Fake Screenshots!
30/08/2024

Yerz's favourite!

The devilish practice of making fake screenshots, rather than working on converting the actual games themselves to the Spectrum... It's just typical of society today...

Semi-authentic...

Each Spectrum picture is a screengrab from X128 in 320x200 mode (up until 2008). So, yes, SCR versions of these do exist.

Examples.

30/08/2024

While I'm in a releasing mood, here are a couple of examples of scrolling on a 128K. Scrolling Demos

I seem to have made them around February or March, which explains why I can't remember much about them in great detail.
The controls are 6 & 7 for left & right (or up & down), 8 to slow down, 0 to move to the next background.

The first is a horizontally-scrolling demonstration, which has 2 backgrounds from a well-known game that involves pipes.

It scrolls at 25 fps, but only barely manages to fit within those 2 frames, though. There is definitely not enough time to fit in any colour data.
It was reasonably easy to scale the images down to two colours, without it looking too bad.

Tiles are 16x16, so the tile pairs are 32x16. Map 1 uses 67 tile pairs and map 2 uses 49 tile pairs.

Pipe dreams

The second is a vertically-scrolling demonstration, which has four backgrounds scrolling at 25 fps. This one takes about 1.2 frames of CPU time, as far as I can remember, so a lot less time than horizontal scrolling.

It's unrolled so much, that I ended up putting some of the background into contended memory, which is completely counterproductive. The background is broken up into horizontal lines, which are "compiled" when the level changes and then called in order to be PUSHed onscreen by stack pointer magic.

The backgrounds are lazily scaled-down from the Amstrad CPC version by the Batman Group. Some of them are better than others. It would take a very good artist to be able to make something with sufficient gaps between attribute blocks to allow for some colour.

Pinball Dreams, likely remaining that way

13/09/2008.

Now, I take the time to expand this fiendish fakery to the Tandy CoCo and Dragon.

Arrrrrr...

Arrrrrr...

24/12/2006.

Mystery...

Mystery.

01/07/2005.

This is an old US Gold screenshot. True or false?

This has been nearly finished for a long time, so I just quickly tidied it up.

Aztec Challenge (Level 1).

27/06/2004.

How fake is fake? Pitch Protoype TAP file.

I tried a bit of "stack pointer magic" to try and get a full screen scroll of just the pitch data (no lines, no players, etc...) Unfortunately, the screen always catches up (except on the Pentagon). The 48K has a big tear and the 128K has a slight tear, but the main point is that once sprites and the pitch lines are added - the tearing would be severe and it might not even run at 50 fps... Oh well.

06/06/2004.

Sensible Soccer (in this case the SMS version, which nicely provides a 256x192 resolution to work from) must stand a fair chance of being a decent Spectrum conversion. The only problem is the large scrolling area, but maybe some stack pointer magic (or even a bare pitch with just the lines drawn) would solve this problem.

In my attempt here, I found out just how hard it is to get sprites as small as these to be visible and look anything like football players. i.e. VERY. (Believe it or not, these screens took hours to make.)

Two screens are provided, one mono and the other with some attributes added, although any in-game routine probably wouldn't choose the squares as carefully...

Sensible Soccer (mono).

Sensible Soccer (colour).

05/06/2004.

I decided to do some screens after a post on the WOS forums. I was a bit lazy though, so I did an early scene from Paradroid (C64) and the two stages of the title screen of Aztec Challenge (C64).

Paradroid is an example of a game that could be converted easily(*) to the Spectrum. Only the bottom two-thirds of the screen scrolls, there are few sprites on screen and each one is a single colour.

However, you'd need some sort of flip-screen or 8-pixel scroll to make the game like this screen, as you'd get a lot of attribute overlap if you scrolled smoothly. The inability to mix bright with non-bright within a character square makes the screen a bit more bold than I'd originally intended.

Paradroid.

Now this is really lazy - two very simple screens here. I did them because I'm half-tempted to try and port this old game onto the Spectrum 16K. (Even though the original's main file is 28K).

Aztec Challenge - Cosmi Logo.

Aztec Challenge - Title Screen.

(*) Relatively easily...

(C) Jane McKay, 2024.