Crabs

Playing the part of a crab you must eat as many starfish as you can before you run ourt of time or lives. Avoid the waves which will wash you away if you are caught. The game has very good graphics and sound. Crab was written by P Hammond of Ipswich, Suffolk. 

—Sinclair Programs, July 1984, p.42.

This a port of a ZX Spectrum game to PlayDate, using a "PRINT" and "BEEP" emulator I made. It can be played on real PlayDate hardware by sideloading it according the PlayDate documentation, or you can play it on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer by installing the PlayDate SDK and opening the .pdx folder in the simulator.

One of my friends posted the above photo in a Discord I'm in, and I figured "I used to do a bit of VB, I wonder how much I can figure out about this from just looking at it."

Anyway I got nerdsniped and ended up reading most of the Spectrum manual and writing a (crude) 1-bit Spectrum graphics system for PlayDate, and using it to port the game.

The original game was written by "P Hammond of Ipswich, Suffolk" (famous for being the hometown of extreme metal band Cradle of Filth). The launcher card is a remix of the artwork & text shown around the game in the magazine. I suspect these pieces are by Elaine Bishop, possibly using assets from a clip-art library.

Because I did not design nor code the original game, and didn't make any of the component parts for the launcher card, I would feel wrong accepting any money for them - so I've disabled payments entirely.

I have no further immediate attention to work on Spectrum emulation for PlayDate, though I am theoretically interested in turning the display & beep code I currently have into a porting library / BASIC emulator.