Astro Warrior port for Spectrum Next
A downloadable game
Just for fun I wanted to see how easy (or hard) it would be to convert an SMS game over to the Spectrum Next. I went with the first game I owned for the SMS which was Astro Warrior. I'm pretty pleased with the result.
Both machines have quite similar capabilities. The SMS has slightly more tile data space available but as it has to share it with sprites a bit of rearranging can get over this. The main feature the SMS has that is difficult to recreate is that on the SMS sprite priority can be set on a tile by tile basis. Options on the Next are either switching layer priorities using a the copper or to use Layer 2 as a second playfield. On Astro Warrior this only affects the title screen (lasers appear both above and below spacecraft) but I decided it wasn't worth implementing this (lazy I know but the copper doesn't have enough horizontal resolution and adding a layer 2 was too much of a pain).
The gameplay is straight forward, move and shoot. It only uses a single fire button so should work with any joystick.
On the title screen, fire on joystick 1 starts a 1 player game and fire on joystick 2 starts a 2 player game. Left or right on joystick 1 switches between 50 and 60hz modes.
Enjoy
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awesome!
Thank you so much for the game!!! I didn't expect to stumble across it by chance, in a semi-closed Telegram group completely unrelated to Next.
Thanks for the efforts, looking forward to giving this a go.
Awesome stuff!
I'm not a programmer. The Next documentation states that, by default, it can handle a tileset of up to 512 tiles if the ULA space is utilized. And Mike Dailly just wrote a blog post about ULA, TILEMAP, and sprite rendering priority using BLEND modes.
I don't have the docs to hand but the game uses a word sized tilemap which reduces the space for tiles to (I think) 432 vs the SMS 448. Not a huge difference but just needs working around. I did briefly look at Stencil/Blend modes but did quite understand them, will have a look at Mike's blog to see if it helps.
Please, keyboard version. Thx!
Seconded. Runs beautifully, though.
Anyone able to get this to run on #CSpect?
I used #CSpect for development so it definitely runs. Only issue I had is that I couldn't get joysticks working (using an Xbox One controller on Windows).
cool stuff
Hi!. Cool game 🤩👍👍
Very nice game!
Good Job Dave !
I didn't know this game for Sega Master System, now I can play it on my ZX Next or Next Core for MiST/SiDi128 where I have successfully tested the game.
So, do You think some sms games could be (more or less) ported to ZX Next ?
Thanks for Astro Warrior
I think most should be able to be ported to the Next. Some might take more effort than others, depending on how big the game is and how much it uses the per tile sprite prioritisation.