This text is from the manual of Lords of Midnight: The Citadel. The package for this game also includes straight PC ports of the two previous Doomdark games, Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge. This text describes how the porting was done.

Lords of Midnight - The PC conversion

PC conversion by Christopher Wild -- July 1991.

Why?

During 1990/1991 I went through a sudden bout of ZX Spectrum nostalgia. Having owned a Spectrum since '84 and it being my first computer, I was missing it a little. I dug out my Spectrum 128k but then decided to buy a Spectrum +3, well what the hell!

I did a little bit of programming on it, wrote a few game routines, sprite routines etc. I started converting a lot of the games to disk, some of which required a little bit of hacking on my behalf. Anyway, back in the 80's I used to do a lot of hacking and got a lot of pokes etc. published in various magazines. I have always been interesting in the inner workings of games and I pride myself on being a very good reverse engineer.

Lords of Midnight was always one of my favourite games and so I decided to reverse engineer it; just out of curiosity.

The development

The +3 is not the ideal environment for such as task so I brought in the help of my trusty PC.

I linked my +3 and PC through the PC parallel port and the +3 RS232 port which I bought a special cable for. I used Hisoft Devpac to print a disassembly of the newly hacked binary files to what it thought was a printer, and my PC captured the info and wrote it to a file. The next stage was to clean up the file into an editable and readable form. I've now got a 10000 line z80 assembler file, complete with un- disassembled parts that need hand disassembling, on my PC that means diddly squat.

I spent the next two weeks working out what the program was doing. I put in meaningful routine names, added comments, gave memory addresses variable names, added equates, formatted data into ASCII, inline data and bin files. By the time I had finished I had a fully compilable z80 file that would probably compare favourably to Mike Singleton's original! This was the biggest reverse engineer I had ever done, I even fixed a few bugs! Not only did I know how the program functioned but I had managed to create fully documented source code. Not bad from a Spectrum Binary File.

The conversion

It was only at this point that I became interested in actually converting this code to work on a PC. I started thinking about doing a rewrite and then finally came up with a simple solution.

A work colleague and myself set about writing a program that would do a literal z80-8086 conversion. It works on a similar concept to emulators the difference being in that an emulator has to do real time conversion, our program would do a one off conversion. This actually has its own problems. Emulators can have the luxury of having routines for commands, we wanted a straight z80/8086 opcode swap. The code had to look the same even though the mnemonics were different; we had to match up mnemonics and registers across different processors. We wrote the program over a couple of days and did the conversion, then spent the next few days ironing out certain translation problems. After about a week we had a fully functioning conversion program and so did the conversion again.

The graphics

The next problem was the display I could convert all the graphics and GFX routines to be PC specific but that would probably add another few weeks onto the conversion. By this stage I had already decided that should the conversion work then I might do a complete ground up rewrite possibly to work under windows, so I didn't want to spend too much time with the graphics. The final decision was to again work like an emulator. I allow the program to still write to what it thinks is a spectrum screen. The programs are compiled to allow a memory region between 16384 and 23296 in the data segment. The game writes directly to this as normal; no need to change any calculations etc. I wrote a routine to interpret this memory and then write to a VGA screen. After all the major drawing routines I then make a call to this routine and the screen is displayed. It isn't the quickest method but it was time saving. If your machine has a decent graphics card then the transfer is done in well under a frame and so the update is flicker free but slower graphics cards might show a slight affect like a blind being closed - but it doesn't detract.

The new platform

The program was now semi up and running on a new platform. All was left to do was to iron out certain hardware dependent routines. A few internal routines for random numbers, keyboard etc. New save and load routines and a new printer dump option - espson compatible printers are supported. A little bit here and there and the game was finished from start to finish in under a month. Not bad - Doomdark's Revenge only took two weeks after that!!!!! I sat back and played the game to make sure it worked. Oh, and added a feature for the character selection - something that tells you that a character is dead or can't move.

The end result

The game is faster. It's still about 48k! The panoramic views are brilliant. Movement is a smooth glide. Night processing is almost instant. The game could have been faster again should I have chosen to optimise it, but I was only doing a conversion... a rewrite was yet to come!

The conversion is so faithful to the original that if you could transfer a Spectrum save game file, you could probably use it - apart from a small header at the front of my save game files.

The future

I would still like to write a Windows version with many new features that would enhance the gameplay.

The code for Doomdark's Revenge almost lends itself to being changed into a two player network game!

The credits

• Mike Singleton, for creating such a fabulous game.
• Brian Walker: DOMARK
• Thanks to DOMARK for granting permission to release this version. Please look out for Lords of Midnight: The Citadel: Coming Soon.
• Richard Maddocks, for his work on the Z80/8086 transfer program, the PC graphic routines, the PC printer routines and general assistance on this project. E-mail: mads@civy.demon.co.uk

The manual was scanned from the original. It is almost identical to the original manual by Mike, the only changes are for specific mentions to the Spectrum computer and the appendices.

1994 - Chris Wild
E-mail: chris@anam.demon.co.uk