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Game created using AGD (Here running on the ZX Spectrum)

I believe everybody, even outside of the ZX Spectrum community, knows about Jonathan Cauldwell’s Arcade Game Designer (AGD), a game engine that lets you create professional-looking games for the Speccy and Amstrad CPC.

Not long ago the Dragon and CoCo community were blessed by a converter tool that helped to bring nothing less than 219 games made with AGD to the TRS-80 Color and Dragon computers, which by the way, can be downloaded here.

Now, the MSX enthusiasts will also be able to play almost all these games, thanks to a new AGD MSX Suite, a set of utilities created by José Luis Tur that allows one to convert, compile and execute AGD games. Andy Johns, a prolific AGD developer mentioned that some of the games he created (Ooze, Nixy 1 and Nixy2) are not just made with AGD so the conversion might not be that great. “You won’t get the intro, menus or additionally coded screens. Not even sure you’ll get the music“, he adds. Despite that, there are still a lot of games that will probably work just fine.

It is important to highlight that the suite is not a turn-key solution that would convert the game with a press of a button, but it requires some development experience to be used. The games that can be converted have to be available in the source code form and the good news is that the vast majority of the games created with AGD are, based on the project made for the CoCo and Dragon we mentioned earlier.

People interested in creating their own games can use Cauldwell’s multiplatform editor which will help to create the ZX Spectrum or Amstrad CPC versions. The AGD MSX Suite can then be used to generate the version that will work in all MSX machine types. However, only MSX1 features are supported, which in my view, is not really a limitation.

Some details of the project:

MSX1 support.

Smooth gameplay (50 fps).

Full 32 hardware sprites available.

Sprite flickering routine.

Full PSG support: PT3 and ayFX players integrated.

It can generate RAM-based distributions (using floppy disk images) or cartridge files (16KB or 32KB ROM files).

High compatibility with the already existing AGD projects.

When we have more information about ported games, we will publish them here.

The AGD MSX Suite is open source and available on Github.

Source: MSX Blog & MSX Resource Center