Pobtastic pobtastic

The game has six different strip-reveal backgrounds, and they’re stored in a custom RLE-based compressed format.

Let’s look at how the decoder unpacks them into the ZX Spectrum’s screen bitmap.

Samantha Fox Strip Poker has a surprisingly accomplished two-channel music player for a card game — especially one that’s only really remembered for other reasons.

Let’s take a look at how it works!

The Hobbit draws a location graphic for some of the places you visit. The graphics are stored as compact bytecode. Here’s how I decoded that format and turned it into readable instructions for the disassembly.

Pheenix contains a surprising number of visual elements from the arcade game, especially given it’s only a 16K game.

This article looks at the “transition effect” which I guess is a little like the ship going into hyperspace to move onto the next phase/ level.

I played this one quite late on, probably as a magazine cover tape. Strange too, as I’m a HUGE fan of the arcade version - and this is a fantastic conversion!

I did a thing!

I don’t tend to do talks anymore, and certainly never about Skoolkit and disassembly! So this is very much a first for me.

Walking down the rabbit hole…

Keep uncovering new CALL routines and trying to gain context for what they’re doing.

How to display fonts as images.

Starting with configuring the logo, and then moving onto the Game Entry Point for the first routine to disassemble. This will give you some insights, as generally it will do some “set-up”, clear the screen, and display a menu.