After a couple of black&white (read: ZX81) posts, it’s time to get back to a full Spectrum of colours 🙂
With the forthcoming release of the ZX Spectrum Next (as far as I know, development boards have already been delivered to lucky official developers, other boards will be shipped in November and complete systems will be delivered in January 2018), I decided to make baSnake (a Snake/Nibbles-like game I quickly developed in BASIC language for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum BASIC Game Jam) more enjoyable by taking advantage of the Next turbo modes. In the resulting modified version, I added the possibility to cycle through the supported CPU speeds:
- 3.5 MHz (original Z80 clock frequency on the Spectrum),
- 7 MHz (which I chose as default speed),
- 14 MHz (really fast!),
- 28 MHz (it seems my PC isn’t poweful enough for handling this speed with emulator…).
by pressing the S key.
Please note that on the original (real or emulated) Spectrum, turbo mode selection will have no effect.
Besides this change, in order to make the game ever less frustrating, I slightly extended the life of apples before they start rotting away.
You can download both baSnakeNXT and the original baSnake through the link below:
Not being an official Next developer, I could not yet try the game on the real computer; by the way, I successfully tested it using ZEsarUX emulator.
Enjoy!
