back to article ZX Spectrum 'Hobbit' revival sparks developer dispute

Sinclair appreciation site World Of Spectrum recently relaunched its forums, after they fell over last year and users were forced to endure a temporary replacement. To celebrate the relaunch, a member and developer using the handle Kayamon released something rather nice: a re-working of classic adventure game The Hobbit with …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HIT ELROND

    Elrond is angry and kills you with an axe. You are dead.

    1. Christoph

      Re: HIT ELROND

      A little dwarf just walked around a corner, saw you, threw a little axe at you (which missed), cursed, and ran away.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    You appear to be hosting a known malware platform on the site...

    ...something called Adobe Flash wants to run on my system????

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: You appear to be hosting a known malware platform on the site...

      Never noticed with my "you have to click on a plugin before it does ANYTHING about loading it" options in my browser.

      Hate people who complain about plugins who don't enable the simplest of security options for them.

      By the time something asks you about "Adobe Flash" wanting to run on your system, your system has already started to load the plugin into memory in order to obtain that name from the supplied HTML embed.

      Turn on click-to-play and then you never see anything worse than a page full of play buttons, and only ever play the single plugin you want, only on the pages you want.

  3. Crisp

    > WALK INTO MORDOR

    You are unable to do that.

    1. VinceH

      Re: > WALK INTO MORDOR

      Surely the response should be: "One simply does not do that."

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: > WALK INTO MORDOR

        You have to wait for the chauffeur to drive you in.

  4. Anonymous Custard Silver badge
    Big Brother

    I just wonder..

    are the pale bulbous eyes watching over them?

  5. DropBear
    Facepalm

    Repeat after me:

    "It's Done When It's Done" Is Not A Release Schedule! It's the admission that you can't be arsed to dedicate any meaningful amount of time to it anymore.

    1. Kane
      Joke

      Re: Repeat after me:

      May I direct your ire and Overuse Of Capitals For Every Word to both here, and here?

      1. OrientalHero

        Re: Repeat after me:

        heh, I thought Microsoft got there first with those....

      2. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: Repeat after me:

        I Just Thought It Was A Golem Speaking

        Dorfl

      3. Stevie

        Re: Repeat after me:

        Innit good the way The Register App broke your links so they only worked on a real computer?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Trollface

      Re: Repeat after me:

      Masterclass in how to cheer on a voluntary community effort there...

  6. Paul Westerman
    Coat

    The problem was

    Einar was busy sitting down and singing about gold

  7. Simon Rockman

    With a broken lunch.

  8. DrStrangeLug

    Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ?

    "The Hobbit with new graphics to take advantage of the Spectrum 128's enhanced capabilities."

    The 128 (or +2 , +3) had no extra or indeed changed graphics. The enhancements were audio, and memory capacity.

    1. CrashM

      Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ?

      Would the extra memory not have allowed for more/more detailed "textures"?

      1. Lee D Silver badge

        Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ?

        Not more detailed, no.

        They may have allowed more OF them but then you're swapping them into and out of video RAM.

        Speccy's worked not on a per-pixel basis but on a 8x8 pixel block (sprite, whatever you want to call it) in a fixed position. With assembler messing about you could indeed make it act per-pixel in terms of on/off but you were constrained by the video hardware of only two colours per block (hence the "blockiness" of most speccy games - the detail was per-pixel, but the colouration was in 8x8 blocks.

        Look at the dragon's mane in the first picture - top right of it is red because the background near it is red.

        From memory, so maybe not 100% accurate but pretty sure I'm right.

        You never got more "detail". You only got more RAM. And you had to swap them in/our of graphics RAM just the same.

        1. ThomH

          Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ? @Lee D

          Some of the 128s also allowed the video area to be paged, but I think only the Amstrad ones. That would technically buy you enhanced video capabilities because you could do a hardware double buffer.

          In this project, being a text adventure, I guess they could have done a lot better and stored per-line attributes, locking the CPU into just pushing those as the video beam progresses before dealing with keyboard input in the retrace area. Like the ZX81 in slow mode, essentially, but with attributes. But then you're increasing the per-screen storage and probably having to do quite a bit more fundamental of a patch job.

      2. DuncanL

        Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ?

        The original 48k game's graphics were drawn (slowly) as vectors (because there wasn't enough RAM to store bitmaps).

        It looks like the new version has taken the bitmap graphics from the PC CGA version and tweaked and coloured them for the Spectrum palette.

    2. DrXym

      Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ?

      The original only had a few locations with images and each was drawn using graphics primitives such as line and fill (a really slow flood fill). Presumably someone replaced them with handdrawn bitmaps.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Holmes

      Re: Extra graphical capabilities of the spectrum 128 ?

      Lot of balls being posted in this bit!

      The Speccy has a 256x192 (4:3) bit-per-pixel bitmap screen with a 32x24 colour overlay that defines the pixel on/off colours for each 8x8 character cell. So it has problems when different coloured things get too close, but no problems with pixel precision.

