We all love to use our old joysticks like the Competition PRO with our retro hardware, but to be honest, sometimes we wish to use a more modern input device like an XboX controller, don’t we? Impossible? No! Duke, also author of the great M4 WiFi interface for the Amstrad CPC, has designed a device, called Imperium Solo, that allows you to connect your modern game controller to the Amstrad CPC and play your games with it. It already supports a variety of USB input devices (like the already mentioned XboX controller or a USB NES gamepad), but the firmware is constantly improved by Duke to support even more input devices.
You can get more information and the latest firmware on Dukes Imperium Solo web page and discuss and order it in the CPC Wiki forums.
NoRecess, who is well-known for his demos, tools and also interviews in with CPC sceners, released a work in progress video of his game for the Amstrad Plus / GX4000 computers. It is called SonicGX and obviously it is a Sonic the Hedgehog game and features a framerate of 50Hz and around 40 colours on screen. He plans to show other previews during the development and wants to release the game at the end of 2020. So keep your fingers crossed that we will have a cool jump and run game at the end of next year :-). Until then: subscribe his Youtube channel to get informed about his next previews and enjoy the preview…
Shining / TGS just released a new Amstrad Plus demo on the Evoke 2019 demoscene party in Cologne / Germany. Download and vote for the production on Pouet.net.
Wow… what a great game development competition – again! And the best of all: I was allowed to be in the jury which was a great honor for me. But let’s talk about the games… I guess that this competition has rised the bar of the quality of the entries again and the students used ASM instead of C. Finally the games Operation Alexandria by 4MHz (1st), Jarlac by Retrobytes Productions (2nd) and Legend of Steel by TOD Studios (3rd) won the competition. And they really, really, really deserve it, but download them (download link below) and you can see it by yourself.
My personal 2nd place (I had to vote for the playability), the game Taulellets by Vicente Jimenez, was finally ranked 17 – anyway, I still like it very much and I will play it from time to time for sure. It made me come back during the test of the other games to play a short round to get past the next level :-).
If you want to participate on the CPCRetroDev next year, be sure to download the games and have a look at the documentations in the games folder. All the developers wrote a small “Making Of” and all games contain the source code. So this is obviously a great learning resource for everyone who wants to code for the Amstrad CPC.
But enough from me… here are the results of the CPCRetroDev 2018 game development competition:
Position | Image | Game | Group | Result |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Operation Alexandra | 4MHz | (393) Best Game, Carlos Abril Mention, Gominolas Mention, Relevo Mention | |
2 | Jarlac | Retrobytes Productions | (380) 2nd Best Game, Pablo Ariza Mention | |
3 | Legend of Steel | TOD Studios | (283) 3rd Best Game | |
4 | The Adventures of Timothy Gunn | CNGSoft | (278) 4th Best Game | |
5 | OPQA vs. QAOP: The Final Battle | Manuel Sagra | (261) | |
6 | 77 Attempts | Unknown Design | (202) Best Student Game | |
7 | Foosball F3 | Quique Miquel | (180) | |
8 | Deeper Warrens | Arnoud Bouche | (162) | |
9 | The Rookie Thief | CPZenon Games | (145) 2nd Best Student Game | |
10 | Crimson Knight Adventures | Nibble Games | (134) | |
11 | Harvest Day | Pixel Productions | (129) | |
12 | Redsea | Gameroid | (114) | |
13 | Earth Defender | Carlos Perezgrin | (113) Best Opera Prima Additional Mention | |
14 | Snake Bubble | The Bubble Club | (106) | |
15 | The Last Debt | Retrojam Games | (105) | |
16 | KimoHiyoko | SarayCow | (103) | |
17 | Taulellets | Vicente Jimenez | (99) | |
18 | The Spirit Of Halloween | Lab16Devs | (98) | |
19 | The Crypt | RetroGamma | (97) | |
20 | Cannon Duels | David Asta | (96) | |
21 | Space Cowboy | VoxelTower | (94) | |
22 | Indigo | Indigo | (87) | |
23 | BringRGBack | Dead Pixel | (74) | |
24 | Overheap | BastaCPC | (70) | |
25 | Turtle Slam | TurtleSlam | (68) | |
26 | Space Ball | Altered Vision | (67) | |
27 | Elfo Saves Christmas | Ninja Pointer | (66) | |
28 | Two Finger Death Now | Spherp08 | (62) | |
29 | Cat Pang | Lady Cats | (61) | |
30 | Cuchara Voladora | CucharaVoladora | (60) | |
31 | Fitzroy And The Infestation | awergh | (60) | |
32 | Bank | ACReturns | (53) | |
33 | Hacktank | Retroleto Games | (50) | |
34 | Lunatic | Lunatic | (45) | |
35 | Invade Space | Proyecto Red | (41) | |
36 | Tank | ARDAD | (41) | |
37 | Disassembler | Machine Gun | (40) | |
38 | Killing Machine | PizzarT | (40) | |
39 | Penalty Kicks | Sakis Kaffesakis | (40) | |
40 | Crocker | Merienda | (20) | |
41 | 18th Century Invaders | LYSGames | (3) |
You can download the games in one package directly down below or from the download section of this site. More information about the game development competition can be found on the CPCRetroDev homepage.
Roudoudou released a new version of his Zilog Z80 cross-assembler called Rasm. Of course it supports all the undocumented opcodes, but beside of that, you can use conditional macros, a floating point engine and several mathmatical functions. A special feature is the possibility to create a cartridge for the Amstrad Plus or the Amstrad GX4000 directly by assembling your source code and you can automatically add an AMSDOS header to your binaries. It also supports crunched sections (the coded will be loaded and crunched on the fly) for LZ48, LZ49, LZ4, ZX7, and Exomizer. It has also a compatibility option to support the widely in the Amstrad CPC used MAXAM syntax. You can download and discuss it at the CPCWiki forums and at the end of this news.
Changes in v0.57
- more flexible preprocessor with macro parameters
- new label prefix tag {BANK} to get the bank where is located a label