Castlevania Spectrum

[L___E___T]

Thought I'd share this - as CV is one of my favourite games and I fondly remember my Spectrum from childhood, this is something I thought I'd never see:

http://www.retrocollect.com/News/nes-classic-castlevania-unofficially-whips-onto-zx-spectrum.html

That music, such remix, much nostalgia wow!

Here's something else for good measure:
https://soundcloud.com/perturbator/castlevania-3-remix






Other entries here:
http://retrogamesbattle.com/

[UglyJoe]

That's pretty cool.  It's using Simon's Quest's graphics, but looks like they took a lot of liberty with the level layout.  The ported music sounds great.

I really need to look into how the Spectrum's color palette works.  It always looks so weird to me.

[L___E___T]

I liked how they took the first couple games and then mish-mashed them together to form something new.  It's actually quite comparable to how ports were done back then, but with a much higher quality.

ZX Spectrum always had a great blippy sound I thought, while the C64 is more famous (and successful) with its SID chip shenanigans.
Spectrum graphics were unusual - conceived in a logical thought pattern that in the end wasn't really all that logical.  You had 7 colours, each with two shades, plus black, plus alpha I believe.  So, that only really gives you seven visibly different colours to play with.  The bright red and dark red don't look that different for example, same with the other colours.  I think you could only use one or two at a time as well, in comparison to Famicom which lets you use 3 per sprite tile for example and four per BG tile (but you could layer).

It was an underpowered system but one that retains a lot of charm I think, projects like this really bring that to life.  What I really love though is the product design:

Spoiler

[close]

Absolutely beautiful.

[P]

Yeah it looks like every character sprite or BG tile can only hold two colours plus transparent. Also Simon changes colours to the same as the background like a chameleon so I'm not even sure if it handles character sprites and BG tiles separately.

[keropi]

too bad he ported CV2... 

[Issun]

Yeah it looks like every character sprite or BG tile can only hold two colours plus transparent. Also Simon changes colours to the same as the background like a chameleon so I'm not even sure if it handles character sprites and BG tiles separately.

The ZX didn't have any hardware sprites. It's basically a Z80 with a framebuffer, no hardware scrolling as well hence the so called "colour clashing". It's a great system though, takes a lot of skill to program for it.

[P]

I see, so you have to do basically everything yourself in software. Sounds tough. This game seems to scroll quite smoothly compared to MSX games though.

[Issun]

That's right. If you want smooth scrolling you'll have to do it manually either by shifting the graphics during runtime (which eats cycles) or using preshifted graphics (which eats RAM). But there's loads of games that used chunky scrolling on the ZX as well, often to avoid colour clashing. The 48k didn't have hardware double buffering nor relocatable video RAM so if you're using a screen buffer you'll have to manually upload that. So software sprites, software smooth scrolling, screen buffer upload and you'll still need to do game logic etc. Not an easy task.

[L___E___T]

From what I saw this CV game scrolls better than Batman the movie, so technically impressive I'd say.

[P]

Yeah even though it has colour clashing it looks well done.

That's right. If you want smooth scrolling you'll have to do it manually either by shifting the graphics during runtime (which eats cycles) or using preshifted graphics (which eats RAM). But there's loads of games that used chunky scrolling on the ZX as well, often to avoid colour clashing. The 48k didn't have hardware double buffering nor relocatable video RAM so if you're using a screen buffer you'll have to manually upload that. So software sprites, software smooth scrolling, screen buffer upload and you'll still need to do game logic etc. Not an easy task.

I see, sounds like you'll need to type a lot of code to make anything.