how hard would it nowadays be to develop a game for the Speccy? Is there any cool dev stack that help me avoid feeling that I'm going back to the stone age?"Īt this point you may be saying "what?!", but let's face it, game development has evolved a lot since those days where tools weren't handy at all for mere mortals and debugging was a real pain in the back. Plus, I would bet that many of us got accustomed to comfort.
Maybe too much sometimes, but hey, it is what it is. Now, by the time I was doing my discovery process to build a stack that suits my needs I happened to find a few tools that caught my attention so much that I felt motivated to write an article about them, in an attempt to also get distanced for a brief moment from game development for modern platforms and bring some "retro" vibe to these pages.īefore installing any compiler and related tools I searched for languages other than both, the original basic and assembly. My goal was twofold: (a) to write the general parts of the game with such language, and (b) left critical code for assembly.Īnd this is when I came across interesting projects like ELENA, a language based on C#, which looks promising but there have been no posts about from the author for more than a year. SPECCY ALTERNATIVE FULLĪnd of course, there is C, but as I will mention in the next section I wanted full integration with VS.Īnd then enters BORIEL ZX BASIC! This is a compiler written in python, available for major platforms (Windows, Linux and MacOSX), that translates an extended version of Basic into Z80 assembly code. Why extended? Because his author, José Rodriguez ( has based on the syntax of FreeBasic to introduce features of structured languages into it, like functions, subroutines and labels. And also, he has provided a set of functions and subroutines as well as new data types and of course, tutorials.īut this is not it, at all. There is one key feature that I still have to mention: ZX Basic allows to inline assembly instructions!!! This is a killing feature for me and here's a link to an example of it. This is a really popular language since many games were created for the Speccy with it in recent years, and new additions are coming weekly. The reason? I use Visual Studio (for games with Unreal, for games with Unity, for games with everything really).
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