Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Terry Pratchett diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's
What miserable news. Bastard fucking universe, there are plenty of other people out there you could have picked on, why did it have to be him? :(
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1984
ReplyDeleteSimon walks to the window and turns around. "MSX is a terrible standard. It is terrible." he repeats emphatically. "I am speaking as a
designer. That´s why I was stressing I can design computers. Because no one´s gone on about about the hardware on the MSX. It´s got a sprite
chip. There are going to be a lot of companies in the market who write sprite type games who will love that computer."
Graham joins in. "Ocean although they´re not keen on the MSX, thinks it´s reasonably good and they prefer it to the Amstrad. And the reason is
because on the Amstrad you´ve got a raster display like on the Spectrum. You can do WHATEVER you want to, BUT you´ve got to think about it
and write sofware for it. On the MSX you just do this pretty shape and shove something out of a port."
Simon taps the edge of the desk firmly. "Let´s get this straight. Sprites are fine, I´m not anti-sprite. But you cannot have ONLY sprites, and that´s
more or less what MSX has done. Because you can´t get at the video display memory. I´m seriously opposed to MSX. People are going ti fall
left, right and centre for MSX because it suits their sprite games. But in six months time, when everybody´s tire of sprite games, there are going
to be no alternative. The software industry will go pooomph !."
"Graphics should be interactive. Now the thing about MSX is that the update on display is so slow that you can´t do 3D games like Dark Star, or
3D tank duel. I´ve seen some of the MSX games from Japan and lot of the people looking at them say, oh they´re garbage but they´ll get better
because the Spectrum games got better. but it WON´T get better ! Because MSX isn´t an open ended system. Spectrum games were awfull
when they first came out because they programmers didn´t know what thez were doing. But because the display is versatile you can get better
and better things with the machine. The Spectrum encourages you to write different programs for it. And a programmer can´t ask for more than a
good procesor like Z80 running fast, a reasonable mount of memory and a display which is easy to get to."
Well what about the QL then ? There´s a moment of silence and thez both laugh. "Hah ! Forget it, it´s terrible. it´s already failed. We knew it
would." says Graham.
...
LATER
...
wikipedia:
The Sinclair QL (for Quantum Leap), was a personal computer launched by Sinclair Research in 1984, as the successor to the ZX Spectrum.
It failed , and production was suspended in 1985.
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The Freescape engine is an early 3D game engine. Developed in-house by Incentive Software in 1986, Freescape is considered to be the first
proprietary 3D engine ever to be used in computer games. The engine was originally designed for the ZX Spectrum and IBM PC.
######
world of spectrum:
R-Type, It is a conversion of an arcade machine made by IREM. It was developed for ZX Spectrum by Electric Dreams.
Year of release 1988
"One of the most acccomplished titles ever released for the spectrum. Large playing area, smooth, colourful scrolling and superbly detailed and
colourful sprites... Incredible. I doff my cap to the programmer/s"
"i didn't notice any motion problems at all in this game, in fact this may well have been the best home port of r-type at the time, i have the master
system version too and it's a joke compared to this."
"A strong contender for the greatest technical achievement on the machine."
"Drawings were accurate to the arcade as was the game play.This was the best version i played back then.C64 was okay too but a lot had to be
changed on that.Great gaming history!"
I thought you were implying I was also suffering from, um, whatever it was... It'll come back in a minute. Whoever it was... Yes? Hello?
ReplyDelete... piece of history, just cruising through the the most comprehensive ZX Spectrum encyclopedia in the world,common moments,sad ones .. epic.
ReplyDelete.
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