ZX Spectrum Doom title screen

[Nootrac4571]

I made this:

 

 

Context: My first computer was a ZX Spectrum - a super cheap early 8-bit home computer produced in the UK in the early 80s. It never really made an impact in the US, but was incredibly popular over here for a good few years, as well as in Europe - and, thanks to a wide variety of unofficial hardware clones, in Russia.

 

(I suspect there are a few UK Doomworlders here who might already know all this - I've noticed some British English spelling, and a very pleasing forum avatar taken from quite possibly the first game I ever played.)

 

Anyway, I have a huge amount of nostalgic affection for the scrappy underdog of 80s home computing, and one of my weird pointless hobbies is to draw things in the Spectrum's unique and objectively terrible video mode.

 

So: Basically, the Speccy had a resolution of 256x192 pixels, and could display 15(!) unique colours. But in order to do so, the display has a bunch of incredibly awkward rules regarding which colours each pixel could be.

 

For a start, while the pixel resolution was 256x192, the colour resolution was much lower: only 32x24. This basically means that the screen was divided up into 8x8 pixel squares, and each square could only display two different colours at once.

 

On top of that, the 15 colours were really just 8 basic colours: Black, blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow and white, and a second bank of the same, but slightly darker versions. And each 8x8 attribute square could only display colours from either the "bright" or "dim" set. (both versions of black were exactly the same, hence only 15 colours rather than 16.)

 

 

Anyway, I find it fun to try to graphically recreate games which the Spectrum could never have actually run, imagining an alternate universe in which the Speccy never died and still gets ludicrously inferior ports of every popular game.

 

Extra bonus: I made a timelapse of the drawing process:
 

Edited March 18, 2019 by Nootrac4571

[cambreaKer]

wasn't there a doom port for the zx spectrum?

[Nootrac4571]

58 minutes ago, cambreaKer said:

wasn't there a doom port for the zx spectrum?

 

Sort of: there's an unofficial Wolfenstein-style fan game/tech demo with Doom sprites, made by some Russian demoscene coders I think:

 

 

[elend]

That looks really great, did you post that on pixeljoint.com already? Very interesting WIP .gif as well. Great work!

[Walter confetti]

really good!

[Marlamir]

That music is soo catchy, i love it

[Dark Pulse]

Reminds me of these oldies some people may (or may not) have seen: