Pandapus

  Hello again and hope you have been enjoying my blog. I had been thinking, yes I know I shouldn't do it too often as it could be dangerous, but so far I have set up my coding environment for using z80, Boriel with NextBuild and Next Basic, all using VSCode and CSpect. I have described in detail how to set up z80, but not Boriel or Next Basic; however, these were quite simple to set up and flowed well using information gained in my previous posts, some other tutorials on line and some assistance from my Speccy Next friend, John Weatherley. Thanks John, I'm finding this community is very friendly and helpful so far.  If however you are struggling with setting Boriel or Next Basic up with VSCode, then just let me know and I'll sort some more posts with some assistance. One area which I found a little bit more tricky, is setting up for C using z88dk, so I thought I would describe this step here. Look at my other blog posts for the z80 set up to get yourself familiar with all s...

  It's time for peril! Now the dev environment is working well (Although I do want to try and set up for Next Basic and C, using Z88dk.) it's time to show some sprites I've been working on. This is my 16x16 pixel interpretation of the platypus character. I've drawn a selection of abilities which will be a good starting point with idle, run, wall grab, punch, jump/fall, duck/crawl and then climb. To get the colour palette for the Speccy Next, I saved the base colour sprite from Remy's sprite tool and loaded it into Aseprite, saving this as a preset for future use.  Remy's Sprite Tool Setting the colour palette to a preset in Aseprite: Here you can see the full sprite sheet with all frames used for the animations in Aseprite. Aseprite is a great tool which reminds me a bit of Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. You can find it here:  Aseprite.org As you can see I was clearly having fun with these sprites and the pixels were flowing, so here's a couple of frog style ani...

  Hello again! In my last post "Z80 Environment Final Edition", I set up my final development environment and was quite pleased with how it was working. There was one niggling issue which I wanted to sort, but wasn't sure how to do it. Here is what I wrote as a reminder: "Of note, there is one more thing I would like to work out, but haven't yet (if possible) and that is how to automate the process of running the NEX file on the SD card image. I know it's only a minor thing but once CSpect has loaded with the SD image, it's a bit of a chore to have to go through the menu and select the NEX file to run. It would be good if there was a setting/flag in CSpect to do this, something like "-mmc=/sdcard.mmc -start=/main.nex". Maybe it's possible but I haven't seen how to do this. Let me know if you have any details." Well I'm please to say that I've got it sorted and it works really well. The good news is that you don't have to...

Only a short post this time. I've been designing a game called Platypus Peril using Unity, for quite some time now and as this isn't a full time project, it's still not finished. It was initially a 2D platformer which then evolved into a 3D game, in the style of Mario 64 or Yooka-Laylee. I still have all the concept work, designs and drawings etc for it, so thought this might be a good project to do on the Next whilst I learn. Obviously it won't be 3D, but I will take it right back to the low-res 2D platformer that is was going to be. I'm not sure what it will be coded in yet, z80 or maybe Boriel with Nextbuild, but I am going to start off doing some basics with both to get the player character moving and decide as it progresses. Also I'm thinking this will get me motivated in learning the Speccy Next, with it being a fun project and something I know, rather than just blindingly typing something from a book. So the next post will most likely be with creating som...

Welcome to another blog update for the ZX Spectrum Next and after some testing, my decision for my final z80 development environment. So read on and see which route I went in the end and if you are deciding to go the same way. Code editor Sublime Text has now been uninstalled and it's full steam ahead, with VSCode! So what made me come to this decision? Well although I initially liked Sublime Text for it's simplicity and clean interface, in fact I still do, VSCode tempted me with it's useful extensions and the automation of build/run features in the JSON file settings. (Maybe this can be done in Sublime, however, I didn't explore that route further.) What's changed? In my last post, I talked about the JSON file set up and having automated processes for build, run and build/run combined using the F5 and F6 keys. I also talked about finding that I didn't require the use of an SD card image in the CSpect folder or of hdfmonkey to place the NEX output file into this...