Post by pcarmo in Spice Invaderz - Spectrum Next comments

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Congrats for your Spice Invaderz! I must tell you that the Invaders are really not my thing, but this particular one is the best I have played. The innovation of having the ?mother ship? sending a missile is excellent, and even if it is a difficult game, it is playable, which is more than I can say about the majority of the Invaders games.

Suggestion: When there is just 2 or 3 Aliens left, the speed of the game gets crazy, and when just 1 is left the speed gets impossible. I would decrease it a bit.

Question: I am playing with CSpect, and I confirm that this game does not work when placed inside the Next SD virtual drive, having to be placed in the CSpect folder itself and be invoked by a script that starts CSpect. Can you explain why this happens? I have just seen this in other 2 games, Outer Intruders https://oscarbraindead.itch.io/outerintrudersand Nexttanks https://oscarbraindead.itch.io/nexttanks, and the only commonality I find is that all these 3 games haven been developed with Boriel's BASIC? Maybe what triggers this issue comes from Boriel?!

Bootlegger3 years ago

Hi pcarmo,

Thanks for the great feedback - glad you enjoyed it.

If any complaint I was expecting to see, it would have been that it is too easy! During development I play tested an enormous amount and personally found it a bit too easy now, and can get to level 8/9 without much trouble. This is why I added the missile to the mothership just to make it a little more difficult. As a tip, when you get to the last invader, stand still and precision time aim rather than trying to chase and shoot. The speed is as per the arcade version and you will notice that the very last invader is subtly different in speed from left to right - this is by design as the same as the arcade. I always thought that was a hardware design issue in the old arcade hardware, but it turns out it was programmed that way.

Regarding CSpect emulation. I have tried to get it working under CSpect. Someone else commented that it didnt work under CSpect running NextOS which is why I compiled the BAT file variant for playing under CSpect. As to why it doesnt work directly under NextOS, thats a tricker question. I have spoken on the boriel/zxbasic forums about this, and so far, no diffinitive answer, but what is speculated by Mike (the cspect dev) is that there is no TBBLUE firmware, just the Nextos and emulator, so many system variables may not be as per real hardware on boot up. These can be set manually, if we know what they are, but that is the unknown at present. When ran from the batch file, the NextOS is not used - this is the difference - maybe that changes some vars. Yet, when ran from real hardware, it all works. All a big mystery at present. Compatability is better if you rename the file from SNX to SNA, and I have had success upto the point of the backdrop showing, but have got no further currently. My other next program, Funky Monkey Kid, does run under CSpect with NextOS as an SNA, which adds even more of a mystery for me. That game however uses very little next hardware - just the backdrop, real time clock, and save and load features. I speculate something to do with sprites or sound are the cause of the troubles in Spice Invaders on cspect/nextos as these are extra to whats in Funky Monkey Kid.

Rest assured, if we every find out the required settings, I will update and release.

pcarmo3 years ago

Finding this game to hard is on me... I always had been terrible with this kind of games ;-)

Regarding the emulation issue, please take your time. There is a workaround, so no rush. It seems quite a tricky issue to catch.

Again, congrats for your game!!!