Biff! Pow! Smack!

Pyskool 1.1 has been released. As always, the download page is waiting to serve up tarballs, zip archives, DEB packages and RPM packages.

It’s been about a year since the last release, so I thought it was time to venture into the pyskool.ca vaults, track down and dust off Pyskool 1.0.1, and check that everything was still in good working order. Turns out everything is, but I updated a few things anyway while I was there.

Chief among the updates is a completely new set of sound files. The old sound files - most of which first appeared over five years ago in Pyskool 0.0.3 - were actual recordings of the audio output of a Spectrum emulator, made at the lofty frequency of 11.025kHz. Not surprisingly, then, they sound a little rough when you listen carefully (especially safe-key.ogg). The new sound files, however, are 44.1kHz streams programmatically generated from a precise analysis of the delays between speaker flips in the sound routines of the original games (taking into account contended memory and interrupts). Whether they sound more or less authentic than the emulator recordings, I’m not sure, but they are undoubtedly of much higher quality.

With a Spectrum-speaker-to-WAV library in place, then, I also took the liberty of adding hitting sound effects to Skool Daze. (Be honest: did you realise they’d been missing all this time?) In addition, Skool Daze and Back to Skool now have their own distinct sound effects for the bell, lines-giving, and Eric walking (instead of sharing them, as they had done up till 1.0.1).

So that covers the main changes to Pyskool itself, but in other news, the latest Pyskool code is now hosted on GitHub, and stable releases of Pyskool are just a pip install away via the Python Package Index. The avid Pyskooler can find even more details on the changes since 1.0.1 in the changelog.

Download Pyskool 1.1 today and hear the difference!