Setting up a village somewhere outback where people have to make everything themselves. work the farms 24/7 just to survive the winter, tooth rot kills you and the only contact with civilization is airliner trails. Also periodical exile of intelligent people so that nothing changes.
noooooo I actually have a friend that wants and strives to live like this (and he gave me this horrible idea), so nostalgia/cave society fetish is there. and market for it would still be bigger than the spectrum clone.
Often developers have harnessed more powerful computers and systems to build games for simpler lower spec hardware. Could Unity be used as a tool to build a ZX Spectrum or C64 game?
Or could you make a PICO8 style tool in Unity that can port to ZX80 or C64?
It could be done. But what you could make would be very limited.
It wouldn’t even be Unity anymore. It would just be some kind of visual/flow chart programming… thing …that would convert everything into “as highly efficient as possible” Sinclair BASIC. And you will be limited to 128K of code on a very limited instruction set.
Personally I don’t think it would be profitable for unity team to struggle with such implementation.
Well we both know C# is capable of making code a cpu that can address 512mb will be able to chew through given the compiler for it is good enough It’s not really the language that’s the problem. Would it be useful? doubtful…
Better question to ask, who would this be for? The people who want to develop for old hardware like this, are also the ones that would want to use the tools of that time as well. I see no money to be made for unity, definitely not enough to offset the massive cost of doing so. If it was possible, the end result would not even resemble unity anymore.
Dude, do you have some sort of thread quota? Who would want this? Why would we want Unity spending their limited resources and time on this instead of improving what we have?
spectrum has 48 kilobytes of memory and runs at 3.5 Mhz. You probably won’t be able to load zlib in there. It also has amazing quirks like not having backbuffer, filesystem, etc. By modern standard it is a brick.
Unity can’t spend any time and resources on this even if they wanted to since it’s 100% impossible, which anyone with half a clue should understand. If this was a joke/troll thread, it might be mildly amusing, but as an “idea”, it’s just sad.
Probably not, since I expect it’s using bank switching. Some computers had more memory than the CPU could address at one time, but you could poke around and make it “see” different banks of RAM.
If they use z80 instruction set the only way they could go above 48k is via bank switching, because z80 could only use 16bit addresses. Putting code into switchable banks is going to be a major pain. I recall dos games doing something similar via *.ovl files, but I suspect they usually used those to load graphics for the game.
Snes and Amiga had hardware accelerated sprites.
So, basically, an equivalent of a “sprite” object was implemented on hardware level and was drawn by a specialized chip. That was used in arcades, on amiga, etc. Graphical/musical co-processors were widely used before hardware got more powerful.
The problem here is that original spectrum had no such hardware helpers. Full software render, at 3.5 mhz. It had three 3d games (elite, hard driving and driller), and those with filled surfaces ran roughly at 0.3…1 fps. Elite was faster, because it used wireframe graphics, but it was still running in a slideshow mode.
It was thanks to the Spectrum that I ended up with a severe itch that took Unity decades to come along and scratch!
One year in the 1980’s one of the Spectrum magazines in the UK did an april fools joke that the young version of me totally fell for. They did a feature on this great new software that would help you to make games, far beyond what the one or two existing ‘template based’ (to be charitable) game creator apps for the spectrum could manage. It awoke my imagination, and then eventually some weeks or maybe even months later, after failing to find it in the shops, I realised it was not real, and I was very sad about that. Decades passed. I got into Unity, the itch was scratched However now we are quite far into this era of accessible game creation tools & engine stuff, despite its presence at the start of my personal story, I do not have any wish to apply the modern game creation concepts to the Spectrum of my childhood
Sounds like the C64… bit shifting and addition unless you were a newbie and would loop x times adding y. Self modifying code was common. Lookup tables. Ah the good ole days. … ok not really for the simple stuff. 8-bit cpu and 16-bit product. Advanced stuff. lol
I’m wondering how much faster a modern quad-core i5 3.5 GHz is compared to Z80 3.5 MHz.
Considering the clock rate, number of cycles to execute an average instruction, instruction-level parallelism and multiple cores, is it like ~100,000 times faster?
It’s not really the language that’s the problem. Would it be useful? doubtful…
However now we are quite far into this era of accessible game creation tools & engine stuff, despite its presence at the start of my personal story, I do not have any wish to apply the modern game creation concepts to the Spectrum of my childhood