Category: Programming

MSX now can play all ZX Spectrum Arcade Game Designer games!

I believe everybody, even outside of the ZX Spectrum community, knows about Jonathan Cauldwell’s Arcade Game Designer (AGD), a game engine that lets you create professional-looking games for the Speccy and Amstrad CPC. Not long ago the Dragon and CoCo community were blessed by a converter tool that helped to bring nothing less than 219 games made with AGD to…

Runner Bear – First game of 2020 for the Atari 8-bit

One of the games available in the New Year Disc 2020 released by Ralf “PPs” Patschke is Runner Bear, an infinite runner game for the Atari XL/XE with at least 48K of RAM. Developed by Paul “Playsoft” Lay, Darryl Guenther y Rob Schlort, Runner Bear presents colourful Mario-like graphics with a very well designed parallax scrolling effect, giving depth to…

Yazzie – New platform game released for the ZX Spectrum was created in only 6 days

Although it is not unseen to have games developed in a short period of time, it is easy to make a really good game in less than one week. One game that falls in that category is Yazzie, developed by Denis Grachev for the competition Yandex Retro Games Battle 2019, which happened at the beginning of last month. Yazzie is…

Compile and Run an Assembly Language Program for the Atari Computer

If you have in your New Year’s resolution list to finally learn assembler for the Atari but you have no idea from where to start, you are lucky! Atari Projects website has published a new quick tutorial where it teaches how to compile and run a small program written in 6502 Assembly for the Atari 8-bit computers. Written by Jason…

MSX game The 4 Masters of Melody gets boxed cartridge version

The 4 Masters of Melody, the first game created by the Clube MSX magazine, is getting a well-deserved cartridge release. The launch will happen on December 7 and 8, at the MSX SP 2019, an event for MSX enthusiasts in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The boxed version of the game brings small graphic enhancements, a printed manual (Portuguese and English) all…

Atari 8-bit Display List Interrupts: An Advanced Tutorial

I’ve been dedicating some of my time learning about Atari 8-bit programming mostly through old Atari books you can find all over the Internet and they are a very good source of information for sure! However, it is nice to see that there are some modern efforts to keep the subject fresh and up to date. One of the most…

R-Type for ZX Spectrum gets mod that brings it closer to the arcade version

R-Type was published in 1988 by Electric Dreams Software for the ZX Spectrum 48k, and they made an excellent job with it. However, due to the hardware and memory limitations, the game was released without music, which was a big part of its frantic gameplay. This weekend, a new mod for the classic game was released trying to close the…

Port of Prince of Persia on Atari XL/XE – First playable level released

Prince of Persia is probably one of my favourite games, and one of the most frustrating as well, mainly when you fall on those spikes after not getting the perfect timing for the jump. Although it was initially developed for the Apple ][, which shares the same CPU, the 6502, the game was never released for the Atari 8-bits. With…

Interview with Randy Linden, the developer who brought Dragon’s Lair to the Amiga, DOOM to the SNES, and creator of Bleem! – Part 2

This is the second part of the interview with Randy Linden, featured on the Retro Hour podcast episode 190. Read the first part here. Bleem! Retro Hour: Well,  when did you get this kind of stroke of genius to run PlayStation games on the PC. How did that start? Randy Linden: I was just thinking one day about what to…

The MagPi magazine issue 88 is all about Retro Computing

Retrocomputing and the maker movement has a close connection. The curiosity, innovation and tinkering spirit are present in the Raspberry PI (and others) community as much as it was present during the dawn of the personal computing era. To confirm that even more, the recently released issue 88 of The MagPI features many articles about retrocomputing and retrogaming. The magazine…