Documentation

General Questions

Q. Will a new version of Sparcade be released?

A. Yes!

Q. When????

A. Very soon now. I hope to release a new version before Sparcade's fourth birthday (a month away at the time of writing).

Q. How come it's been so long since the last release?

A. Lack of motivation, stress at work, moving house, catching up with old friends... Basically, "real life" has been providing plenty of distractions. :-)

Q. Could you send me full technical information on game xyz so that I can write an emulator?

A. As a rule, I don't usually have enough time to prepare detailled technical information. Personally I also believe that most of the fun in writing an emulation is the challenge. If someone else tells you how to do it, the task becomes a mundane button-pushing exercise (he says, whilst wondering whether to become a hypocrite by using Jrok's System 1 info).

Q. Are there any plans to save high scores?

A. Hiscores are already saved, albeit indirectly, by virtue of the fact that all games retain their current state on exit.

Q. Sparcade v2.x seems to be slower than the old v1.x versions. What gives?

A. Unfortunately, a number of speed tricks used with the older versions could not be carried over to the new release without causing problems when running under WIndows 95.

Q. Why can't Sparcade be run directly from the command line so that I can use it with my frontend?

A. Sparcade is a stand-alone package which was never intended to be run from an external frontend program.

Q. Could you please send me detailled instructions telling me how to run Sparcade?

A. RTFM. :)

Q. What does RTFM mean?

A. Read The Fraggin Manual. I can't believe I was asked this question!

Q. When did you start working on Sparcade?

A. June 1995.

Q. Which games were emulated in the early versions?

A. Centipede was the first, rapidly followed by Millipede and Missile Command.

Q. Any plans for emulation of the Mega Drive (aka Genesis) console?

A. Nope.

Q. What happened to the Master System and Game Gear support?

A. It's gone, probably forever.

Q. What happened to Zaxxon?

A. I didn't get around to updating it. Maybe one day.

Q. I can't find the ROMs for game xxxxx anywhere?

A. Well go and *buy* the game then!

Back