So Mr Arcadian's been nagging me for about a year to hand over my old dev disks. I finally gave them to him at Retro Reunited in September. And on Christmas Eve I received the greatest Christmas gift of all - all my old dev disks in emulator-ready format! Including many long-forgotten card games, and games I'd forgotten I'd ever written, including a snake game that I've forgotten why it was never published but which he's gonna publish for free on Retro Software. And another I'm very tempted to revisit and finish.

I love this forum. Thanks for keeping my teen years alive

^^ made me l0l

Here's to Dave, the champion showman Full of energy, he is.

Happy new year.

--Greg

Yes, here's to Dave and his tireless energy for all that is Acorn.

You know, I don't know how he does it. Absolute expert in persuading you to spend huge amounts of your spare time not only doing stuff, but then reworking it 15 times when he's not happy - he makes Derren Brown and Paul McKenna look a bit lame

Thanks and praise to Dave - and his partner in crime Samwise - for keeping our teenage years alive.

Dave is certainly charismatic, in getting people to help out.

He does absolutely sterling work, not just running this site, but retro software, organising events, etc and his full time job.

If I could get half the work done that Dave does everyday, I would be a happy man.

An absolute huge vote of thanks from me.

Kenton's "Hyper Viper" game is ace, btw ... it ain't easy, but it's extremely addictive.

Vid below!

Happy New Year!

& keep up the good work!

PS... a predictable question from me but any chance of an Elk version of that Snake game? I've been after a good version for a while and that looks the best on the beeb!

Dave is ok...

Happy new 2010!

wonder what wonderfull boards DaveM will find in someones loft/shed/garage this year?

PS, that game looks cool

I reckon he's on the verge of finding a warehouse full of mint boxed and unopened model B's (around a 1000 of them). Plus loads of similer Masters and pheripherals, and in a corner Chris Serle and Mac learning BASIC.... or was that in a dream I had... .... ah yes it was cos I remember Holly Willoughby appearing at one point

Ace! What card games were they? I have a certain fondness for card games - I had a dabble a few years ago writing a pontoon game. It ran over IRC and was written in Python. It was actually very addictive


Yeah it's a good crowd. Really enjoyed meeting up with a few as well

I believe I wrote it on an Electron. Most of my development was done on my Elk during school holidays - I went to boarding school and that's the only place I used BBC Micros, that is until late '86 when they allowed me to take a Beeb home during holidays. So it should work just fine

Nothing particularly special. Just stuff I did to teach myself to program, I think.

'pologies for the necro-post, but is 'Hyper Viper' still slated to be released by RetroSoftware?

Well, it was going to be our second 'freeware' release after Sparse Invaders, but that never quite got finished and Neil's gone awol again.

The one thing I wanted to do with Hyper was try and find someone who could modify it to include an Electron detection and/or compatibility routine (from memory it did run on an Elk, though not brilliantly).

Gotcha, thanks!


P.S. You are still great

Ok, I've had another go at Hyper Viper on Elkulator (Electron emulator) ...

The game runs fine with the exception of the music: it plays most of the notes ok but it seems that whenever it plays the same note in succession, it kind of 'merges' it into a single, brief note.

I'm not sure whether it'll be possible to rectify this as we don't have source and the program is machine code. But should one of you clever bods be willing to have a stab at hacking the binary, shout and I'll sling you a disc image ...

The music sounds like it's using an amplitude envelope to decay the volume of the notes which isn't supported on the Electron. This will be what's making all the notes blend in to one another.

I had a similar issue with the Treasure Island tune. The solution is to add a short duration of silence between each note to make them more distinct.

If you want to throw the disk image my way I'll take a look at it. The game doesn't look too complicated so it may even be possible to re-create a usable source file from it.

You have mail ...

Ooh ... wait ... I think I may have found the source.

Will copy it to a fresh disc image and mail it over in a sec ...

Update - Hyper Viper nearly ready for release!

Thanks to Paul (dv8) the music/sound now plays back nicely on an Electron.

He's even added a high score table, too!



Loading screen and inlay has also been sorted ...

So I've just played it, on BeebEm with Options - Default Keyboard Mapping so the ZX:/ is where you'd think it should be, and it's actually rather brilliantly addictive (he said modestly). I just have no bloody idea when I wrote it! The one thing I can say for certain is "at least 12 years before Nokia put it on just about every phone that ever existed"...

I guess the biggest omission is some sort of timer or change of flashing speed to indicate when the flashing mushroom is about to change, both if it's been eaten and if it's not. Wanna code it, dv8?

It does amuse the hell out of me that the cover image above uses over 4x the memory of the computer the game runs on

Now I want to see some proper highscore screenprints posted here, y'hear...

Looks good, looking forward to having a go on this one when it's available, and will be attempting to get some good high scores too!

As of today, it's available!

http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/hyperviper

Yeah, and it's great.

Let's see some of those high scores being posted over in the Hyper Viper forum. I think this is going to get competitive.

Sam.

Wonderful stuff - it's really addictive and a lot of fun.

Yes great stuff

Hi there,

I just noticed your posting here and thought it might be interesting to mention - I have been working on the C64 game "Hyper Viper" a port of the MSX original from the 80s!

What a coincidence! It's a different concept to the game - but it's just been commercially released by Psytronik Software and I thought you guys might be interested to hear about it!

I know it's not a Beeb game - but I thought you may be interested in taking a peek

You can see on Psytronik here

Here's a you tube video of the game in action:

Nice!

When's the Beeb version coming out?