More modern ZX-Spectrum games: 9999 in One, Agent Blue, Albatrossity, Aliens Neoplasma, Alter Ego, Angels, Angry Birds Opposition, Aquanoids, Asteroids RX, Atlantis ZX, Automated Cave Explorer, Axel K. and The Lost Bills, Batboy, Battle City 2016, Bean Brothers, BlokTris, Bobby Carrot, Bomb Munchies, Bonnie & Clyde, Booty The Remake, Brick Rick Graveyard Shift, Bruce Lee RX, Buzzsaw+, Castaway Castle of Sorrow, Castlevania Spectral Interlude, Coinz Are Mine!, Cosmic Payback, Crazy Kong City, Cygnus: Alpha, Delta Shadow, Dirty Dozer, Dogmole Tuppowski - The New Adventures, Dr. Who Surrender Time, Dreamwalker, Dragonfire ZX, Duck Tales ZX, Duckstroma, El Stompo, Escape From Colony 8, Farmer Jack, Flynn's Adventure in Bombland, Frantic Pengo, Foggy's Quest, Fucking Mili, Funky Fungus Reloaded, Galdalf Deluxe, Gem Slider, Get Out of Mars, Gluf, Gokumal, Gravibots, Hell Yeah!, Hunt Buck Nuclear Defence, Impossamal, Invasion of The Zombie Monsters, Jilly's Farm Volume 1 SokoBAArn, Join, Karlos, King's Valley, Klondike Solitaire, Knightmare ZX, Knightmare 2 ZX, Last Train to Tranz-Central, Left Behind, Mahjong Solitaire, Mario Bros Game & Watch, Marsmare Alienation, Matthew Cranston Battles, Maze Death Rally, Metal Man Reloaded, Metamorphosis, Mighty Final Fight, Misifu Remeow, Mister Kung Fu, More Tea Vicar, Mr. Do!, MultiDude, Ninja Gaiden Shadow Warriors, NinjaJar, Ninjakul 2: The Last Ninja, Nixy And The Seeds of Doom, Nixy The Glade Sprite, Nothing, Old Tower, Ooze, Pentacorn Quest, Pillars, Pilot Attack, Pitman, Pre-Zu, Preliminary Monty, Project Revelation, PTM, Q-Box, Quest For Elements, Raiders of The Lost Ark, Rallybug, Red Raid, Redshift, Retro Racer, Retroforce, Ringo, Rival Gangs, Roger The Pangolin, Rubinho Cucaracha, Run!, Savage Princess, Sector Invasion, Seraphima, SIP - Special Inter-Galactic Painter, Sir Abadol, Sir Abadol 2, Sir Froggy, Snake Escape, Space Monsters Meet The Hardy, Speccy Bros., Springbot Mars Attack, Sprouty, Stormfinch, Sunbucket, Super 48k Box, Terrapins, The Dark: Lost Pages, The Goblin, The Return of Traxtor, The Lost Treasures of Tulum, The Legend of The Frog Prince, The Lost Treasures of Tulum, The Sword of lanna, The Vectornauts, TokiMal, Toofy's Winter Nuts, Toof in Fan Land, Tourmaline, Towdie, Travel Through Time, Turbomania, Twinlight, Uroboros, Uwol - Quest for Money, Vallation, Valley of Rains, Vampire Vengeance, Wonderful Dizzy, Xenoblast, Yazzie
@@zxspectrum16KB I think the point he's making is overcoming colour clash _on a Spectrum._ Yeah of course different hardware can do away with it. You may as well say "Windows PC running an emulator".
Check out Gandalf. It's stunning, cheats clash and has amazing level design. Best console style platform game on the system. Manic Pietro is another wonderful game along with Noentiendo's other games!
Really love your videos :) I was born in 82 and grew up on hand-me-down 8-bits and 16-bits - did my time on the C64 and Amiga in both of their twilight years and I became a programmer - I totally recognize your first-rate knowledge and love for the machines we grew up with :) (The Russian search engine probably sponsered it because Russia has a HUGE history of Spectrum clones - some of the best spectrum demos today are from old school Russian clone coders)
@@Sharopolis - yeah man! so many clones of the speccy over there, not to mention lots of weird and wonderful soviet bloc upgrades and hacks. I don't know too much about them, just aware there's a lot to it
Awesome list! I was a Speccy owner in the late 1980's, and I quite loved playing its games. Thank goodness there are enthusiasts and skilled programmers to bring new stuff to life on the good ol' Speccy!
