Introducing SMEG In this post I’m going to introduce the SMEG adventure game system that I’m creating to build my ZX Spectrum point and click adventure. What is SMEG? SMEG stands for Scriptable MachinE for adventure Games, a very tenuous play on words that pays homage to Lucas Arts’ SCUMM and one of my favourite TV shows, Red Dwarf. Rather than just being a fun acronym, it nicely describes the approach and the architecture of the system.

Making a game for the ZX Spectrum in 2020 One of the aims for me creating my Spectrum emulator neccy (short for not a speccy) was so I could learn the ins-and-outs of the Spectrum - something I never did when I was using this machine back in the 80’s. “What better way to learn it”, I thought, “than to create an emulator?". As it stands, writing an emulator for a 35+ year old machine is really only part of the puzzle.

Hello again, neccy! It’s been a while since I posted about neccy, my toy 48k ZX Spectrum emulator. It’s probably a good idea to remind ourselves where we were. My next milestone is to get Sinclair BASIC working. After that, who knows - I’ll probably try and go for sound and then onto trying to run a game. It’s a long journey ahead. And here’s how it looked:

Hello, neccy! It’s been a (long) while since I blogged. I thought I’d break the silence by talking about a fun little project I started. I was working on a 2d physics based game and was getting frustrated by my own lack of maths knowledge. One night I watched One Lone Coder’s video series on building a NES emulator and it triggered a something of a nostalgia vibe in me.

July 2017 Roundup Wow, it’s been a month already? I’ve not written an update for a while, but it doesn’t mean that activity has stopped on the OldCode / Manta-X project. Name Change The last thing I did in July was to change the “internal” branding (namespaces, project names, etc) from “Manta-X” to “OldCode”. Manta-X was always a code name, and one from the original days of the project (pre-rediscovery & updates, I may add).

Why 3D is bad for me The goal of this project was always to make a game. Specifically, to make a top-down, side scrolling shump type of game. The previous old code entries talked about ripping out superflous stuff and pulling the project back to the essence of what 2004 me was trying to achieve. I started looking into modernizing the codebase to a newer version of OpenGL, one that moves away from immediate mode and into the realm of shaders.