Emulation: on not being American

It's interesting sometimes to contrast how American and British (and to some extent European) retrocomputing enthusiasts look at the area of emulation. These days gaming is pretty much global -- PC, PS3 and so on -- but that wasn't nearly so much the case in the old days. We in Britain had a very substantial home computer industry in the early-mid 1980s, after all, and given that and the fact that it was feasible back then for bedroom coders to produce commercial software alone we had much less need to bow to what America or Japan did.

And that word "computer" is important. The Atari 2600 and the NES, for example, weren't nearly the phenomena over here that they were in the US, and a major reason for that is that we had Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad producing enormous numbers of computers rather than consoles, and those are what the average 12-year-old had at school (in Acorn's case) or at home (in the case of the others). Of the American manufacturers, Commodore did well and Atari (with the 400/800) to an extent, but you rarely saw UK homes with an Apple II, TRS-80 or TI99/4A.

So when you have a console like our very own GP2X, with a strong coding base in Europe, you're likely to get emulators for more of the British machines than you might otherwise do with such a (relatively) small installation base. And that is in fact the case: the relevant section of the OHH archive has good emulators for half a dozen major British micros: the Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Dragon, Sam Coupé, Spectrum and ZX80/81. (Okay, the Sam Coupé isn't really major, but still...) I'm not counting the Archimedes emulator as (like so much GP2X stuff) it has never been finished.

I wonder sometimes whether this gives European coders a slight advantage. If you had a NES, all you were likely to do was shove in a cartridge and go. But those of us who had computers expected to do at least a little programming from time to time, even if we mostly had our machines for leisure purposes. Sometimes that hacking was needed just to get a game to run, after all! The 1980s generation of kids was the only one, ever, who learned to program on a mass scale from before they even reached their teens. That's something that's largely missing today, and I think it's a real shame.

And... we're back

Phew... following a pretty serious outage at Blogger, during which I have to say we weren't kept all that well informed, things seem to be back to normal. My most recent game review (of Shippy 1984) has disappeared, but I have that saved so will post it up again if the promised retrieval of such things doesn't happen in the near future. If you have any trouble reading or commenting, then it's their fault, all right? *grins*

Edit: Aha, it's back to normal, review and all. Excellent!

Game review: Shippy 1984

Shippy 1984
Genre: Shooter
Author: seb
OHH download: v?.?? (31/08/07)
Size: 2.0 MB
Licence: GPL v2

Description
Shippy 1984 is a space-based shooter with strong echoes of the arcade machines of the early 1980s. If you've ever played something like Galaga (and if you're a GP2X owner, surely you have) then you'll feel at home pretty quickly. There's no complex underlying plot: Galaxian starts with a simple MISSION: DESTROY ALIENS and the same applies here: just blast away, avoiding alien bombs and helping yourself to the odd power-up. There is a countdown timer, but if it reaches zero you don't die; you just don't get a level bonus. That doesn't mean you can relax, though, as those aliens are coming down the screen towards you...

The game's retro atmosphere is very much an integral part of the experience: in a fun touch, you even get that infamous "Winners Don't Use Drugs" FBI splash screen at the very beginning. (Yes, I know that was American, but most of us over here know about it too these days.) The game was originally written for the PC by Ryan Broomfield; its name varies a bit across platforms, and even here it's written "Shippy84" in the readme. I've put "seb" as the author of this version since that's what the readme is signed and it was the only name I could find!

Addictiveness: 7
It's not often I say this about this type of game, but Shippy 1984 may be a little bit too easy, early on at least, to be truly captivating. The first time I played I got through several levels without losing a life without trying hard at all. It is a bit more of a challenge later, as more and more aliens appear, so if you stick with it for a couple of levels you should find yourself having more fun.

Depth: 5
It's an old-school endless space blaster; what did you expect? In all honesty, Shippy 1984 is probably better for not trying to be too clever. It does offer a little variety as the levels go by, and the presence of the few power-ups helps, but it's no Elite.

