Pyskool

Time for a new release of the Skool Disassemblies. As always, you can browse them online, or download a copy for offline viewing. And also as always, if you’d like to build the disassemblies yourself (including ASM versions that can be fed into an assembler), then SkoolKit will do the trick.

As the veteran disassembly-watchers among you will already know, the Skool Disassemblies are now in maintenance mode: I have no new features planned, but I will fix errors or document new bugs, pokes and trivia as they come to light. For this particular maintenance release, I have documented more graphic glitches, and added a couple of trivia entries about the tunes that play in the skool games. For details of all the changes since the last release, see the changelog.

Also remember that SkoolKit includes a disassembler, and provides some support for creating HTML and ASM disassemblies of other Spectrum games. An incomplete disassembly of Contact Sam Cruise is already bundled, alongside an even more incomplete disassembly of Manic Miner.

Pyskool 0.5.1 has been released. The download page is the place to go to get a copy.

0.5.1 is a bugfix release. In 0.5 there is a bug that makes the game crash when the teacher has returned to the blackboard during a non-question-and-answer lesson after fetching the truant Eric; this bug is now fixed. Saved games from version 0.5 should work just fine in 0.5.1, too. Thanks to Ben for reporting the bug.

Pyskool 0.5 has been released. Copies are waiting over at the download page.

The main change since 0.4 is the addition of an in-game menu. Pressing F10 will bring up the menu, whereupon you are presented with suitably labelled items bound to the following operations:

• Resume the game
• Save the game
• Load the most recently saved game
• Increase the scale of the screen
• Decrease the scale of the screen
• Quit Pyskool

To move between items, use the up and down arrow keys. To execute an item, press Enter. To hide the menu, press Escape (or F10 again).

Other changes include the ability to increase or decrease the scale of the screen while Pyskool is running (thus enabling the related menu items to actually work as advertised), and the exposure of the game key bindings (q – Up, a – Down etc.) in the Keys section in the new global ini file, pyskool.ini. (Before 0.5, the key bindings were sort of hidden in the keys module, where non-programmers may have feared to tread.)

The plan for 0.6 is…undecided at the moment. I think the menu could be improved – by adding submenus that make saving to and loading from specific files somewhat easier, for example – so I might work on that. Or I might give the stock graphics a bit of a makeover (which could take some time, since I’m no artist). We’ll see. In the meantime, enjoy ordering from 0.5′s menu.