Wasting bandwidth since 1996

I haven’t done a single bit of remake coding for ages – just got too many other things to do. This doesn’t mean that Dynamite Dan and Wizards Lair are off, by any means – they’re not. They’re just two of the many things I have bubbling away on the stove right now.

So where are they? Well, I have a few rooms of dynamite dan up and running, although I’m still plugging away at fully understanding the original level structure. Wizards Lair exists in concept only at this stage.

Well well, it’s all going swimmingly. i think I’ve finally got my head around how the rooms as stored in the original version. I’ve been poring over Chris Wild’s disassembly of the Spectrum source, but it’s obviously intended for hyper-intelligent genii, rather than thick individuals like me Hopefully, I’ll get the map structures in place and ported out to an easier-to-code format over the next few days.

….but there are other remakes on the horizon as well – Wizards Lair, to name but one. I’m currently, amongst other things, working on getting the map up and running in DD.

I’ve started cutting the images now. Basically, Chris Wild has supplied the original graphics which he ripped as part of his disassembly of the game and I’m busily chopping and converting them. Basically, I’m scaling them by two so I can work in 640×480 without bugging some poor soul to do the graphics until I’m sure the game’ll be finished.

I have to admit, though, that after playing the original extensively, it’s not a great game as it stands – I’m probably going to make a few tweaks here and there (particularly to the jumping routines). Shouldn’t take much longer to get the working images cut and put into some kind of order. Once that’s done, I’m going to work on getting the basic data structures worked out and find a neat way of storing the map.

iTunes is currently playing me Micro Cuts from the album “Origin Of Symmetry” by Muse.

I haven’t done anything on Dynamite Dan yet cos I’m working on some catch-up stuff. I’ve been porting Andy Noble’s titles to MacOS X. So far, Jetset Willy is done. Manic Miner is next, and then Lunar Jetman

Ok, I’ve done some more modifications to the full screen rendering setup so that my framework uses quartz hardware acceleration for the 2D stuff. A couple of the guys at RetroSpec have suggested I use OpenGL for all the 2D stuff but, given that I’m doing this for fun, I’m not entirely sure I want to learn a whole new branch of computer science Seems like a lot of hard work to me!

Another decision I’ve made is that DD isn’t going to scroll, as some people have suggested it should. I want to retain the flip-screen nature of the game so I can put in lots of nice starwarsy scene transitions Next up, I need to have a good old gaming session (with an infinite lives poke) so I can get me head around the mechanics of exactly how everything works….

Greetings remake fans and spec-chums. I’ve embarked on my first remake in quite some time. You’re probably aware that we had a pretty crap year in 2003, what with being on the hot end of a housefire, me being made redundant, and other stuff. All of this resulted in the destruction of my entire development environment, and the backups I had were scunnered.

So, things are almost back to normal, as can be seen from the other blog, and normality requires remakes. So that’s what I’m doing. To kick off – a bit of technical gubbins about what I’m doing. Dynamite Dan is one of my favourite spectrum games – very colourful, great sound, and fab gameplay. It’s also a platform game, which is something I’ve never done before. I’m going to be writing it primarily for Mac OS X, but I’m doing it in C so I’ll be able to do a simultaneous Windows and Linux port at the same time.

At the moment, the state of play is that I have the window creation code done and I’ve swiped the original graphics (courtesy of the lovely Chris Wild). I’ll be doing the remake in 640×480 2D and in the first instance I’ll be working with just the original graphics scaled by 2. I will, of course, be doing all the usual silly pixel effects, but initially I want to get the game core up and running – it’s been a long time since I’ve written a game, and I want to get the momentum up before I ask anyone to commit to doing graphics.

I’ll keep this blog as up to date as possible – I hope you’ll join me on the adventure. As you can see, you can take an RSS feed of the site, so feel free to use your favourite syndication reader to check for updates