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
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
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!
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?
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.
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
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.
"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!).
@@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. th-cam.com/video/1PI6GwKVAeY/w-d-xo.html
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 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
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.
I love retro gaming as much as the next man (or woman)... but I cannot see how the Speccy was compared to the C64. I mean the graphics and sound were in a different league altogether. and let's not comment on the joystick situation. I'll agree it is nice to keep these legends alive... perhaps the next is better in colour management.
I think they're compared in terms of popularity during the 8 bit era, rather than technical capabilities. The ZX Spectrum was significantly cheaper as far as I know, so it makes sense that it'd be far less capable.
@@izzieb You are right, the Spectrum was far cheaper. And the superiority it has, is probably in the United Kingdom. I'm not dissing it obviously, as it started an amazing bedroom industry in coding games. But once the C64 came down to within 50 pounds, then there was trouble. Not to mention the presence of Amstrad, BBC, and the similarly priced, superior, but ultimately less popular, Oric-1... The Speccy came at the exactly right time. For which, of course, we are thankful. But across Europe, the Spectrum was second fiddle to the 64.
@@metalheadmalta maybe, but in Britain it was cheaper and people loved them because of the massive library of different games and to even get even close to the 64 was amazing, by certain devs, there were even a few better games than the 64 too. Always thought the graphics were much better detailed on the Spectrum too, Cobra, Chase Hq are just a couple of good examples of classic speccy!
@@metalheadmalta In Europe there are countries like Spain where the ZX Spectrum was very strong, maybe even market-leading. The 128kB version was introduced in Spain first. Europe also includes the Eastern Block and here Spectrum clones ruled for quite some time - far into the 1990s. The Spectrum outshone the C64 as soon as raw CPU power was needed. 3D games like Starstrike II never appreared on the C64 and Carrier Command only got a 2D versoin on the C64. If, however, the hardware of the C64 (sprites etc.) could support the game then the C64 was hard to beat. 2D shooters and platformers never had a better 8-bit platform than the C64.
The Spectrum is a plucky little machine, and I have to give it it's due. Being an American, I only ever played it through emulation, but its got such a rich library. And you're telling me the games for the thing were only like five or six bucks a pop back in the day? No wonder 8-bit consoles had such a hard time cracking Europe.
Less than that in some cases, and there was a massive second hand market. I remember my local thrift shop always had a section with old Spectrum games, in fact they got to know me so well they'd hold them for me. Towards the end of the system's life, new games were usually around £10 and when re-released in budget they were about £3-4 and sometimes you got compilation tapes for the same price that had 4 games on them. Plus, magazines always had an older game or two for free on their cover tape.
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.
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
I never thought colour clash would be overcome in my lifetime.
Ula+ spectra datagear dma mb-02+ & of course Sam coupe
@@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".
@@greenaum well worth a try...
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th-cam.com/video/zsjTpFR0oYQ/w-d-xo.html
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!
Fantastic video. "Cheated like a Donkey Kong world record holeder" had me snorting in particular, but it wasn't the only excellent turn of phrase.
Thanks!
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)
russian coders rule !
Thanks! I always knew the Speccy was big in Russia, I didn't know it still has such a following!
@@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
Some really remarkable games here, great video. Nice to see these programmers get the credit they deserve.
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
Id love to see Cousin Horace featured, four great games in one and a story that explains why US Horace was so different to UK Horace on the boxart
Why did Yandex sponsor a Spectrum game? Maybe because Spectrum clones were the order of the day in the USSR hence they have a massive community.
Imagine if they'd been released in '83 or '84. Absolutely amazing stuff 🙌💯
I'm sure Mastertronic would have given you at least £250 for valley of rains.
@@Sharopolis hell yeah 🙌
@@Sharopolis Haha, like Kingsoft on the Atari ST.
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.
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!
That one game with 8x8 blocks to eliminate clash with large pixels is great and unique too. Cant recall the name. The puzzle platformer.
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!
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.
Alas 38 years too late! If only these clever techniques had been used ~35 years ago what a different experience we would have had!
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.
Paperboy had "Rasterinterrupts" in the border in its menu. Or my cracked version had ;-)
Thanks for showcasing these incredible Spectrum games
that last game looks amazing, i would have loved to have that on my ST back in the day!
It's worth a go, it plays as good as it looks.
