The Sinclair QL Forum

I would imagine that I should give these screen savers a test at some stage, even if they're outside the scope of this competition. (Of course, you could have another go at a game, couldn't you, Steve?)

Meanwhile, catching up with the latest in-competition stirrings...

END OF WEEK 22:

I was going to say "to my utter dismay, I've had a barren week again". But it's not my fault, nor yours, it's Google up to their old tricks again, hiding CSSCGC entries in my Spam folder! So I have had an entry this week, and it comes from former host Lee Prince, who's promised that there's more to come! So, what do you get if you cross Head Over Heels with Viz and include none of the gameplay from either of those games? You get... something NSFW and not entirely family-friendly. Professional offence-takers approach with caution!

Also, technically, that isn't the full quota for this week. Barely an hour ago I've been sent something that Google didn't intercept from Jamie Bradbury, who's making a valiant attempt to make up for that Chuntey Simulator... thing, by making a game that (hopefully!) works for a Sinclair-related system I am not at all familiar with. (This forum might, possibly, appreciate it - it's business-ish, like the QL...) And because I'll have to do a bit of extra hardware learning, that game can't be part of this week's round-up, but I'd hope to have it assessed this weekend. Cricket, F1 and essential house decoration might still get in the way, though.

END OF WEEK 23:

This is good! I'd been concerned that the competition was withering for some reason I couldn't put my finger on (and if that sounded filthy, it wasn't supposed to). If I wasn't getting any entries in May when it was constantly chucking down with rain, what chance did I have when the sun came out? Well, this week... there's been three entries, all for different machines.

Number one (and number 24 overall) was Jamie Bradbury's Z88 Boggle - only the third-ever entry for the Z88 in 25 years, but now accessible to ever more people because the review has been UPDATED to add loading instructions for ZEsarUX as well as OZvm, for which César Hernández Bañó can be credited. Gracias!

Number two (quarter of a century!) was Salvador Camacho's Tic Tac Toe Hell, this year's first ZX80 entry (though you'll need a 16K RAM pack for it), and - unless I'm very much mistaken - the first ever ZX80 machine code entry. I'm hoping it's not the last for the old yoghurt pot this year, and some of you more experienced in Spectrum or ZX81 programming will take up the challenge of trying to make the most restricted of the Sinclair computers (that isn't the MK14...) do something useful.

Number three is the one I haven't revealed yet, submitted yesterday and for which I wrote the outline of a review in the small hours of this morning. Lee Prince has resurrected an old CSSCGC joke that refuses to die, based on the last two pages of this thread. Advanced Adding A TXT File To An EPROM Card For A Z88 Emulator Simulator has, to the surprise of nobody who will "play" it, gone into pole position for Most Crap Game Of The Year, as the first to score 1/10 for attainment and not be wrecked by any demerits. If you're interested in seeing how to generate weird error reports - including those for the 128K Spectrum - I recommend this one!

MEANWHILE...

Any chance of any more QL submissions to complement this lot? Or maybe one or more of you will have a crack at something you've never tried before...

END OF WEEK 24:

It's satisfying to not have to report a blank week again, thanks to Andy Jenkinson. His was the only submission this week, the triumph of style-over-substance that is Rubik Code, for the 48K Spectrum. Play it if you dare, and see if you can work out the tactics for solving the grids the way I did.

VITALLY IMPORTANT MESSAGE:

We are now half way through the competition.

The end of week 48 will be 3rd December, by which time the competition is scheduled to have finished. I may, or may not extend the final deadline past the end of November, depending on how many entries I've had by the end of October, and also according to how eager a host there is for next year. I've already got a ton of ideas stored away, and I've just finished one of them a few minutes ago, although I'll make some other versions of it (disc, microdrive, etc) just because I can. So, I will have something all ready to go the instant the next host is ready to kick off (much the way Alexandre Colella did in January) - and I don't want to be hanging onto it until April or May!

As this is a more "niche" forum in the Sinclair world than SC or WOS, I wouldn't be likely to lumber anyone who only lurks here with the burden of hosting next year's competition (which is the "prize" for Least Crap Game Of The Year), but if I know in advance there's someone who can be relied on to kick off next year's competition on time, then I am much more likely to extend the final deadline until anything up to 17th December, which will be the end of week 50.

Meanwhile, anyone here who wants to submit another QL entry, I continue to encourage it - convert an existing Spectrum or ZX81 game the way Tobias Fröschle did, if you want. I'm converting one of my QL games for the Spectrum right now, and I can certainly be tempted to move other games in the other direction...

Maybe some of you might take a break from the QL and write something for the Spectrum, but can't wrench yourself away from those miniature 8-track cartridges, and save it as .MDR format instead of .TAP. I've been waiting for one of those! Fuse and Spectaculator will both handle it...

Hi Folks,

With the hot weather, don't forget to blow the dust off your circuit boards. My PC was running up to 70°C. Now down to 52°C...

I finally got around to converting the 'Thunderbolt' screen saver into a game, after lots of tweaking to get rid of quirks. (Tested under QPC2 and SGC).

LRUN then hit '0' or ESC to quit. ( It doesn't exec under TURBO, which needs too much DataArea to be set aside...). Difficulty : 3 is hard, up to 9... easy.

