Re: OT (FAO Ian Oliver and any speccy programmers)

[Ian Oliver <ioliver.lists@xxxxxxx>]

> great game..never did manage to beat it.. wasn't there a writeup on it
in
> edge a few months back..(I just checked issue 95) I love those
articles...

Yup, not a bad article.

> I had a spectrum 16K as my first machine, (Still have my kempston
joystick!)
> and I remember starstike, that was a great game too.

One of our best, and one that made us loads of money when we were three
students living in a back-to-back terrace!

> The screen was split into three.  Each third worked as follows...

Don't remind me!  The tricks were many and varied, but for the most part we
used an off-screen buffer that was in linear order and copied this in
screen
order while beam chasing. This involves letting the TV refresh get just
ahead
of you, copying like the clappers, and getting everything across before the
beam comes back around.

> The question is, How is it possible to smooth scroll a spectrum
screen....?

Clever code, lots of look-up tables (often accessed by pointing the stack
at
them and doing pops), lots of "unofficial" instructions and an
intimate
knowledge of the processor/system you're using.

Hacker stuff, basically. Which is why I'm doing my home automation in Java
-
it's something a bit different.

Regards

Ian Oliver
Sunny Leeds, UK
Using Java on Tini for control via Dallas 1-wire



For more information: http://www.automatedhome.co.uk
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