Sharp MZ

Hi,
I wanted to order the Beyond game from the SHARPWORKS site, but there is only paypal for the payment, so I gave up, not having and not wanting to use paypal.
Can't order a digital version (.mzf for example) by credit card or other means such as paper mail?

Hi,

Yes, I'm a bit limited on the store as I'm not a business and don't have a business account. Sorry about that. Please just send me an email at mzsharpworks@gmail.com and we can work something out!

Also we're still deciding on whether to release digitally or not. It wouldn't be MZF as it has its own custom loader which is not in MZF format. More likely just a WAV (the EmuZ emulator can read WAV as well as MZF)

Cheers!

Cheating at the BEYOND game is possible:
When opening a game board, press all the B, E, Y, O N and D keys and the screen is erased to reveal the message "PROGRAM AMMENDMENT". There he asks us "SCREEN NO". Apparently only the numbers 0 to 4 give us access to a table. Then "DIRECTION" which waits for 0 or 1 and which determines in which direction the tables must scroll: 0 normal direction (0->1->2...) and 1 reverse direction (2->1->0...). And finally "LIVES (max. 255)" where we can give a number between 0 and 255.
Happy cheating.

Interesting! I wonder if anyone discovered the cheat in Minesnake before now.

If anyone is interested, I recreate Beyond as a single MZF file allowing it to be loaded more easily on a real machine and an emulator.

En WAV - sur cassette - ça prend combien de temps en chargement ? j'avais fait un changement pour que ça prenne moins de 3 minutes au lieu des 12 minutes mais je n'avais pas fait l'effort de rassembler tout ça en un seul MZF.

I didn't compress anything, the file is 45.6kb in size and has been recompiled so that it can load all at once, so it takes that long in wav. When using a drive other than a tape drive (in digital therefore) I find it more practical to have a single file rather than 8.
Given the structure of the data (there are a lot of 0's on diamond animations) I think we should be able to compress it to more than half. I'll try to have fun with it and come back for the results.

After compression with mz7, I obtained a wav file with a length of almost 100s (1m39.58s).
It includes the initial presentation screen, the one displayed during loading, then the welcome screen with the rotating banner, and the complete game.

Using decompression through keyboard buffer? There is an option to choose between decompressor inside the MZF header or through the keybaord buffer. For 3 minutes version, it was because each block were compressed. Compressing one huge block appears to give more compression ratio.

In this version, the decompressor is part of the code, it is not integrated in the header of the MZF.
In the decompressor version in the header, we have a wav duration of 99.1s (1m39.1s).
The difference is not visible when loading.
For information, the delta is 3.