Recently, I was watching Rod Hull lament about the lack of joystick control in Mike Singleton’s Snake Pit. Having seen keyboard patches for other Spectrum games which fix terrible controls in classics like Jet Pac (Q, W, E, R and T for goodness sake!) I wondered how difficult it would be to adapt the game to use the Kempton joystick interface provided by the divMMC Future.
Armed with a pen, my trusty notebook and a ZX Spectrum emulator – Fuse in my case as I’m on Linux – I started my investigations. After some initial dead ends, I tracked down the keyboard reading routine. I then wrote some new code which took input from the Kempston joystick (on loan from my esxDOS browser) and converted that to the keypresses the game was expecting, so the original game code would be none the wiser as to what was going on. I then patched the original routine to call my new code and crossed my fingers.
After managing to get Fuse to emulate a Kempston interface and mapping the keyboard to be the attached joystick, it did indeed work. I then made a patched version available and after getting Rod Hull’s seal of approval in his rather lovely follow up video I then went about tidying up the patch and doing a final release. This involved me modifying the game to start using the joystick and – more importantly – adding a little cracker-esque message screen at the start.
Snake Pit with Kempston joystick support is available here.
After getting this all set up, I decided to package up a couple of other patches and fixes I had kicking around. When I got my +2 up and running a few months back, I’d tried running a +2 timed version of deMarche’s Paralactika demo to see how the cool multicolour effects looked on real hardware. The .tap file I had promptly reset after loading. On power up, esxDOS forces a 128k machine into USR 0 mode (basically the 48k BASIC prompt but with access to all the memory pages) whereas the loader was expecting standard 128k mode and was doing the memory paging in a way that didn’t work in USR 0 mode. So, I rewrote the loader to take this into consideration and the demo loaded and started up correctly. Paralactika fixed for esxDOS / USR 0 mode is available here.
Finally, I’d come across a 128k mod of Manic Miner which played AY music in game and also included an in-game cheat menu. The original file was a .z80 snapshot and it was causing the full-screen preview code in my esxDOS browser to crash. After fixing that, I had a play around with it and noticed that the music code was hanging – playing the last note over and over again – when you turned the music off or ended up on the Game Over screen. The mod code was using an interrupt based music player for the 128k music and was just enabling and disabling interrupts to start and stop the music. They weren’t calling the ‘stop’ routine to silence the AY chip in the music player which is why the music was getting stuck. After patching the code to do this, I then extracted the code and made it into a .tap file with the original Manic Miner animated loading screen as I’m not a fan of snapshot files. Manic Miner 128k with fixed music playback is available here.