I'm a c64 man myself but these are really impressive :-o
Same! Would've really livened up the format war if we'd seen colour like that back in the day 😂
I'm fixing mine currently
"Teletext acid trip" is so apt is not even a joke!
Anything coming out to push the BBC Micro? I'm very nostalgic for the BBC B as it was my first computer (in 1990, past it's heyday, for cheap.).
Yep that's coming one day!
Excellent video, it's amazing what some of these homebrewers have done with such limited hardware!
Honestly my favourite part of these videos is the nicknames you give to the computers.
5:28 Wow, these seem like indie retro-style games that would've been released nowadays! So surprised you could do all of this on systems back then!
They were released "nowadays", that's the entire premise of this. video.
That is just tomb of mask idk
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
said "holy shit" about 5 times in this vid. Got damn!!!
I can't believe these colorful games! Amazing! 👍
Loved watching these games. So spectrum, but so "New Spectrum". Great!
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!!!
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.
More new games that push retro system videos please my good man.
I'm working on it!
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
"Psychedelic biscuit tin" is the best description I've ever heard for the Spectrum.
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 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.
You missed "Aliens: Neoplasma" "Alter Ego" and "Dreamwalker". I definitely recommend to check these out :)
Good suggestions, thanks!
... also Metal Man is worth a look.
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.
Yeah there's loads of new stuff, I've barely scratched the surface, lots of games getting physical releases on tape too!
Wow! Buzzsaw and old tower, looks amazing. They don't look like a zx spectrum game with that colour, also fps so smooth. Nice video man...
"Teletext acid trip" had me spluttering coffee into my lap.
Another great video! I quite enjoy Old Tower and Castlevania: Spectral Interlude as it is, so it's nice to see some new suggestions for my DivMMC!
Thanks!
That last game looks incredible
Who else was heartbroken at 6:23 when old castle was left and we never got to find out how he was supposed to get those 2 remaining pellets?
Don't worry, he picked up the last two pellets just as the video went onto the next game!
My first ever platform and enjoyed every second of it. Video games and computer games take themselves far too seriously nowadays.
Totally.
@@Sharopolis Given enough time money ruins everything.
The last game looks stunning!
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.
That last game blew me away.
The graphics for Spectral Interlude reminds me of Dark Castle for the Mac. Only with added color.
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.
I take it you are a KS2 backer as I am also waiting on my Next!
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
Interesting point, you may well be right.
Definitely modern tastes shape new games on retro systems.
If nobody said anything, you would'nt know they were running on a 48K Speccy. AWSOME.
Teletext Acid trip... never heard that one before. Love the speccy and love these vids 👍👍
Thanks!
Valley of Rains looks stunning!
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
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 ;)
Shame? I don't think so. Games that push the 64 and even those that are just respectable at least have sound and music.
Look out for more C64 stuff from me in the future, including some REALLY impressive new titles!
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!
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?
That final game is stunning running on a 48k. I played the other week on real hardware and was gobsmacked
Look for channel sinc Lair, they develop a new game with Sanchez.
Back in the day Gyron was pretty impressive on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K.
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.
This sounds very strange. But I love and miss the spectrum colour of light blue. I can't quite put my finger on it but it just doesn't for me.
because 00FFFF is the only pure 1-bit rgb color that looks good
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.
another excellent complation! thank you!!
Thank you!
@@Sharopolis you're welcome!
Outstanding.
Cheers!
Apparently my graphics calculator used one of these processors. I think this computer would have sold more if it has pimpquest on it.
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
Some of the American Timex/Sinclair Spectrums did support it in hardware; but it was very rarely (if ever) used for commercially released games.
that finalfight just trounced renegade. so fluid.
That's some really impressive programming.
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.
"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 knew there were clones and I knew they were popular, but I had no idea they were THAT big!
That Old Tower game looks really similar to an Android/iOS game called "Tomb of the Mask".
"I cheated like a Donkey Kong World Record holder" - Welsh LGR 2020
Thanks for the Video 👍
How did Buzzsaw and other achieve the extra colors? I'm looking online and can't see any technical discussions
Given the high colour games seem to decrease the 8x8 to 1 or two rows of pixels? it's likely a scan-line interrupt style technique
@@JohnnyWednesday that's what I was wondering; pity the programmers of nay if then haven't written an article for a site
@@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.
th-cam.com/video/1PI6GwKVAeY/w-d-xo.html
"I cheated like a Donkey Kong world record holder"
_Billy Mitchell has entered the chat ..._ 😂
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.
can't wait for 2030!
