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GulpmanFAQ

Special Controls

Most of these are documented on the second screen.

'F5' pauses on the first scrolling title screen - in case you want to read it.

What's broken in v0.01

A few things you might see:

• Resizing does strange things, but nothing fatal. (Artefacts in border, wrong placement on screen, title screen image size, etc.)
• No full screen on Linux (we had problems).
• The S=Save option is not working in any way.
• Laser action isn't ideal (multiple lasers).
• Monsters can keep walking during the best score display.

If you see other stuff, let us know.

The Linux version is really slow (might apply to broken Windows/Mac versions)

We noticed one specific Linux 32-bit Pentium 4 machine ran very slowly (1-4 fps on the title screen) and less than 1 fps on the menu.

Our current working theory is that this machine is using software rendering - and although it has a graphics card.

Gulpman uses SDL2 hardware renderers to do all scaling and rendering (printing). It doesn't need much in the way of 3D hardware, but missing 3D hardware is, apparently, devastating. If you have something which is running less than 20 frames per second, then it's quite possible you also have missing 3D hardware acceleration.

We will will continue to investigate.

(It doesn't escape our humour that a 2d game that moves five tiny things on screen written in 1982 that ran on a 3.5MHz Z80 is crippled by no 3D hardware. )

From a technically perspective we reprint all characters on screen every frame - mostly because of the iPhone history of the game (see GulpmanClone). We've used SDL1.2 before, and this wouldn't have the problem because the software renderer is good. However, we don't think it's unreasonable to want rely on a hardware 3D chip - if this is in fact problem.

Will you produce versions for other platforms?

Maybe but no promises. We've had iOS (phone/tablet), Android and Open Pandora versions running. A Raspberry Pi build shouldn't be too hard.

Any more background info?

The fantastic World of Spectrum has some more information on its Gulpman page. There were a few minor versions produced for different publishers - you can find those on the World of Spectrum web site.

Some information about the original ZX Spectrum development can be found on the initial 'title screen' of the Gulpman Remake.

Gulpman was based on his ZX81 game Gulp (and here). (Also see Gulp 2).

Rob has written about the background to the creation of the remake and occasionally on his blog.

Contact us

Any feedback to team@gulpman.net - which will find it’s way to Rob, Tony and Kenny.