Controls: 7
The stick moves you around, A shoots and Start pauses; most people should be able to remember that! The ship is responsive enough, and (if you're better at the game than me) you should be able to dodge bombs pretty nimbly. Select quits the game: as it's instant and non-recoverable, I'm not wild about the lack of any confirmation screen there.

Graphics: 7
I'm not that sold on the odd design of your ship, which looks like a green moth with a small yellow smiley stuck to its top, and occasionally text superimposed on aliens is a little hard to see, but most of the rest is better. The font used for the score display is reminiscent of that used in the likes of Galaga, while the aliens themselves, their bombs and your missiles also feel right; they all move nice and smoothly, too. I enjoyed the messages like GO UNLIMITED BULLETS when you pick up a power-up.

Sound: 7
Right at the start there's a mid-80s style (ie rather laboured) speech synth of the game's title. I can't really see the point, to be honest. The in-game sounds and music are really pretty good, though: they certainly have the feel of that era's arcade machines about them. And, for once, through headphones the default volume is merely "too loud" and not "eardrum-shattering".

Documentation: 4
There's very little in-game, and what does exist is confusing: for example, when the game is paused you're told it's "belated". Why, I have no idea; perhaps it's (deliberately?) odd English from the original Shippy game. There is a very basic readme, which will get you started, but through no fault of seb's own the site it refers to is no more.

Completeness: 6
seb himself says that this is a "quick and dirty port", and that's obvious in the way that the instructions still refer to the CTRL key and "button 1". The game itself isn't lacking too much, though; offer selectable difficulty and put in an instruction page and there'd be little to complain about. Even a high-score table doesn't seem necessary for an old-school game like this one.

Overall: 7
It's perhaps too easy to say, "If you like Galaxian, you'll probably like Shippy 1984", but it's not any the less true for all that. I had some trouble deciding whether this was a 6 or a 7, but in the end its nicely executed retro feel just helped it to the higher rating.

Logan = Bunny

On the off-chance that anyone's wondering: yes, I am the same person as Bunny on the GP32X.com forum. I originally tried to sign up there as "Logan", but that name was taken, so "Bunny" it was. My name is Logan, though. I should probably tag this post "snore" or something, but I'll stick to "general"...

Game review: ztunnel

ztunnel
Genre: Racing
Authors: Jim McLeod & rokdcasbah
OHH download: v?.? (28/10/07)
Size: 5.8 MB
Licence: Freeware

Description
ztunnel (as far as I can tell it's all lower-case) is one of surprisingly few racing games to have been released for the GP2X. It was written for a coding competition in 2007 -- and, like many such games, has unfortunately not been updated any time recently. You pilot a spaceship and must win races against similar ships in order to proceed across a grid: after completing one race, you get a choice of where to go next. (Remember Blockbusters? Well, not exactly like that, but close.)

The courses are tunnel-like (hence the name) and twist about, in some cases even going upside-down. If you leave the track you won't crash, but you will lose a great deal of speed. It can be hard to get past blocking ships, so make use of the missiles (diamonds) you can collect and blast them out of the way. There are also golden coins, which if collected will give you a brief burst of extra power -- in both speed and the ability to pass through other ships.

Addictiveness: 8
Okay, I'm a racing game fan, so predisposed to like this sort of thing, but ztunnel passes the acid test: when I just failed to qualify for the next round, I didn't get annoyed and quit the game; I had another go. And then another. Good stuff.

Depth: 7
Okay, it's not the sort of game you'll get lost in for weeks, but you can certainly develop and refine your tactics as you go along. The large number of courses available (25) and the choice of routes over the grid doesn't harm that at all, and there's even the odd secret to discover along the way.

Controls: 8
Left, right, brake, fire. That's it: your ship goes at full speed unless you actually brake. You can use stick or trigger buttons to steer, which is nice. Pause is Select, while Select and Start together quit the game. There's a useful intro screen explaining it all.

