Pyskool 0.5.2 has been released. The download page is, as usual, your one-stop shop for a fresh copy.

Things have been a little quiet on the Pyskool front lately, so I thought it would be good to push out a release to prove that Eric isn’t dead. On the contrary, Eric is alive and jumping, as you can see in the picture that accompanies this article. And you can also see that the picture was taken in the White Room, which makes it the first White Room blackboard picture to appear on this website. Take note, Pyskool blog trivia buffs!

So what’s new? Well, first, some background information. In the original (Spectrum) version of Skool Daze, there is a bug that prevents us from hearing the sound of Eric jumping as it should be heard, because address 60149 contains 245 instead of 254. Now Microsphere lore has it that David Reidy used to write machine code as numbers down on paper, and his wife Helen would cast her trusty schoolteacher’s eye over these numbers and type them dutifully into the Spectrum. If this is true, then I think it provides a nice explanation for the jumping sound bug. A slip of the finger caused by late night muscle fatigue on Helen’s part, or perhaps a slip of the brain or pen on David’s part for similar reasons, 254 becomes 245, and bingo: the jumping sound effect is dead.

Anyway, getting to the point, the jumping sound has been resurrected for version 0.5.2 of Pyskool. Whether this makes Pyskool more or less faithful to the original game is a difficult, subtle and open question, and not one I intend to address in this blog post. Leave a comment if you have strong feelings either way. Suffice it to say, though, that if you find the old-but-new sound effect repugnant or otherwise offensive, it is a simple matter to disable it: remove or comment out the line that starts with JUMP in the [Sounds] section in ini/skool_daze/config.ini.

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.