Use the left and/or right arrow keys to get a magic lightning deflector. You have twice 9 lives, with bonus every 10 frames...).

<< LINE 170 sets beeping on or off, and line 180 keeps a tally of recursions, for info... >>

NB: On my setup, using a floppy drive with a USB splitter gives spurious failures. So I now don't use it with the splitter !

Best Wishes, Steve.

Ooh, crikey! A fourth QL game!

Anyway, for reasons which are dull and boring, I've had two submissions via email this week, that I have only had the briefest window to review. I am now preparing for a residential weekend in which I will have absolutely no access whatsoever to Tim Berners-Lee's wondrous creation. Hence, I can't leave the usual weekly report until after dinner, but even so, I've made time for a couple of reviews, and who cares if it's early? Neither are for Sir Clive's business-oriented machine, but don't let that put you off!

END OF WEEK 25:

Number one for this week, and number 29 for the year, is Gonzalo Medina's allegedly-first-ever attempt at programming a Spectrum (which I don't believe for a minute, "I have no idea how arrays work" be damned), Las Aventuras de Eustaquio I. Knowledge of Spanish isn't necessary to guide Eustaquio through his quest on the Earth, Moon and Mars, and I've thrown in some English translations where I thought it necessary - see "Jim's additional material".

Number two this week, and number 30 for the year - so I'm now tied for entries with the 2016 competition - is a second entry from Andy Jenkinson, the bizarrely-titled Cliff Richard Loves Rihanna... FACT!. Written mostly in BASIC but enhanced by 5.7K of machine code, it's a sort-of-dating-sim based on some childhood playground game that showed which boys and girls secretly loved each other and which had cooties (or does that only happen in 'MURICA?) It features a proportionally-spaced font that Andy put to good use in Sir Clive's Ink Lair last year, an AY soundtrack that technically doesn't need a 128K Spectrum (but will require a Melodik AY Soundbox), and has the potential to throw a sack of spanners in the works of more friendships and relationships than (anti-)social media ever could. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!


So... Steve, I will count your entry as number 31 (it's from the same day as CRLR...F! but I saw that one first), I'll take it with me, and if there's a window of opportunity over the weekend, I'll assess it. Failing that, I'll make it my first priority on Monday when I get home.

I encourage the use of CRLR...F! to act as an official arbiter of what is reality and what is fake news. I put "DILWYN JONES LIVES THE SINCLAIR QL" into it, and what do you know, this is 89% true! I suppose the other 11% must have been when a microdrive failed or the dongle fell out in the Wild West days.

Eight days it took. In my defence, I had urgent work to get done where there was no internet access. Less in my defence, I don't check this forum anywhere near as much as SC. Either way, I did save an offline copy of Steve's Thor Game to my reviewing-laptop which has QemuLator 3.3.1 on it, and wrote most of what I needed to do on Sunday evening.

Today, I have tested the game further on QPC2 in 8-bit colour mode (once I'd worked out that's what it was supposed to have been all along), and now, here's the official review.



What did those two Vikings do to deserve being constantly hit by lightning?

Fun fact (as a comment on your review):

The QL's FILL algorithm is one of the very, very few (in fact the only one I know) that isn't the least bit recursive.

Nice writeup. One comment on something hardly anybody probably knows: there is actually a screen saver suite for the QL called "cue dark" that can also execute screen savers written in basic, at least under SMSQ/E I guess (it's been a long time!). It even has features like hot corners for "never sleep" and "sleep now" if I remember correctly. It needs the pointer environment and is available from http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/screensa/index.html

Hi Tofro,

There was a superb FIND_AREA / FILL_TEXTURE routine included in Talent's 'GraphiQL' program, never seen elsewhere ? Pity ! Probably recursive too...

TMD : Thor struck the vikings down, because he liked to eat them fried ! Thanks for an honest review... as you say, you have to be nimble with 'random' lightning.

I am still trying to get a workaround so that the game will compile without running out of data_space... ( which it doesn't in Basic...)

Best Wishes,

Steve.

END OF WEEK 26:

As ever, I've checked the nefarious GMail spam folder to see if there's anything waiting for me - there isn't, which means that technically, this has been a blank week, but owing to the weird way that Life, The Universe And Everything works, the one game I've reviewed this week was not only sent (well, posted a few comments above, although it's on the previous page now) last week, but was on the same day as the previous entry... the game is Steve Poole's Thor Game, designed to run under SMSQ/E on QPC2 with 8-bit colour (and maybe more), but will also run on regular-black-box-QL systems, if you're prepared to accept a few compromises or make a few edits as I've specified in the review.

I am nowhere near Steve's incredibly advanced age, but I am going to rack up another completed year this month. And as I'm going to be 42, why not enter some Hitchhiker's themed games for the Yellow Challenge? I might be more strict with that from now on - merely putting "the answer is 42" as a final victory message won't cut the Dentrassi mustard any more. Also, it need not necessarily be a game - if a Commodore 64 can generate a random haiku (as I translated for the 16K Spectrum last year), surely a QL can programmed to write Vogon poetry? Think of all that extra string-handling space that's available over the Spectrum, even on a 128K QL.