Lucky Red Fish

Lucky Red Fish is proud to announce the public release of the demo of TX-1696.

You can download the digital copy here.

Status

We are currently working on the last level which should be quite special all going well, but we want to keep that under our hats for now. We are probably looking at a summer release of the full game. Therefore if you have not pre-ordered you can here. Please note we do not ask for payment until release.

Pre-order TX-1696

The TX-1696 DEMO

Star date 1696, The Taris Xavia has been sent out into deep unknown space after a signal was intercepted on TOI 700e, the only known human inhabited planet to exist.

After intercepting the strange alien signal, you are met by hostile lifeforms that are determined to obliterate you. Your onboard computer deciphers the signal and shows the alien creatures intentions. Humans must die. you pull out of warp and get ready to use your powerful elite experimental weapon systems to take out the massive threat that awaits.

Good luck commander the human race depends on you.

TX-1696 pushes the Spectrum Next to its limits and features massive boss baddies, horizontal and vertical play areas, masses of highly detailed sprites on screen and loads of weapon pickups with a unique weapon selection system.

The Team

We also get a taste of some fantastic techno style music from Richard Faulkner aka A man in his Techno shed

The games graphics and code have been produced by Patricia Curtis who has worked on some huge titles like the conversion of Xenon 2 for the Amiga CDTV and Megadrive!.

Bret Pritchard of BAPSTARCADE YouTube and Twitch retro gaming shows has been testing and honing the gameplay down to the perfect retro gaming experience.

TX-1696 is the ultimate Spectrum Next game that you need for your collection

Enjoy the TX-1696 Team

What a Gamer Said about the TX-1696 demo

Controls

TX-1696 supports gamepads and Keyboard controls only

Gamepad

A = back (front menu)
B = Fire (hold for beam)
C / (circle) = Weapons selection, you shoot the weapon’s case to open it, it will display a (?) then press and hold button C to select the weapons using the direction arrows. Once you have selected you weapon of choice simply fly into your selection.

Tested with

Kempston
Sega mega drive style pad
PlayStation 4 pad using an 8bitDo Bluetooth device

Keys

Space = fire
Z/enter = weapon select
X = back
H = paused
P/cursor right = right
O/cursor left = left
Q/cursor up = up
A/cursor down = down

Tested on

System/Next 22.09
NextZXOS 2.07k
Core 3.01.10
Firmware 1.43

Also on

CSpect V2.19.2.1
please note this game does not run in 60htz.

The game does work with Auto fire however to get the best enjoyment out of it use the beam option.

With TX-1696 finished and only some minor adjustments needed, its time to think about publishing the game that has taken us nearly 3 years to create. With that in mind the first step is to see about duplicating SD cards in bulk as we have over 350 pre-orders and that would need a lot of swapping of SD cards.

One solution would be to buy an SD card duplicating machine like the EZ DUPE SOHO Touch 1 to 10 SD Duplicator from amazon at £699.00 to make 10 copies making it £2.00 a copy just for the duplication and that’s without the price of the SD cards

The test

I believe that its just a matter of writing a multi-threading application to write the data to the SD cards synchronously, this could probably be written in C#, so I could use windows forms, but before I embark on yet another programming project, I thought I would check to see if someone has written one already. Luckily, they have, it’s called Disk Imager.

https://github.com/RomanBelkov/DiskImager/wiki

This small application lets you make back up images of your SD card, and then lets you write that image to multiple SD card or USB sticks.

Hardware

I purchased a powered USB hub by Vemont with 7 ports so I could write seven SD cards at once, I also purchased Beikell High-speed SD/Micro SD Card Readers from amazon at a total cost £52.61, in hindsight I may have been able to buy cheaper SD readers as my old one worked just as fast.

I made an image of the SD card and wrote 6 copies from it in under 6 minutes, some were done much faster, however for some reason some of the SD cards took much longer to write than others so I will call it 6 minutes. This would mean that it will take roughly 5-6 hours to make 350 SD cards at just £0.14p, this lower cost for duplication is not bad at all.

Next time we think about boxes and inserts!