Games, Utilities and Music written by Mark Alexander for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum |
 The
Sinclair Spectrum was a popular z80 based home computer
released in 1982.The first game I wrote was "3 card brag" which put the player against three reasonable brag card players. The game featured basic card graphics (picture cards had no pictures). Logic routines included hand evaluation and bluffing. I released the game in 1983 for the Spectrum 16K. |
.gif) Racing
Manager was my second attempt at games writing. And was
accepted by Virgin Games for worldwide release in 1983.Inspiration for the game came from what I knew of how to use inside information to make lots of money from bookmakers. I tried to get the game to be as realistic as possible and to convey that gambling on horses is not likely to make the punter money. During beta testing I often had a room full of friends who would make real money bets (small stakes) on the horses while I took the part of bookmaker. Just as in real life sometimes someone would back an outsider because they liked the name, and sometimes they won too! I used many names of horses that were racing at the time. I also used the Citizen Band radio handles of some of my CB Friends like Night Prowler and Fitter. I put my own handle in there (Captain Kirk). My girlfriend of the moment got a mention too (Rene's Pet) and the place where my Sister worked (Bastion Mews). There are other references in there as well. I did offer the option of sponsoring races to local companies (Bulmers Cider etc.) but this never made it to the production version. If anything needed improvement with the software it was the difficulty rating which only made it harder to get a good score, and increased the chance of "disaster" befalling your horses in training. Sadly there was no room left in the game to implement enhancements. The game was written in both Sinclair Basic and Z80
assembler. Assembler routines were used to animate the
horses. |
| Spurred on by my success with
"Racing Manager" I developed a few other games.
Chaotic Caverns was eventually published by Silicon Joy
and the Sequel "Maze of Mayhem" was released on
my own label. In 1985 it was becoming evident that a single programmer could not compete with the software houses of the day so I changed direction and started to produce utility software. Some of the programs were game editors or tuners. Arkanoid editor allowed the whole game to be redesigned while Elite Shipbuilder allowed you to "cheat" in Elite. . Around this time the "Microdrive" floppy tape storage system was released and the improvement in loading times over cassette was a breath of fresh air. However, the popular games of the day could not be loaded to microdrive due to the copy protection mechanisms. A bit of time using my assembler knowledge and I created "The Prince" utility which saved tape software to microdrive. It was capable of handling many games and was updated and released again as "The Duke" and finally as "Transformer" |
| I also had an interest in Music and
having experience in marketing my wares and a few
contacts in the industry I set about creating the
impossible, two channel sound on the spectrum. The routine I developed oscillated the speaker at two different frequencies, a major breakthrough in it's day. This routine formed the heart of my second major release with "Wham! The Music Box". Wham didn't have much to do with it, but they were flavor of the month and having their name on the software allowed me to use George's Careless Whisper riff in the demonstration. While developing the software I used it to create music for :-
And many many others. Coding music for the Spectrum was tricky. Often the developer would say there was no ram left for me to use, and I would beg to be allowed the 192 bytes usually unused in the printer buffer. The core of the two channel routine was only 32 bytes long so I could usually squeeze a tune into this, even if it was very short. When the Spectrum 128k became available in early 1986 the machine finally got a dedicated music chip (the ay-3-8912) and I produced an updated music box to use this. However, the technical challenge had gone and there were no barriers to break in programming someone else's sound chip so this marked my departure from the world of Spectrum. The software lives on however and was still in use by some "retro" fans producing spectrum music in 2008. see http://mister_beep.republika.pl/music.html Nearly 25 years after I wrote it. Compare that to how long microsoft stuff is used for :) |
| You can find links to emulators and save
files on the sites below. Music too! If you listen to the music then remember that the poor little spectrum with it's native music ability was only half as good as the stuff I produced! http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekpub.cgi?regexp=^Mark+Alexander$ http://members.fortunecity.com/gudger/spectrummusic/twochannel/index.html This page last updated 8/2008 |
