
Nirvana Engine for ZX Spectrum (2013) - bane
http://irrlichtproject.blogspot.com/2013/11/bye-bye-8x8-color-grid-nirvana-engine.html
======
ParrotyError
When I was in my teens I bough a book called "Advanced Spectrum Machine
Language" by David Webb (IIRC) and it had examples of a rainbow processor
(high-res colour by repeatedly writing to the attributes file quickly) and a
full-screen horizon (by flipping the border colour bit at the right time).
I've often wondered what other tricks were possible. For example, would it be
possible to mix colours by changing the attributes on successive frames? So
you could, for example, make orange by mixing red and yellow?

~~~
Joeboy
I had that book! Programming books were generally out of my budget back then,
but I saved up for that one, which I recall being full of incredibly clever
tricks. I wonder if this is the same David Webb - I guess it probably is:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Webb_%28Hong_Kong_activi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Webb_%28Hong_Kong_activist%29)

I think switching between colours at 25hz would give you pretty horrible
flicker, although maybe we would have forgiven that in the Spectrum era.

------
jug
Wow, this is pretty amazing, haha. Can't wait for the latest ZX Spectrum games
to take advantage of this!

Hmm, I wonder how/if it affects performance. No catch besides the RAM usage?

~~~
Leynos
It relies on the colour attributes being twiddled every few scanlines, so I'd
be rather sceptical of its applications. That said, there is a video of it
running here,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQajN1XWzJY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQajN1XWzJY)
(on a 48k Speccy no less), and it looks rather performant.

~~~
fuzzix
Was just looking at a review for a new game, Stormfinch, which uses this
engine:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2sd2FNPTBs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2sd2FNPTBs)

It's clearly a little clunkier than monochrome or simple colour attribute
shooters, but still pretty competent.

~~~
Theodores
Some of those sound effects are AY-8192 sounding to me, explosions on the
spectrum were never like that.

~~~
Narishma
They added an AY chip to the Spectrum starting from the 128K model I think. It
was also available as an add-on to the original 48K.

------
Marazan
Splendiferous.

ZX Spectrum wins again.

