The demo and all source code is on GitHub where more information is available. Only the source files pawn.c and world_pawn.c contain game-specific information, the rest of the source code is general.
https://github.com/stefanbylund/zxnext_pawn_demo
The purpose of the demo is to explore and demonstrate how a text adventure game can be presented on the Spectrum Next using a combination of the layer 2 screen for displaying colorful graphics and the Timex hi-res mode for displaying high-resolution text with a proportional font. It also demonstrates how a text adventure game can support a large amount of graphics and text by loading such resources on-demand from an SD card using ESXDOS.
The purpose of the demo is not to provide a fully-featured playable game. The parser is very limited, you can only walk around in the world, you cannot interact with its in-game characters and objects. I don't intend to continue developing the demo into a complete game since the original game is still under copyright and even if it wasn't, reimplementing the full parser and analyzing the original source code for determining all possible character/object interactions would be a huge work.
The demo contains all rooms with descriptions and graphics from the original Amiga version of the game. The Amiga version used the same graphics as the Atari ST version, which had 16-color images from a palette of 512 colors. These images have been converted to Spectrum Next's layer 2 graphics mode. Some of the images have been slightly reduced in height to fit the Spectrum Next screen resolution.
The demo can be run in the CSpect 1.7 emulator. Since I don't have a development board, I haven't been able to verify if it runs on the real hardware. It would be fun if someone with a board would try it
Unfortunately, the demo does not currently run correctly in the ZEsarUX 6.0 emulator. If you enable the Timex hi-res mode in ZEsarUX, it cannot be combined with the layer 2 screen, only the Timex hi-res part of the screen is visible. If Timex hi-res mode is disabled in ZEsarUX, the text part of the screen will be displayed together with the layer 2 part but the actual text will of course be garbled.How to Run
1. Download zxnext_pawn_demo.zip from GitHub and unzip it.
2. Install the latest version of the CSpect emulator (version 1.7 or later).
3. Run the batch file run_cspect.bat included in the demo. Make sure CSpect.exe is in your PATH or modify the batch file to point out where CSpect.exe is located.
Screenshots
Here are some screenshots from the demo:
Video
Here is a short video of the demo (click on the image to play):
