10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”

Testing... Testing... 1... 2... 3...

A quick ‘hello!’ and welcome to the first dev. log entry for updates and progress to the wonderful Melkhior’s Mansion game, which I’m converting to the humble 128K ZX Spectrum.  I always say ‘humble’ with regards to this, as the game itself is huge in terms of both scope and the amount of amazing graphics which line the walls of Melkhior’s castle.  It was those - the fact that it actually looked like an Ultimate game - which originally drew me to the project a couple of years ago, and since then I’ve been constantly arguing with the tiny machine as to whether this conversion is actually possible. I still don’t know the answer.

As it currently stands, the game can be played and completed with any of the four characters in Atic Atac mode - that is, collect the three parts of the key to unlock the door and escape. There are graphics for two distinct room types - the castle, and the caverns below it.

What’s left to do is a big list of things to fit in an ever-decreasing amount of memory.  Each character has their own kind of quest to be done before they can leave the castle, there’s more graphics to be added, a lot of optimising, and the usual array of bugs to stamp on.  (Must ask Sir Stamperlot about helping with those...)