Sven Michael Klose has developed and released a rather spiffy horizontally scrolling shoot-'em-up for the unexpanded Commodore Vic-20 called Pulse. This is influenced by Konami's 1985 arcade hit Gradius.

Gradius was later ported to the Commodore 64, as well as other home computers and video games consoles but by that time the Vic-20 was already a commercial relic and Commodore were turning their attentions to a fledgling 16-bit multimedia computer called the Amiga.

Ironically, the VIC has probably had more entertainment software released for it in the past decade (thanks to enthusiasts and developers like Sven) than the A500 or any of the classic 'Miggy' computers. Anyway, back to the matter in hand.

By coincidence, the original Gradius involved taking control of the Vic Viper armoured craft, which was hurtling towards many dozens of attacking alien scum. The task is simply to obliterate and/or avoid these malevolent beings, whilst navigating past any of missiles and other such things fired at the Viper.

In comparison to the C64 version of Gradius, Sven's Pulse is a whole lot more fluid and pacey from the start, although is soon limited by the memory restrictions of the 3.5K of RAM available on the unexpanded machine. There are also a few glitches here and there, but nothing that distracts from the technical achievement nor the gameplay. Sound effects are not much more than functional, and there is no music to speak of, but then this was the same on the C64 - which had the luxury of more memory and a superior sound chip.

The source code for this excellent byte-sized blaster is available at github.com/SvenMichaelKlose/pulse, where you will find the program file (.prg extension), which will work on all good emulators and may be transferred to the real machine if you know how.

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Back in mid-November last year, Einar Saukas released a multi-colour software sprite engine for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum called Nirvana, which allows the colour within a character block to be changed every two lines, somewhat negating the traditional problems associated with the infamous colour attribute clash. This engine was available to be used by other Speccy developers, and so it has with El Stompo, a platform/puzzie game by World of Spectrum forumite R-Tape (also known as Dave Hughes) under the label Stonechat Productions.

The last television repair shop has closed, leaving many CRT television sets unwanted and un-fixed so, to save them from land-fill, a googly-eyed green monster must find each one and simply stomp on the top each within a static screen level. As the sets are brought back to life, some family favourite programmes and channels appear; you will recognise many (if not all) of these. But there are nasty roaming organisms that are out to stop you.

The graphics are really quite nice and well-defined, and aside from the colourful aesthetics and cute animations, the game is nicely progressive with thoughtful levels. If you want to play El Stompo, head over to tinyurl.com/qa8uovr, and give it a go.

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A couple of weeks ago, I reported on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum release called ZX2048, a version of a simple but popular puzzle game. Well, I missed the Commodore 64 version, which was released at around the same time.

The game starts involved a 4 x 4 grid which, at the start, is populated with two squares each containing the number two. These blocks may be moved to each side of the square play area; if the block touches one of the same value on its travels, the sum total is added together and one block is removed from play. Each move will add a new block with the value of two in it.

To get addicted to the C64 version, simply head over to https://csdb.dk/release/?id=129788 and download it.