Spider

I had quite a bit of difficulty (a few years back) getting a reliable working Atom emulator up and running.

If you have a suitable charset/font already you can use, provided you have some space remaining (48k version) in one of a couple of places its very easy to use this.

Huge congrats on the 10th anniversary 🙂

It can freeze gameplay (usually at a critical moment!) , at least for me due to disk writing/caching. If I just want a quick video of play normally I'd do an .rzx, then play it back and record the playback as an .avi. Regarding rzx's in general: I'm the opposite, I record in Spectaculator and otherwise generally use ZXSpin. In this case I needed to record in ZXSpin because I could disable contention*** , but for .rzx the reason I use Spectaculator is simply as taking a snapshot doesn't pause the action something ZXSpin seems to do which is annoying. 🙂 *** I think I'm capable (just) of doing it for real but its a fair bit of work.

I only have (and use) ZXSpin and Spectaculator. There are reasons mainly boring ones why these two, I think it was also either Fuse or Zero I had before the reinstallation a few months back as that had very advanced breakpoints which I needed (break on value increasing or break on register change etc) It refused to 'accept' full frames to record an .avi despite retrying it the next day too. It has its quirks.

I wanted to try something else , although I (don't plan yet) on doing it. Attached are two three very short videos. Not going to record a 'standard' game First video is the standard game, I just chose to start recording in Master Bedroom, to try to emulate reasonably near the other two videos. The second video is the JSW 2024 game The third video is also the JSW 2024 game but this time without any lower memory contention. Video 1 was recorded in Spectaculator (last) , video 2 and 3 were recorded in ZXSpin. Also I noted that Spectaculator seems to playback at a higher speed, or its an optical illusion. There is a difference however the differing recording platforms (as ZXSpin decided to have a bit of a hissy fit about recording anyway) should be noticeable. Care was taken before recording to ensure that the setting were the same aka same 'later ULA timing' and 100% emulation speed at standard CPU cycles (3.54Mhz) Video 1 (The original standard game) Video 2 (The 'as released' JSW2024 game) Video 3 (The 'as released' JSW2024 game but without any contention) EDIT... Decided to include a standard game anyway. EDIT2... Sorry about the video quality (or lack of) and the fact they don't start properly, that's likely the avi to mp4 conversion going astray. Further examination shows that the standard game with the original copy routines but without contention is also not far off comparable to the newer speed, that is they both seem to gain by an equal amount. A rewrite is needed to properly do it. 😉 🙂

I had a look at my .rzx from 7th December (before it's release to be fair! a 'final pretest' run) with a 'best time' of 11:34pm , I had no doubt you'd beat this though 😉 🙂

MM is fine if set at say 125% or 150% , its still not "that" fast 🙂 I think for both of these on that platform the programmers did well to squeeze it all in.

Thank you @jetsetdanny I've read through the description and details on your site and its perfectly fine to me too. I hope the speed boost was OK too, I have found (with standard or near standard game layouts) its not insane. It could go faster*** but that might be a lot of work. All good and thank you for playing, the ending time is also quite impressive. I knew you'd beat my time by a fair margin though. 🙂 *** Moving room data out of contended memory = another boost + changing to stack copy method (I need to look into it) = another boost

The link in the first post , the site no longer exists or the owner has perhaps changed URL. I'm not sure exactly what you're asking for with the new forum, unless there's a lot of events ? We do have a calendar here but I've never enabled it. 🙂

Ah yes I was aware of that , and the 'upgraded' (updated?) versions make use of this, the Electron Manic Miner is a good thing too. Regarding the newer JSW and MM as you know he took the opportunity to add more colours too which is a good thing. I do rate them quite highly.

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=166858 Must admit, I had never heard of this before...

To be fair the 'rebuilt' Manic Miner and JSW1 for these are much improved and have a 'spectrum' feel to them.

I look forward to seeing this 🙂

Thank you from me too. They also have (for me at least) some other interesting 'Spectrum themed' platform games, namely Frankenstein , Automania and then things like Pyramid et al...