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Message: 5631

Author: dunny291073

Date: 01/03/2006

Subject: Re: RZX recording of ... "upgraded UMM" up in the files section.

 

In manicminerandjetsetwilly@yahoogroups.com, Igor Makovsky wrote:

Wow! Can't believe my eyes!
Philip Bee is a real zx hero! Thanks to him very much for this work.
Interested in why he doesn't appear here anymore.

I don't know why he doesn't hang around... But I feel that maybe an
explanation of RZX and "rollback" in particular may be necessary.

Rollback is a method of saving your position whilst recording a game.
When you die, you "roll back" to that position and try again. When
you've eventually finished the game, you have a recording that plays
as though you made all the right moves at the right time.

Inserting rollback points into the game recording adds another 5kb or
15kb to the recording size. The Recording that Philip ended with
before compression was 26mb in size. With the rollback points removed,
it is a mere 254kb. That should indicate how much trouble he had
getting through the game.

Can't Dunny send to my e-mail (or post here, maybe) something like a
log of the "GREAT" discussion between you and other members of the
IRC group? Pity, I don't have IRC, so I didn't took part in it and
neither heard anything, being said there. As an author, I wish I had.

If you have access to the internet, you can use IRC. Many people who
use Dialup accounts or pay for how many minutes of internet connection
they use do use IRC.

If you're able, then you could try using mIRC to connect to
irc.astrolink.org, port 6667, and "/join #speccy " where the
is the address of the spectrum's screen display memory in
decimal.

There's a lot of us speccy fans in there.

I've been surprised by how Philip Bee made through the "THE REVENGE
OF THE AMOEBATRONS". After moving through the red vertical pipe,
Willy jumped in the air and not fell down! He stood on the air and
jumped further again without falling! This can't be done in the
original UMM without changes. So, as far as I see, this version of
UMM has been CHANGED.

If you were to take the recording apart, you'll see that it loads a
snapshot of your game in order to set up the emulation for playback.
You can extract that snapshot (it's zlib compressed) and compare it
against your own game - and you'll be pleasantly surprised to find
that it hasn't been changed AT ALL :-D

D.

 

 

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