It’s been swelling, building for a while and now the time is right for a massive dump .. of links related to my project to reverse engineer The Great Escape.

The Great Escape

• The Great Escape {mariuszw}
  • is a port of The Great Escape to the Atari 8-bit machines from the C64. The C64 version of TGE is horribly—essentially unplayably—slow but mariuszw has worked his magic optimising it for the Atari.

Reversing & Hacking

• Retro Ports {tcdev}
  • is disassembling and porting retro games between retro systems, like Knight Lore to the Neo Geo, and Alien 8/Pentagram to the TRS-80.
• Sinclair Spectrum Data Formats
  • has room and map definitions for Jet Set Willy, Atic Atac, Knight Lore, etc. They’ve also got some partial disassemblies of those titles.
• Kempston Mouse Software
  • is a collection of many Spectrum titles modified to work with the Kempston mouse interface. The Kempston mouse is emulatable using FUSE, for example.

Disassemblies

• Spectrum 128K ROM.
  • a high standard of work on this disassembly of the 128K and +2 ROMs by Matthew Wilson & co.
• Philip Anderson’s disassemblies:
  • Spellbound
  • Knight Tyme
  • Stormbringer 48K
  • Through the Trap Door
• Derek Bolli’s disassemblies:
  • Ant Attack
  • Gunfright
  • Cybernoid
• Stardust {TheJare} reverse engineered by the authors.

Graphics

• ZXArt hosts some staggeringly good ZX artwork, in particular check out the top rated images like Space Harrier: Batman: and Where Time Stood Still:

Graphics Programming

• Filmation math {Joaquín M López Muñoz, 2008}
  • discusses the maths and limitations of the isometric projection method used by isometric Ultimate games and their ilk.
• _Isometric Tiles Math {Clint Bellanger}_
  • explains how to do isometric projection and its inverse.
• Lou’s Pseudo 3D Page {Louis Gorenfeld, 2013}
  • is a nicely detailed description of how games, including older arcade hardware, draw roads.
  • In July rez implemented something similar for the PICO-8:

    reverse drawing order implemented, now I can draw some elements around the road! 🛣️#pico8 #racing #gamedev #indiedev #screenshotsaturday pic.twitter.com/wwuZV1SFGx

    — 𝝘Ε𝝛 (@chiptune) July 2, 2017

Sound Programming

• Beeps and Bleeps - Playing Speccy Music in Python
  • covers translating BASIC BEEP statements into the equivalent Python.
• Writing a ZX Spectrum emulator - Part 1: The Beeper
  • is more detailed: describes how to sample the Speccy’s audio pulses down for output at 44.1KHz.

Emulators

• ZXBaremulator {José Luis Sánchez}
  • is a Speccy emulator which runs bare metal on a Raspberry Pi. It uses bare metal environment called Circle to manage this.
• SpectREM {Mike Daley}
  • is a native Cocoa & Objective-C emulator for macOS 10.10+. It doesn’t seem that well known about presently (which is perhaps for the best as the screen is upside down in the current trunk build). But it does have some neat screen effects provided via a fragment shader.

Others

• Checkpoints {Declan Dineen}
  • is a gaming oriented podcast. They’re up to episode 107 and have had the Mel Croucher and the Tim Schafer as guests.
• Spectrum Computing
  • is a (successor? replacement? — it’s difficult to say…) to the World of Spectrum, with database of games and a forum too.