Retro Beach Man

I've had a play and come up with parallax clouds on the ZX Spectrum Next... in NextBASIC! Just sprites and they are not actually moving on the screen. All that you see are just animations, but it makes for a cool effect.

I've ported my volume metre I wrote in NextBASIC to assembly. Very pleased 😁 Music by Paul Hesso: Zoosters Breakout.

Just a bit of fun on the Next:

Fun with palette-cycling and 3D shapes on the Next:

O my!

54 frames of animation for the player, including walking, climbing, jumping, idle etc! It's meant I've had to get creative with the sprite pattern slots (I'm using just 1 of the 64 slots available, for the player), but I've managed to allocate space for them all for you to enjoy, as well as all the enemies, objects and pickups. 'O' for the Next is coming along nicely and the music and sfx are sounding great.

A little teaser. Player sprite by Simon Butler, sound effects by Paul Hesso and code by myself.

NextBASIC Text Scroller: I've been on holiday in Turkey and am back now and just getting back into the swing of things before I carry on with my main ZX Next project. To get the juices flowing I've returned to my text scroller, written in NextBASIC, which previously had 4 scrollers. I have now managed to increase this to 6! There have been speed improvements in NextBASIC since I originally coded this and it looks like they have paid off. Captured on CSpect (will later test on my Next board).

This is the ZX Next engine I'm working on. This is in BASIC, but I'm converting it to assembly so I can get even more speed out of it. Will be used for several games:

Messing around with some more palette-cycling in NextBASIC:

This is based on the mesh star drawing from Johnny McGibbitts in the BASIC on the ZX Spectrum group which I converted to ZX Spectrum Next on layer 2, ran 10 iterations with different numbers and palette-cycled each one. Here is the code if you want to play with it: 10 RUN AT 3: LAYER 2,1: PALETTE DIM 8: BORDER 0: PAPER 227: CLS :s=90: PROC pal(4): FOR i=0 TO s STEP 5: INK %i: PLOT i+128,96: PROC xtra(): DRAW -i,s-i: PROC xtra(): DRAW -i,i-s: PROC xtra(): DRAW i,i-s: PROC xtra(): DRAW i,s-i:%i=%i+1 AND (i<255): NEXT i 20 PROC cycle(3): GO TO 20 100 DEFPROC pal(%p) 110 BANK 20 ERASE : FOR %a=0 TO 255 STEP %p: BANK 20 POKE %a,%a: BANK 20 POKE %a+256,%a: NEXT %a 120 ENDPROC 130 DEFPROC cycle(%c) 140 FOR %a=0 TO 255 STEP %c: LAYER PALETTE 0 BANK 20,%a: LAYER PALETTE 0,227,0: SPRITE MOVE INT : NEXT %a 150 ENDPROC 160 DEFPROC xtra() 170 ;DRAW 5,5,5: DRAW -5,-5,-5 180 ENDPROC

Uwe Geiken made a post showing a simple fractal in ZX Basic (in the BASIC group) and I converted it to the ZX Next, changing the ink colour each iteration then palette-cycling it. I slowed the animation down with PAUSE so it was captured better:

I've been working on a screen saver for Richard Szerman for the Next Launcher. It's a video converted into about 800 layer 2 screens. Here it is running in CSpect.

More DMA fun on the ZX Spectrum Next in BASIC: