The Sinclair QL Forum

dilwyn wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 10:28 pm Darren Branagh (remember Q-Celt Computing?) is with me in Wales for a few days. We have been playing Andrew's QStar for a while. Totally stuck at level 4 at the moment after an hour an a half. Hope this new game of Andrew's isn't as completely addictive as Qstar.

Two of us? Almost enough for a QL meeting. Any other QLers in Wales this week who could help us make a real meeting out of this!

This coming Saturday's video is on QStar and I go all the way to level 4 and solve it, so if you don't figure out that level by then, check it out.

Here's my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@8BitRetroJournal

Looks great!!

A sneak preview - Test Demo
https://youtu.be/_oWHsP2kBys

Amazing....for a program written is SBASIC. Congrats!

Andrew wrote: Wed Jul 24, 2024 7:19 pm A sneak preview - Test Demo
https://youtu.be/_oWHsP2kBys

Looks excellent.

For me personally, I think Andrew really demonstrated how to write games like this in SuperBASIC with his Christmas Card about two years ago of santa throwing presents down the chimney. If you recall, last Christmas I created a clone of that with the Grinch throwing bombs into chimney's in a town scene and found his use of sprites and how to move them very intuitive.

It got me thinking then that using his technique it would be pretty workable to write a game. The only issue I see is, with a BBQL you can't have too many moving parts (i.e. maybe 2 at most) before it slows down. Of course that was interpreted so I'm not sure how much faster it gets when complied. So maybe other creative folks could put his ideas to use and write more games like this. We could have an explosion of cool new QL games.

Btw, for my graphics, I ended up doing all of them on a Windows system and using Photon to convert them to QL images. This works as long as you get the color palette just right in whichever Windows program you use to create the images. I used a combination of Paint and Paint.net. Of course for sprites, they end up looking funky if you just lbyte them into screen memory as you need to do them one line of pixels at a time, but I wrote a small helper BASIC program to do that so I could verify my sprites were accurate.

So thank you Andrew for both writing these games and showing us how to potentially do it ourselves!

Andrew wrote: Wed Jul 24, 2024 7:19 pm A sneak preview - Test Demo
https://youtu.be/_oWHsP2kBys

WOW Andrew

Great work

PITMAN Test Demo 2 - running in resolution 512 x 384 pixels (8 bits per pixel) on QPC2.
Next step: convert the 8bpp sprites to 16bpp
https://youtu.be/GLwGR8P9Ff4?si=EPI159FLYayobjDx

dilwyn wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 10:28 pm Darren Branagh (remember Q-Celt Computing?) is with me in Wales for a few days. We have been playing Andrew's QStar for a while. Totally stuck at level 4 at the moment after an hour an a half. Hope this new game of Andrew's isn't as completely addictive as Qstar.

Did you finally solve level 4?

https://youtu.be/wogJKhs7THU?t=880

Please report any bugs! PITMAN FOR SINCLAIR QL
-====================-

There are 2 executables for Sinclair QL:

1. PITMANQ_obj: This is the version for QDOS and runs only in MODE 8

2. PITMAN_obj: This is the version for SMSQ/E and runs in almost all existing modes:
- Mode 4 and Mode 8
- Mode 16 (256 colours, any resolution)
- Mode 32 (QPC2/QXL 65536 colours, any resolution)
- Mode 33 (Q40/Q60/Q68/QIMSI Gold 65536 colours, any resolution)

For best results in modes 16, 32 and 33 please use 512x384 pixel resolution!

The program comes in different media formats:
- mdv image: due to space limitation it contains only the Qdos version and only the graphics needed for mode 8
- flp image: It contains both versions and the graphics for all video modes.
- zip file : It contains both versions and the graphics for all video modes.

How to install the game
-=====================-

You can run the game directly from microdrive or from floppy, or you can copy the game on a directory on the hard drive.
Pitman also needs TOOLKIT2 running on your system.

To start the game use:

On QDOS:
EXEC_W MyPath_pitmanq_obj;"MyPath_"
(replace MyPath_ with the actual path to the game)
If parameter "MyPath_" is missing than it defaults to "flp1_"

On SMSQ/E
EXEC_W MyPath_pitman_obj;"MyPath_"
(replace MyPath_ with the actual path to the game)
If parameter "MyPath_" is missing than it defaults to Home_Dir$