My main goal, as well as learning machine code, was to get it as close as possible to the arcade - not easy given the Spectrum's limitations.

Luckly, The Pit helped me out - its colour scheme is basically the Speccy palette. It is based on 8x8 blocks, like the Speccy. It's horizontal res was similar as well. Only the vertical res was challenging.

In the end, I settled on having the screen flip between top and bottom, rather than be single screen. It seems to work fine.

Most rewarding part of the project was focusing on the fine details - the weird title screen, the font, the high-score and instruction text.

And the biggest challenge was actually making the gameplay feel like the arcade. Not easy when you're terrible at the game and can barely finish the first cavern.

Oh, and, of course, machine code...

Honestly, it feels a bit like a fever dream. It's so different from the modern programming languages I'm used to. Needing to think of memory as something you actually need to care about and consider is so alien to me. No variables, as such; self-modifying code; considering how quickly you can get a new screen generated and copied to the "TV"... By the end of it, I was thinking in t-states and frames and little else.

It's all gone now, of course, lost in a whirlwind of pandemic and dice and other distractions. I doubt I could remember a tenth of the things I learned in that month...

But maybe I'll get the urge one day, and dust off the old assembler again. Maybe I'll wonder anew at how the hell bedroom coders did it back in the 80s, without the convenience of modern IDEs, debugging and such.