The Tempest Mystery
Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2018 12:40 pm
Something incredibly weird is going on, and I don't know what.
I've been fiddling around tweaking my colour mod of Tempest, and I also wanted to make a monochrome inverse one representing how the game could have looked when it was released in 1981. And then I noticed something really odd. Here are screenshots of my latest builds, one colour and one mono. See if you can see what's strange about them:
Did you spot it? One of them says "PRESS FIRE KEY" and the other says "PRESS ANY KEY", with an untidy extra space on the end of the line.
But here's the mad thing: both of them were made from the exact same P file. It's the only one in my Chroma folder. They were made just minutes apart. And when I go back and look at my previous builds of the last couple of days, all the colour ones say FIRE and all the mono ones say ANY.
And it's weirder still. If you go here:
http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/tape/Tempest
and play the online browser version, it says FIRE. But if you actually download either of the game files on the page (the P or the TZK) and run them in EightyOne, they say ANY. I've scoured my hard drive and found nine versions of the P file, all of which say ANY.
What the bejeesus is going on here? Where in God's name has the FIRE version come from? Can anyone somehow extract it from the TZX? The attachment below contains my original P file, my latest colour and mono builds, and their respective COL files. I'm totally perplexed.
I've been fiddling around tweaking my colour mod of Tempest, and I also wanted to make a monochrome inverse one representing how the game could have looked when it was released in 1981. And then I noticed something really odd. Here are screenshots of my latest builds, one colour and one mono. See if you can see what's strange about them:
Did you spot it? One of them says "PRESS FIRE KEY" and the other says "PRESS ANY KEY", with an untidy extra space on the end of the line.
But here's the mad thing: both of them were made from the exact same P file. It's the only one in my Chroma folder. They were made just minutes apart. And when I go back and look at my previous builds of the last couple of days, all the colour ones say FIRE and all the mono ones say ANY.
And it's weirder still. If you go here:
http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/tape/Tempest
and play the online browser version, it says FIRE. But if you actually download either of the game files on the page (the P or the TZK) and run them in EightyOne, they say ANY. I've scoured my hard drive and found nine versions of the P file, all of which say ANY.
What the bejeesus is going on here? Where in God's name has the FIRE version come from? Can anyone somehow extract it from the TZX? The attachment below contains my original P file, my latest colour and mono builds, and their respective COL files. I'm totally perplexed.