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.

Continuing on with 180 having some really pro-level coding, it also has speech in it!! Incredible given it’s a budget game and that the speech works on the 48K Spectrum beeper!

I’d love to know how they achieved this cheaply enough for it to not be a full priced game.

180 has some really pro-level coding in it! For a budget game at £2.99, a lot of love and care went into the code. Garry Hughes I believe is the author, I really hope he does a talk about his experiences some day.

Normally the games I disassemble tend to be a little older, and so I suppose their code is a little “early” in the grand scheme of things. So I caveat this by saying - I don’t know if anyone else did this first, but I tried my hand at disassembling 180 and I found it confusing … at first… And then finally, I realised it’s actually GENIUS!

As I’ve mentioned before, I love a budget game, mostly for “budgetary reasons” I suppose… As paper round money doesn’t stretch far.

So, it was always exciting when a new budget game hit the shelves, I’m not entirely sure why younger me was drawn to 180 - I don’t know that I’d ever even played darts at that age. I can imagine I probably was swayed by the review in Crash magazine!

Anyways, this is such a great game! It is unfortunately possible to get quite accurate with where the darts land - but it’s still a very nice darts experience.