Graphics: 8
Pretty good, all told. Your ship (like the others) is just a few spheres stuck together and painted a neon colour, but I've got no problem with that. The track is generally clear enough to see, the weapons are sensibly coloured and the starry background is easy on the eye. It all dashes along at a great pace, too.

Sound: 7
The title music is fine if rather forgettable; as usual, you'll want it turned down almost to nothing if you're wearing headphones. The engine noise is a bit whiny, but it's no worse than in an awful lot of other similar games. Weapon and power-up effects are vaguely sci-fi-ish, which works well enough.

Documentation: 2
Almost non-existent, with not even a couple of lines on the OHH site: apart from the screen explaining what the various buttons do, you have to figure out the rest as you go along -- which doesn't take long, but is a bit frustrating.

Completeness: 7
The documentation issue loses ztunnel a little bit of a score here, as does the lack of a savegame facility. The core game is pretty well finished, though.

Overall: 8
I like ztunnel a lot. There aren't many racing games on the GP2X (unless you count the emulated ones!) and so it's nice to come across one that's genuinely enjoyable. It's very reminiscent of a DOS-based game from the early-mid 1990s, but I can't remember which one! Certainly worth a spot on the ol' SD card, this.

Watching films on the GP2X

I'm not American, so I'm damned if I'm going to call them "movies" all the time! anyway, I've barely used the GP2X for this feature since I bought it, so I thought I might as well see how well it worked. I dug out a DVD more or less at random (it was Oliver!) and ripped it to Xvid using AcidRip, which has the inestimable virtues of being in the Ubuntu repositories and of actually working out of the box.

Having copied it to an SD card, I bunged on the movie player (the built-in one) at standard power. Not bad at all, actually. As we know, the sound quality through speakers is pathetic, so it did need some headphones, but apart from that and the slightly restrictive vertical viewing angle of the screen there was no problem. I wish the Start-to-quit button had an "Are you sure?" step, though.

I must admit, I'm not entirely certain what the other two power settings in the movie player are for. If you turn it down low for economy the video stutters too much to be remotely watchable; and since it works fine on normal why would anyone use the extra power setting? Ah well. I was wired up to the mains,* incidentally, so I have no idea what battery life was like.

* Okay, not me personally. That may disappoint some of you...

A program, egad!

Okay, I know: it doesn't say "Hello World!" This is a disgraceful breach of convention, and I'm utterly ashamed of myself. Now... as I hinted a little while ago, it is indeed SdlBasic I've chosen, since I actually understand most of it, which alone puts it way ahead of C++ and the like. It's a very simple program to plot a Lorenz Attractor, something I've always rather liked watching.

I must be honest and say that the screenshot is actually from the PC. The version of SdlBasic in the Ubuntu repository doesn't seem entirely finished in terms of presentation (it tends to crash) but the actual language works, and I can use the code with no changes on the GP2X. The timings on the GP2X are a lot slower: something like 3.5 seconds overall and 2 seconds for the drawing.

'Very basic Lorenz Attractor plotter

'Set up the display
setdisplay(320, 240, 16, 1)
setFont("../share/fonts/ttf/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf")
hideMouse

'Initialise variables
s = 10 : p = 28 : b = 8/3
x = 10 : y = 0 : z = 10
dt = 0.002
drawstarttime = timer

'Actual plottery
for n = 1 to 20000
dx = s * (y - x)
dy = x * (p - z) - y
dz = x * y - b * z
x = x + dx * dt
y = y + dy * dt
z = z + dz * dt
plot(160 + y * 5, z * 5, rgb(255, 255, 0))
next

'Print elapsed time (in s) since program / drawing start
ink(rgb(255, 255, 255))
timetaken = timer : drawtime = timer - drawstarttime
timedisplay$ = str$ (timetaken / 1000) + " / " + str$ (drawtime / 1000)
text(0, 0, 16, timedisplay$)

'Wait for button press before ending
j = bjoy(0)
while j = 0
j = bjoy(0)
end while

wait(100)

end