A bit of info regarding love of Yandex for good old Speccy: First of all, Yandex owns retro-computer museum in Moscow, why wouldn't they make a compo there? Secondly, a great part of Russian coders' revolution came into life due to Speccy (pretty much, a decade before in UK). Some people used it as a daily driver to access the net (FidoNet) as well as for coding and hardware design very well into late 90s. So perhaps Yandex acknowledges that great part of their expertise comes of the humble 48k.
Fun fact: There actually exist clones that already support detailed 8x1 coloring in hardware, as a separate display mode. They were made in Portugal by Timex and also came out in limited quantities in Poland, Chile and some parts of North America.
Something like the Bifrost Engine, getting more colour squeezed into an 8x8 cell, was done back in the day. I think some Arkanoid-like game did it. The same way Bifrost does, just with very tight timing and strict programming.
I hope Gandalf and Manic Pietro are on this list!! Especially Gandalf. Cheats colour limits and has amazing world and level design, particularly world 4. The best console style platformer ever released!
Noentiendo is working on a Ninja Turtles port that looks great. He is my fave Speccy homebrew dev, just ahead of Zosya - he deserves a LOT more publicity and credit for his amazing games. With Get Out of Mars, Gandalf & Manic Pietro he has the best metroidvania, best console style platformer and best Manic style platformer from his first three releases 😮 Please PLEASE do a video on him. More people NEED to play his games! Hes not well known but each of those three are truly amazing. Manic Pietro is a tour of 8 bit franchises with a story that makes it make sense somehow 😂 He also has Pietro Bros which is better than the official Mario Bros on Speccy!
Although the Devs other games don't reach the same high note, the game Janky Joe in Retro Hell is worth featuring too! The levels are a Manic style tour of 8 bit games, mostly micro based franchises. It's great. (Manic Pietro is console franchise's for its levels) Janky Joe in Retro Hell is the 2nd best Manic game IMO, just behind Manic Pietro
Forcing multi-color like that, when the hardware was pigeonholed as being unable to do anything of the sort, is the kind of hack I'm used to seeing reserved for the likes of the Atari 2600.
The oldest Atari consoles relied on you re-programming the display on-the-fly like this, as they simply didn't have enough memory to store a whole screen of scenery. That's where all these tricks originate. And that includes all those colour-fade skies on the Amiga.
@@jasonrailton7990 Right, I know how it works. It's still a marvel, though, because _by no means_ did the designers of the VCS hardware envision people figuring out how to have more than five moving objects, let alone the gobsmacking complexity of things like the homebrew Draconian or Mappy. They designed it to reproduce "pong deluxe" and "tank game", and while they certainly knew it could be tweaked to do variations on those objectives, in the end it was only intended to be better than the truly humble hardware that came before it.
I love all your vids - I grew up playing my friend's SNES but at home we had an Acorn Electron and then an Archimedes. Would love a video on those or the BBC Micro.
Woooaaah fresh as a daisy really really blows my mind, lot’s of colors on screen ,heck theres even parallax scrolling backgrounds on screen,,, unbelievible!!!
The colors of the Speccy are strong and clear, much better than the washed out palettes of the C64 or NES, for example. Without color clash the graphics really do look like early 80s vibrant arcade classics. Pity this wasn't discovered back then.
Actually, there were some games which make use of multi colour graphics (i.e. more than 2 colours per character (8x8 pixels). Action Force II springs to mind immediately which used this on some screens between levels. But techniques like these were not widely adopted. Coders were pushed to get games done, I guess, and exploring and fine-tuning really helped here - but this happened for years and after the Spectrum's commercial heyday.
