Unless explicitly stated otherwise these notes are relative to the Windows version, both x86 and 圆4, since that's the OS I use most. It's available here: PureBasic on GitHub.Īs any language has its strong and weak points, and most of them are subjective since not everyone need (or like) the same level of power or complexity so what I find important or irrelevant can be very different from what you think.īut beyond my opinions, there is a lot of good information in here, and if you just discovered PureBasic this page can point you in various directions you can explore further and most importantly a lot sooner. It's not really identical on all the platforms but it's reasonably close, so you get an idea of what can be done.Īlso recently the IDE has been made open source! Now you can contribute to the bug fixing or add new features, or simply look the source to learn something from it. The PureBasic's IDE is one good example of a fairly complex cross platform application and it's written in PureBasic. On macOS this requires some acrobatics since Cocoa it's built with Objective C in mind. It's possible to write cross platform programs by just using PB statements and libraries, if you limit yourself to only the common set of commands and libraries available for all the OSes.īut realistically you often need to write at least some platform specific code here and there, using the target OS APIs. It's available for Windows, Linux, macOS and Raspberry. PureBasic is a language, you guessed it, sharing some common ground with a very large family of BASIC dialects. In 2004 I stumbled on PureBasic after using many generations of Visual Studio (Visual Basic and Visual C/C++) and I was hooked by experiencing again, after all those years, a sensation similar to the one TP3.0 gave me in 1986. It was something that really impressed me, computers were not as powerful as today and TP3.0 was a joy to use: everything was immediate and the programming cycle was so effortless it was like using an interpreter magically running at the speed of compiled code. It was written in assembly, it was blazing fast and in less than 40 KB you had a compiler, an editor, a linker and a debugger all loaded in RAM at the same time. While Microsoft was producing its sophisticated but bulky compilers, in 1986 Borland introduced Turbo Pascal 3.0.
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If not exploded quickly, power-up balls will return to their regular state after some time.Įach regular adventure begins with three lives (represented by frogs in the upper-left hand corner of the screen), but extra lives are earned with every 50,000 points. The explosion ball explodes all of the balls within a small radius of the ball at the spot and time of its explosion. The accuracy ball allows quicker shots and points an arrow at where the ball will be shot (this stays active for about the same amount of time as the slow-down ball however, the size of the balls must be considered). The slow-down ball slows the speed of the chain of balls for a short length of time. The backwards ball pushes the furthest-out chain (depending on if all of the balls are connected) backwards for a short length of time. Time bonuses are also awarded if a player completes the level within ace time – ranging from thirty seconds to four minutes depending on the level.įour different types of power-ups show up in the balls, which can be activated by exploding the ball with the power-up. There are bonuses for collecting coins (usually through gaps), for causing explosions through gaps of other balls, and chains for having a streak of always causing an explosion with each consecutive ball (coins and chain bonuses are a quick way to fill the bar). The level is completed when after the bar is filled, the player eliminates all of the balls on the screen. When three or more of the same color come in contact, they explode, possibly triggering other explosions as part of a chain reaction. To prevent the balls from reaching the skull, the player can eliminate the balls by firing a colored ball from the stone frog idol's mouth towards the chain of balls that will continue to push forward until the player fills the yellow bar, which is when the balls will stop producing off-screen. As soon as one ball reaches the skull, the others follow and the player loses a life. The player can carry two balls at a time and can switch at any time. The objective of Zuma is to eliminate all of the balls rolling around the screen along a given path (the path is clearly visible in all of the levels except for the last level) with other balls before these balls reach the yellow skull structure, which will open to varying degrees as a warning of oncoming balls. Zuma received the 2004 "Game of the Year" award from RealArcade. It is also included with the PlayStation 3 retail version of Bejeweled 3, along with Feeding Frenzy 2. Īn enhanced version, called Zuma Deluxe, was released for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X as well as an Xbox Live Arcade download for the Xbox 360 and a PlayStation Network download for the PlayStation 3. It was released for a number of platforms, including PDAs, mobile phones, and the iPod. Zuma is a 2003 tile-matching puzzle video game developed by Oberon Media and published by PopCap Games. Mac OS X, iPod, Mobile phone, Windows, Windows Mobile, Xbox, Xbox 360 ( XBLA), PlayStation 2, Palm OS, Java, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable ( PSN), In-flight entertainment (IFE) By locking a hack to run only on ZSNES, you are dooming your hack to irrelevance. You simply can't run this on your cell phone. That's especially true for ones such as ZSNES that are written in pure x86 assembly. You have to realize that emulators, too, have shelf-lives. It's possible to foresee a bad day at some point in the future where an end user needs ZSNES v1.42 for a list of four translations, Snes9X v1.51 for another six ROM hacks, and bsnes v080 for some obscure Japanese games. In truth, most software runs with great tolerance to timing issues and appears to be functioning normally even if timing is off by as much as 20 percent. Apparent compatibility is the most obvious measure of accuracywill an old game run on my new emulator?but such a narrow view can paper over many small problems. Put simply, accuracy is the measure of how well emulation software mimics the original hardware. In this piece we'll take a look at why accuracy is so important for emulators and why it's so hard to achieve. But emulating those old consoles accuratelywell, that's another challenge entirely accurate emulators may need up to 3GHz of power to faithfully recreate aging tech. It doesn't take much raw power to play Nintendo or SNES games on a modern PC emulators could do it in the 1990s with a mere 25MHz of processing power. He wants to share his thoughts on the most important part of the emulation experience, accuracy. Today we present another point of view from a gentleman who has created the Super Nintendo emulator bsnes. Emulators for playing older games are immensely popular online, with regular arguments breaking out over which emulator is best for which game. |
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