      The only graphical enhancements of the 128K machines (all of them) was being able to page in one of two RAM banks to the display, allowing buffering. But at the expense that you had to page the bank in to the top of RAM first to draw on it, then page it into view.

      The only extra definition anyone ever achieved is through carefully timed software making changes synchronised to the TV raster display and increasing the vertical colour resolution, or displaying small coloured bars in the border area, but even the 48K can do this (trust me...).

      The original Hobbit graphics were rendered as vectors with a (noticeably slow) fill routine, to save memory. These new ones are hand-drawn and regularly coloured bitmaps, compressed with modern algorithms and only possible because of the extra RAM to store them in the 128K machines. Many have actually been adapted from other editions of the original game.

  9. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    Melbourne House?

    It's the best part of 30 years old... and still better than the shambles of the recent movies.

  10. Graham Marsden
    Coat

    Thorin...

    ... sits down and starts singing about gold.

    "Gold, gold, gold, gold..."

    1. Wommit
      Coat

      Re: Thorin...

      ... sits down and starts singing about gold.

      "Gold, gold, gold, gold..."

      Oh bugger, can't remember the next verse... something like... Gold, er... glod, not that's not right. GOLD! yeah that's it. Gold, gold gold...

  11. Bernard M. Orwell

    Something drops from above....

    ....and stings.

    You are dead.

  12. Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese Silver badge

    Mondegreen

    I misread the sub-heading as "Elvis vs Dwarves"...I don't know about you, but I would pay good money to see that

    1. Code Monkey
      Windows

      Re: Mondegreen

      Rule 34 says you probably can see it.

    2. Graham Marsden
      Coat

      Re: Mondegreen

      Well we've had Elvis versus The Mummy in Bubba Ho-tep...

    3. Robert Baker
      Coat

      Re: Mondegreen

      Reminds me of the time I could have sworn I'd just seen a magazine cover advertising Resident Elvis. Then I did a double-take and saw that it was actually Resident Evil 5.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Let me get this straight.

    One person was working on an improved version but hadn't completed it.

    Another person decided to complete the project in his own way.

    And the one who hadn't finished it his way is arsey?

    Forking hell.

    1. NumptyScrub
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Did that person contact the original developers to check that they were fine with him altering the original version of the program that *they* wrote and designed?

      1. justred

        Re: Permission

        Yes, the Elf contacted original game author a year ago and obtained permission under certain conditions (to include disclaimer, link to original version, etc):

        http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/discussion/comment/765351/#Comment_765351

        The Dwarf's release ignored these conditions:

        http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/discussion/50480/the-hobbit-128k-edition/p1

        The Elf's release adhered to these conditions:

        http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/discussion/comment/823697/#Comment_823697

        And the Men didn't care about any of it.

    3. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

      THE ROOM IS TOO FULL FOR YOU TO COLLABORATE.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    forum wars

    Any Speccy fans who want a friendlier experience would be wiser to visit:

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/speccy4ever/

    instead.

  15. Hans 1
    Joke

    Those are "enhanced" graphics???????? Almost as bad as minecraft with a GTX TITAN, almost.

    ROFL

  16. Oh Matron!

    Time passes.......

    I never managed to get out of the first room... Chequered Flag was the ankle of my game playing capabilities (even after I got the polarity of the AC adapter set wrong and the tape spewed from the cassette deck...

  17. thesykes

    Have to admit I gave up trying to play the Hobbit. I had the MSX version, which took about 15 minutes to load and each picture about 5 minutes to draw (probably a bit quicker, but age blurs the reality). I just didn't have the patience for that, so just loaded River Raid in 30 seconds and was away.

    I did play text adventures, and can still remember encountering a bear blocking a cave entrance on a TI99/4a game (I knew how to pick a winner when it came to home computers). To get past you had to scream, which scared it and it fell off a cliff. You later walked past a "slightly woozy bear". No idea why that sticks in my mind. No idea what the game was either.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sounds like Scott Adams' 'Adventureland' from Adventure International. Available on just about everything in the early 1980s. There's a Java version here:

      http://www.freearcade.com/Zplet.jav/Advland.html

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        PULL ROD, PUSH ROD, TOUCH PLASTIC

  18. windy_miller

    I never managed to complete this game, even with a walkthrough. Gandalf has a habbit of just wandering off, especially in the dungeon making it impossible to get past certain sections of the game

  19. Comic Book Guy

    Gold is a lovely metal,

    much better than copper or brass,

    but a dragon stole mine so I'll settle,

    for kicking him hard up the.... sorry, wrong game.

    Still a good one, though.

  20. Johndoe888
    Paris Hilton

    "Rather better graphics than the original"

    Maybe the same will be done for Samantha Fox Strip Poker :)

  21. x 7

    so who owns the copyright? Where are the original developers now?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      ...where the shadows lie?

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If you think a bit of a tiff on the World of Spectrum forums is bad you should see the Spectrum 4 Ever group on Facebook. That place is toxic!

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Since when

    Has a bit of a tiff between retro homebrew coders on anther forum been 'news'?

    Talk about a slow day...

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