Why would a Russian search engine sponsor a Speccy programming competition? Because the Speccy was huuuuge in the USSR, that's why! Up until even the mid 1990s former communists were playing on their Scorpions and Pentagons, Spectrum clones. Besides the large homebrew software scene over there (ignoring the huge piracy of Western games) meant games were still being made into the mid 1990s. And the Soviets got GOOD at it! They also invented their own hardware, generally sharing plans to make your own rather than starting companies to make them. So there were all sorts of expansions, particularly Speccies with 512K or a couple of MB RAM. But also many disk drives, hard drives, all sorts of joysticks, printers, all sorts of stuff. The clones, the Pentagons and Scorpions, among others... some you could buy, I think sometimes in shops, depending on the particular country and what was going on at the time. The USSR had trouble keeping bread in it's shops so computers are gonna be a bit iffy sometimes. But beside that, many enthusiasts made and modded their own Spectrums, from ordinary electronic parts. I think that the Spectrum's simple design had a lot to do with why it was cloned. If you have to make a computer out of standard TTL logic, no custom chips, then you'll appreciate a simpler design. Though you want some GAMES on it, so a Jupiter Ace wouldn't be much use. So you'd implement the Speccy in whatever logic you could get. Maybe a few CPLDs were available to help implement the ULA. Producing a more complex system would have been much more difficult. And there's no need, the Speccy plays great games. And of course it's compatible with your friends' machines, so you can all trade tapes with each other and establish a network of traders to get software across the land. So that's how come the former USSR ended up with loads of Spectrum geniuses, second only to the UK. And that's why Yandex decided to sponsor one, I suppose. It would drag up warm memories in their customers' hearts, and the kitsch or novelty value might be enough to get it mentioned in a few papers or TV shows. All good and interesting PR for Yandex. Some former communist citizens actually look back fondly to those days. Particularly now capitalism is now in the stage just before we start grinding babies up into hamburgers, where we appoint clowns as our leaders yet nothing really bad happens. That itself is unnerving. People want to regress, to feel safe, and imagine their childhood, as idyllicly and unrealistically as possible, please. Oh and since Vlad came into power, democracy went back out the window anyway. If you're gonna have the totalitarianism, you at least ought to get the egalitarianism with it.
Just in time for the release of the Spectrum NEXT too. Not necessarily a system pusher, but I quite enjoyed Steve Snake's Horace and the Robots that came out a few years back. Other than the main sprite being changed to Horace. I think it's the most faithful port/clone of Berzerk I've seen in years
As for the VALLEY OF RAINS - the documentation states that the game is supposed to come with it's own prerecorded soundtrack! They are occasionally releasing snippets of music in their VK social-thing. You may consider it a Speccy AAA title.
Bloody hell, I still dust off my 36-year old Speccy 48k once in a while and wasn't even aware people still made games for it. I'm gonna have to check out a few of those.
Valley of Rains is actually quite impressive and stackes fairly well against other micros of the era. Unlike some of the titles at the beginning of the video, the color-clash tricks of the last entry are much more obvious. To be honest though, I think that simply blocking out the background like that still looks better than bashing the character graphics over the background colors like so many spectrum games did in the day.
Another C64 guy here. These colour techniques are amazing. I'm not sure Valley could look any better if it was on C64. Old Tower looks great, not just visually but seems like a well designed, fun game, fast & responsive too. If you'd told me it was a retro game on a modern platform, I wouldn't have doubted it. The look kinda reminds me of Downwell.
Old Tower really is good, plays just as well as it looks, there's even a version for the MegaDrive/Genesis now www.indieretronews.com/2019/03/old-towers-retrosouls-snazzy-zx.html
The Timex Sinclair 2068 computer has a 1x8-bit two-color mode. I played around this mode but never made it into a game. I thought that this was a unique feature of the 2086 computer. Are you telling me that the Spectrum can support this mode as well?
I played El Stompo and Sunbucket and really loved those games. Maybe they are a bit easier than games of the 80's because I managed to finish both of them. But they really pulled me in, I wished they had even more levels to play through! Also, same thing happened with BSquared.
I suspect there was a good reason why we didn't see games like this back in the day. The problem with multicolour engines is that they require most of the CPU time, severely restricting what the developer can do in his game. Back in the day game designs were evolving and that was what drove the market, so while these games could have been written I suspect they might not have been complex enough for the market at the time. Thankfully Spectrum developers are free to do as they please now
Old Tower is available for free on Android if you want to play it. Oddly it is reduced in color but it is a very fun, retro-style game. Worth a play if you haven't.
@@JohnnyWednesday that's basically it, except without the scan-line interrupt, as the Spectrum doesn't have one. It's a lot of careful cycle-counting and changing the attribute memory in-between scanlines.
@@gdclemo - so they actually have to use the correct number of instructions to ensure they hit the right 'window' to adjust the attribute memory? that must be a solid ass bitch to code
I think Buzzsaw was 8x2 blocks of colour. I did a video a while ago about Speccy Colour I explained multicolour, but I might have been talking gibberish and my voice-over technique has improved a bit since then. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1PI6GwKVAeY.html
I've owned a 128+2 (grey) since 1986 + I'm awaiting delivery of a Speccy NEXT. IMO the 128k Speccy machines are still "work in progress" as far as software is concerned, as the 48K is STILL a gift that keeps on giving.
"Why is Yandex, a Russian company, sponsoring a Spectrum game competition?" (Yes I'm paraphrasing). Sharopolis, are you really unaware how big hardware clone versions of the UK Spectrum were in the Eastern European and ex-CCCP countries of the late 80's and 90's? (apologies if I have the historical/geopolitical names wrong here!).
i'm not one to keep up with home brew developments, but i am absolutely stunned that games exist without colour clash. how long did it take to create those graphics engines? it can't have been easy otherwise commercial games back in the 80s would have looked so much better
"New games that push this 'Rainbow Revolutionary' to the edge, and keep it rocking in the 21st century." "Trial by ordeal of the Stamper brothers." - Brilliant!
I never thought I'd see Speccy games that could put respectable C64 titles to shame. It makes it all the more frustrating for me to watch, being American.
The Speccy at its best? could be better than the C64 at its worse - but the C64 was massive here in the UK too, so we can still geek out over it with you ;)
Some class Speccy games out lately, here are just a few of them, speccy vs C64 back in the 80s, but the speccy has so many titles in its library now, and 128ks music is as good as the 64 in some of its games. Both 8 bit classics!
Wow that last game looks like it belonged on an arcade console. Its visually appealing enough that it would do well on something like the Nintendo switch.
Wow, with these color tricks Speccy color palette looks actually pretty good O_O Too bad hardware didn't support this natively as it would make this computer so much better
Jesus. All my mates were Speccy kids while I was a C64 User and I never seen anything close to whats in this video. WOW. If I'd seen releases like these at the time, I'd have paid it more attention.
The different shades of blue on the sides of Old Tower are witchcraft I tell you. Seriously though, how is that possible on an original spectrum that only had a few colours. Im guessing either very precise dithering or some sort of artifacting to create the illusion of more shades. That game is so smooth and polished it could pass on a 16 bit machine, amazing coding skills.
The multicolour effect is only used for the actual gameplay area. The borders are just using the standard Spectrum graphics mode, with blue ink on black paper. The shading is simple dithering; it doesn't even use the two bright attribute bit for two shades of blue.
As usual this has a little bit of history : www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/4094/Advanced%20Spectrum%20Machine%20Language/ A book I used to own. As I recall the routine in question was interrupt based but only to determine the position of the scan line. The routines main drawback was the cost of those extra clock cycles. For the area of the screen being worked on this could be up to eight times higher which is probably why none of the implementations you show are full screen. Now if someone coded a routine that simply managed colour clash intelligently I WOULD be impressed.
I'm colour blind, and speccys colour clash absolutely ruined so many gaming experiences for me in my childhood sadly. But honestly some of this stuff is frankly amazing.
Somehow I know we'll never push current gen consoles anywhere near as much as we did the speccy. The devs are far too concerned with textures than innovative new idea's, concepts and that thing called playability.
Increasing the colour resolution isn't new. I remember reading a zx spectrum programming book about the technique of chasing the scan line sync signals to do things like this in the 90s.
The technique was explained (and demonstrated) in the book _Advanced Spectrum Machine Language_ published in 1984. However it was limited to a maximum width of 8 character cells.
I'm surprised the Castlevania guys hav my been sued by Konami. If I were them I would have made it as it is but named it as a unique IP and call it a spiritual successor or tribute to the classic CV formula
