Juicing Up The Next
Jim Bagley on why you should be excited about the ZX Spectrum Next
Jim Bagley tells us about his involvement with the exciting Spectrum Next
Fans of all things Spectrum are looking set for a fantastic 2018, thanks to the incoming launch of the Kickstarted ZX Spectrum Next machine, which lucky backers will have their hands on in a few short months. We spoke to the prolific Spectrum coder Jim Bagley to discover how he ended up contributing to the exciting new project by creating new tools and games for it. How did you become involved with the Spectrum Next?
I was doing a talk at Play Blackpool
2016 and Henrique Olifiers [one of the Spectrum Next’s creators] suggested I might be interested in his talk, so I went to see it. I watched him unveil the Spectrum Next, and at the end of his talk he asked if there were any questions. I put my hand up and said where could I get a dev kit from, so he gave me a board after the talk. With it being called the ZX Spectrum Next, I thought it needed to be a next iteration. So, unlike the other developers who had boards who made games for it, I decided to add hardware sprites because one of the first things people ask me when they want to make a game for the Spectrum is, ‘How do you draw a sprite onto the screen?’ And the quick answer is that it’s pretty difficult for a newcomer. I thought by adding hardware sprites, it would mean that they would be able to get sprites moving around the screen a lot easier, which would mean less people giving up with their dreams of making a game.
Can you tell us more about the sprite tool you’ve made for the system?
It’s basically a sprite editor, you can load a 16K file and you can then edit them and view it as a big 8x8 pixels to one pixel, so you can see which pixel you’re drawing on, and you can also see it in its 1:1 scale version also, and you can animate them, by adding the current sprite to your animation list, and it will play it animated.
What’s it been like being involved with crowdfunding?
It’s been an awesome experience. I’ve
loved being a part of it, yes. It was also a little scary because of all of the issues that went on with the other Spectrum before we went live with our Kickstarter campaign, but, thankfully, the Spectrum community is an awesome one and got behind the Spectrum Next in mass! So I thank them for that.
So you’ve been working with Henrique Olifiers, what has it been like working with him?
Henrique is an awesome organiser and has done a fantastic job bringing all the correct people together to make an awesome machine. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and we’ve become good friends in the last year.
How important will good programming tools be to the success of the Next?
Very much so, as I believe the easier it is for people to make games, be it in Garry Lancaster’s amazing job of NEXTBASIC or machine code, or with Jonathan Cauldwell’s brilliant Arcade Game Designer. With more people making games, it’ll be better for the community and better for the machine. Having all the tools is just as vital as the machine itself.
Tell us about the games you are creating for the Next.
There’s an awesome platformer designed, with graphics by Simon Butler with the working title Quakestar, and I want to do a Spectrum Next remake of a few older games, which will be released for free. There is also an awesome port of Warhawk (C64 and DS games) by the original author Michael Ware who
I’m working with to bring out on the Spectrum Next.
Will original Spectrum games be enhanced by the Next?
Some of the slower Spectrum games – such as 3D games – can be enhanced by getting the speed boost from the Spectrum Next’s turbo modes. BASIC games will be given their own speed boost from the turbo modes, too – like the original Football Manager by Kevin Toms, as the league scores come up a lot faster now. The new hardware additions to the machine weren’t known back [when the games were made], so none of the new features will be used with them, unless someone has the original sources and can add use of hardware sprites etc, and redo it.
Are you tempted to revisit any of your old games and enhance them? Yes I’d love to do a remake of Midnight Resistance using the extra features of the Next, but it would have to be a free release, as I don’t own the IP, but I do own the code from my Speccy version. What Next games do you think readers should be excited about? Dream World Pogie, Wonderful Dizzy, and hopefully Warhawk. Readers should also look forward to a few games being written by the awesome Lampros Potamianos and any game by the equally awesome WASP group.
Why do you think there’s been so much excitement around the Next? Because it’s something that seems to have got the Spectrum community back together, and the fact that there are a lot of the original Spectrum games programmers and artists getting back into making games, because making games for the Next (for me, at least) reminds me of when the games industry was starting out and it was fun times. I’ve had a lot more fun making games and demos for the Next than making a high-profile game for the next-gen consoles.
The Spectrum community is an awesome one and got behind the Spectrum next in mass Jim Bagley