!
I will use this, no offense :), to describe my reasons, as for me it is the totally opposite situation, I never look in the chit chat, there is so much Spectrum stuff related that I think in general the ZX scene is very much alive. And for me nostalgia plays a little role, as I am, for example, more interested in new games than the ones from those years ;)
The Speccy still has so much more to offer. There are tonnes of games still to be seen, and I wanna play 'em! :D
You can always rely on Bob Smith and Jon Cauldwell for original games that are fun to play. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the Mojons come up with when there aren't any more enhancements they can make to their game engine. But I'm struggling to think of any other recent games that weren't a retread of an existing puzzle, platform, side scrolling shooter, or text adventure.
You can always rely on Bob Smith and Jon Cauldwell for original games that are fun to play. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the Mojons come up with when there aren't any more enhancements they can make to their game engine. But I'm struggling to think of any other recent games that weren't a retread of an existing puzzle, platform, side scrolling shooter, or text adventure.
It's more than nostalgia for me. I enjoy programming, even when no-one else is going to experience what I have created (I've been developing a Bridge game in C for about 5 years on and off). The Speccy was the first machine I programmed on, and so I like to keep doing that, but the more important part for me is the experience of God-like creativity I get when something I programmed emerges which is more than the sum of the parts I put into it. So in my bridge game I am trying to create an AI that will be a better bridge-player than me, and in the BASIC RPG linked in my sig I am trying to create an emergent immersive action RPG experience from minimal game-rules and procedural generation. I'd love it if there was a community like this for C hobbyist programmers but I haven't found one, so Speccy wins for the mo!
I'm here because I'm seriously thinking about writing a machine code game or two.
I had a Spectrum from 1983-1990 and, apart from playing all those games off the shelf, spent all my time writing little games in BASIC for the fun of it. Tried to learn machine code on and off during those years but couldn't get the hang of it.
In 1988 or so I tried for the umpteenth time to see how machine code worked, and somehow understood a tiny bit of it that time round. I was still writing little games in BASIC, but now they had little machine code snippets here and there for things like unusual sound effects, scrolling the screen, drawing occasional large graphics in a speedy way that PRINT couldn't, that sort of thing.
But when I really started to understand it I was bought an Amiga 500, and the Spectrum went in the loft and all my knowledge went out of the window.
Fast forward to today and I'm pleasantly surprised that people are still writing games for the Spectrum today, along with people happy to share their tips here in order to squeeze every last spare T-state out of the machine. I still remember the numbers of keyboard ports and memory locations of the display file, system variables etc like yesterday.
And thanks to emulators with comprehensive debuggers, along with Z80 assemblers running on my PC exporting their results into .TAP files, it seems that modern machine code development for the Spectrum today is much less painful.
Thus I feel like I'm ready to write a real machine code game...
Comments
That went away when CPUs started doing out-of-order instruction execution. The main strength of the Java platform is the JVM, much more so than the language. For many applications there's not much performance benefit in using C over Java these days. For most applications Scala is a much more appropriate language than C++. Easier to tune and fewer lines of code to maintain.
Habit. Like a few others. I drifted into the scene years ago, eventually got utterly bored with all of it, even the actual speccy itself, and drifted back out again. In fact I only usually read the chit-chat subforum now and the only reason I even saw this thread was cos it was on the forums index!
I will use this, no offense :), to describe my reasons, as for me it is the totally opposite situation, I never look in the chit chat, there is so much Spectrum stuff related that I think in general the ZX scene is very much alive. And for me nostalgia plays a little role, as I am, for example, more interested in new games than the ones from those years ;)
You can always rely on Bob Smith and Jon Cauldwell for original games that are fun to play. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the Mojons come up with when there aren't any more enhancements they can make to their game engine. But I'm struggling to think of any other recent games that weren't a retread of an existing puzzle, platform, side scrolling shooter, or text adventure.
You will see an impressive one very soon...
I had a Spectrum from 1983-1990 and, apart from playing all those games off the shelf, spent all my time writing little games in BASIC for the fun of it. Tried to learn machine code on and off during those years but couldn't get the hang of it.
In 1988 or so I tried for the umpteenth time to see how machine code worked, and somehow understood a tiny bit of it that time round. I was still writing little games in BASIC, but now they had little machine code snippets here and there for things like unusual sound effects, scrolling the screen, drawing occasional large graphics in a speedy way that PRINT couldn't, that sort of thing.
But when I really started to understand it I was bought an Amiga 500, and the Spectrum went in the loft and all my knowledge went out of the window.
Fast forward to today and I'm pleasantly surprised that people are still writing games for the Spectrum today, along with people happy to share their tips here in order to squeeze every last spare T-state out of the machine. I still remember the numbers of keyboard ports and memory locations of the display file, system variables etc like yesterday.
And thanks to emulators with comprehensive debuggers, along with Z80 assemblers running on my PC exporting their results into .TAP files, it seems that modern machine code development for the Spectrum today is much less painful.
Thus I feel like I'm ready to write a real machine code game...
This just tells me you don't know how and when to use a microwave... :lol:
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