4:24 that looks a lot like a mobile game I used to play a few years ago
Would you mind posting links to the games?
Good idea - I'll stick it in the description.
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
That buzzsaw game reminds me of that game Pac-Attack 😆
insane!
Wonder if these games (particularly castlevania) would've been Crash SMASHES!
Old Tower reminds me of this mobile game Tomb of the Mask.
But how???? What sorcery is this!!!! How does it work? Anyone has a link to the technical how?
Wow these look good
the only thing I didn't like about mighty final fight was that you can complete the vast parts of the game with one fighting manoeuvre
Fantastic stuff
Thanks!
Great video but i would like to have seen Nixy the Glade Sprite included...!!
Thanks, that looks like a cool game, a new one for me!
Nixy is excellent, especially in ULAplus. I never cease to be amazed by what people can do with Arcade Game Designer and its successors
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.
If you're colourblind, then you must - by definition - be blind.
So how could you see anything going on in the display output of the Spectrum?
Sword Of Ianna was (well, it still is...) excellent also...
Looks good!
I love retro gaming as much as the next man (or woman)... but I cannot see how the Speccy was compared to the C64. I mean the graphics and sound were in a different league altogether. and let's not comment on the joystick situation. I'll agree it is nice to keep these legends alive... perhaps the next is better in colour management.
I think they're compared in terms of popularity during the 8 bit era, rather than technical capabilities. The ZX Spectrum was significantly cheaper as far as I know, so it makes sense that it'd be far less capable.
@@izzieb You are right, the Spectrum was far cheaper. And the superiority it has, is probably in the United Kingdom. I'm not dissing it obviously, as it started an amazing bedroom industry in coding games. But once the C64 came down to within 50 pounds, then there was trouble. Not to mention the presence of Amstrad, BBC, and the similarly priced, superior, but ultimately less popular, Oric-1...
The Speccy came at the exactly right time. For which, of course, we are thankful. But across Europe, the Spectrum was second fiddle to the 64.
@@metalheadmalta maybe, but in Britain it was cheaper and people loved them because of the massive library of different games and to even get even close to the 64 was amazing, by certain devs, there were even a few better games than the 64 too. Always thought the graphics were much better detailed on the Spectrum too, Cobra, Chase Hq are just a couple of good examples of classic speccy!
@@metalheadmalta In Europe there are countries like Spain where the ZX Spectrum was very strong, maybe even market-leading. The 128kB version was introduced in Spain first.
Europe also includes the Eastern Block and here Spectrum clones ruled for quite some time - far into the 1990s.
The Spectrum outshone the C64 as soon as raw CPU power was needed. 3D games like Starstrike II never appreared on the C64 and Carrier Command only got a 2D versoin on the C64.
If, however, the hardware of the C64 (sprites etc.) could support the game then the C64 was hard to beat. 2D shooters and platformers never had a better 8-bit platform than the C64.
Good video! Subbed immediately. Looking forward to new content. Keep it up!
Thanks, more coming soon!
nice efforts here but nothing will ever top Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.
Whenever I go shopping, I always go naked, except for my teal tall boots.
Great video! What is the music at 8:00?
It's Rest by Otis McDonald
th-cam.com/video/DDt0E8HL2-o/w-d-xo.html
The Spectrum is a plucky little machine, and I have to give it it's due. Being an American, I only ever played it through emulation, but its got such a rich library. And you're telling me the games for the thing were only like five or six bucks a pop back in the day? No wonder 8-bit consoles had such a hard time cracking Europe.
Less than that in some cases, and there was a massive second hand market. I remember my local thrift shop always had a section with old Spectrum games, in fact they got to know me so well they'd hold them for me. Towards the end of the system's life, new games were usually around £10 and when re-released in budget they were about £3-4 and sometimes you got compilation tapes for the same price that had 4 games on them. Plus, magazines always had an older game or two for free on their cover tape.
@@Zerbey I rest my case.
Remember commando? On Google play store they got a game called arrowhead commando exactly the same game but better graphics...give it a try....
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.