Time for some screenshots of Pyskool in action. If they look eerily like the original Spectrum games, that would be because I’m using the original graphics. However, to go some way towards convincing you that these screenshots are not merely of the original games, I hacked the config files so that things happen that never happened in the originals.

In the Back to Skool screenshot in this post, Eric is supposed to be in the Blue Room with Mr Rockitt, and Mr Creak is teaching a mixed class of boys and girls in the Science Lab. Heresy!

See the next post for a screenshot of Skool Daze. I was going to put both screenshots in this post, but WordPress seems to make a mess of any post with more than one image in it. At least, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

So back in June (2008) I started working on a project to rewrite the classic ZX Spectrum games Skool Daze and Back to Skool in python and pygame. Why? For fun, mostly. I spent many hours playing those games as a teenager back in the 80s, and always thought it would be good to be able to ‘mod’ them easily. Now easy modding is not really feasible with the original games; you’d need some knowledge of Spectrum hardware, Z80 assembly language, and Spectrum emulators. With Pyskool, one of the goals (besides being fun for me) is that you should have some control over how the characters behave and how the game works by editing a configuration file, and be able to do more advanced customisation by writing small bits of python code.

Anyway, hopefully I can be bothered to update this blog with reasonable regularity to keep myself (and anybody else who’s interested) up to date with progress on this project. In the next post I’ll give some details on where the project stands now and what remains to be done. Perhaps there will even be some screenshots, once I figure out how this blogging software works.