Spatterlight with Scott Adams C64 and TI-99/4A support

Grab version 0.9.2 here!

The CBM 64 versions of the Adventure International games sometimes had more pictures and text than the ZX Spectrum counterparts, so they are usually the ones to play. Some of them can be found here, while the ZX Spectrum versions can be found by searching here.

There is a new Scott Adams tab in the Spatterlight preferences where you can select the C64 or the ZX Spectrum colour palette to use for the pictures.

These graphics were quite impressive for their time. We had never seen anything like it on a C64 or a ZX Spectrum. Still impressive is the amount of work that went into making them, by painstakingly adding tile after tile from a character set, rotating and superimposing them on top of each other.

There’s an in-depth analysis of the format here, and an interview (or rather two very similar interviews) with the guy who made them here.

I’ve Google translated many English messages into Spanish and German for the localized versions of Gremlins, so it would be great if any native speakers would like to help out. German texts are here and Spanish a bit below here. Any suggestions are welcome!

This release also adds support for the TI-99/4A Scott Adams format, which is interesting because of the many homebrew games using it. Here is a list of known games, and here is a forum post with a link to a large archive of many of them. You may have to add .fiad or .dsk file name suffixes for Spatterlight to recognise them.

3 Likes

FYI, the Mac App Store version is still on v0.8.9… I’d say it should at least be on v0.9.1 at this point.

(It might well make sense to only update MAS to the previous version, in perpetuity, In other words, 0.9.2 wouldn’t come out on the Mac App Store until 0.9.3 came out.)

Yeah, Apple has rejected the last couple of versions I’ve submitted. It seems like they notice something new every time that they don’t like and want me to remove, which makes me kind of reluctant to submit new versions.

2 Likes

I’m curious to hear more about this! What have they rejected you for?

The first time it was because the Quicklook extensions had their deployment target set to 10.10 rather than 10.15. This made the app run (without Quicklook extensions) on 10.10. I changed this, so now the App Store version is 10.15 and above only.

The last time the problem was that it asks for access one level above the current directory of the selected file, to be able to look for cover images that some games keep there. Now I’ve changed it to only look in the folder of the actual selected file, so we’ll see if that is enough.

EDIT: Seems it was accepted. Yay!

3 Likes