It’s the Gigeresque alien mecha monstrosity
Dobkeratops, one of the best known recurring
bosses in the R-Type series. The Spectrum
version coloured him all red, because basically
none of the other palette of colours would have
been remotely suitable.
CLASSIC BOSS
It wasn’t meant to be possible to have such
large, colourful objects in a Spectrum game, and
few if any ever managed to top R-Type’s screen-
filling cyan and magenta monsters. You can see
how everything is designed around those 8x
squares.
CLASSIC LEVEL
T
he distinctive look of most
Spectrum games was forced
on programmers by its
severe graphical limitations.
The screen was divided into squares
of 8x8 pixels, and each square could
only contain two of the machine’s tiny
palette of garish colours. As graphics
moved around the screen, they’d
take on the colour attributes of the
underlying squares. To avoid the screen
turning into a mismatched mess of
coloured blocks, programmers usually
stuck with black or white sprites on a
single-coloured background.
The big, bold arcade graphics of
R-Type allowed for an alternative
approach, in which everything was
made as large and chunky as possible,
designed around those 8x8 squares.
It’s a technique used by a select
few Spectrum games, notably Light
Force and Trapdoor, and although the
enhanced colour came at the expense
of smoothness of movement, it made
for a very eye-catching effect.
Virtually everything from Irem’s
state-of-the-art coin-op was somehow
crammed into 48 kilobytes of RAM,
demonstrating that six years after its
launch, as the 16-bit next gen steadily
gained traction, the humble Spectrum
still had a few tricks up its sleeve.