Pax Britannia Update: Things to Fix
Andrew Owen has posted a couple of updates concerning U3.5: Pax Britannia to the Ultima Dragons Facebook group, both of which have concerned issues that have been identified in Pax Britannia that he will have to work on fixing.
For example, screen border offsets:
I knew the +2A/+3 had a fairly large border offset but none of the emulators actually show it so I had to guess which border it was. I guessed wrong. I’ll fix it in the final release though. Thanks to a friend of mine for testing on real hardware.
Or how about archaic grammar and character field overruns?
If you think modern English grammar is tricky, try the archaic kind. I think I have all my haths, hasts, thees, thys, thines and thous sorted now. I also found a one character overrun which might explain the occasional glitch in the character generator. If anyone has any comments on the questions before I finalize them I’d love to hear them.
Still, it’s good to see that he is making progress, and that early testing on the recently-released character generator beta has been fruitful!
Hang on. +2A/B/+3 had different border offsets to the rest of the Spectrum range?
The border offset is determined by the ULA (or in the case of the +2A/B/+3 the ASIC that does the job of the ULA). It’s different on every revision of the ULA, but on the last Amstrad models there’s a really large left border. U3.5 uses a 248 pixel wide screen during the character generation so I can compensate for this. But until I saw it running on real hardware I wasn’t sure I’d picked the correct border. As an aside, U3.5 will run on the earlier 128K machines, but owing to some nasty hardware bugs in those models the screen will glitch from time to time.