Play Anaglyph Aliens, a game using 3D glasses for the Amstrad CPC computer

Anaglyph Aliens is a type-in listing I wrote for Amtix CPC magazine, which was published in June 2024. Below you can play the game, read how it works, and copy the game listing to paste into your emulator. There's also a .dsk file to download.

How to play Anaglyph Aliens

This game is designed to work with 3D red/blue anaglyph glasses. You can buy them cheaply on eBay, or perhaps you have a pair from a comic or my book Cool Scratch Projects in Easy Steps.

Click the game window to activate it (including sound), and then use the cursor and Space keys to play. At the start, it draws the huge sprites. When the game ends, you can play again without going through this process.

You can play the game below, but the online emulator runs a bit slow and there is a bit more ghosting on the 3D effect. To see it in real time and with a better 3D effect, download my .dsk file to use in your emulator. This disc also includes BAS Invaders and my programs from Amstrad Action, Amstrad Computer User and my book The Basic Idea.

Viewing tips

The 3D effect depends entirely on the separation between the red and cyan images. If that gets too big, the effect breaks down. The 3D effect looked really good to me using Winape and the standard window size, but broke down somewhat on an Amstrad monitor and when running the in-browser emulator with a very wide browser window.

You can try adjusting the size of the emulator window you're using, or sitting further back.

The effect is easiest to see if you sit square-on to the monitor and have the monitor close to eye height (that is: not looking down on it, and not looking from the side at it).

About Anaglyph Aliens

I've always been fascinated by 3D effects, as my article about how stereograms work and the 3D games in Cool Scratch Project in Easy Steps show. For the final issue of Amtix CPC in June 2024, I wanted to see whether it was possible to create games using 3D glasses in Amstrad BASIC. There isn't much prior art for this. Mike Singleton wrote a game called 3 Deep Space, which appeared on the Spectrum and other machines, but didn't review well. C&VG ran a 3D special in October 1983 with various type-ins (and some nice 3D illustrations), however they seemed to be limited by the colours available on the computers. I'm not aware of any other 8-bit games for 3D glasses, or any on the Amstrad. [Update! I've since been told by Rity at the CPCWIKI forum about French commercial games Bad Max and Relief Action which came with 3D glasses.]

The 3D effect is possible because the red lens lets red images through and blocks blue, while the blue lens lets blue through and blocks red. Because each eye can be shown a different view of the same object, there can be a sense of depth. The glasses are cheap on eBay and other places, by the way, if you don't have any to hand (search for 3D anaglyph glasses).

How effective the technique would be on the Amstrad depended on how well the machine's colours could match the red and blue lenses of the glasses. I created an experiment using the Winape emulator. For the first demo I simply drew boxes in random positions and at random depths. While there was some leakage of colours through the lenses, it was possible to see a 3D effect and recognise multiple levels of depth. It was also possible to use the older red/green 3D glasses by changing the colour of the right-eye ink from blue to green.

For the magazine listing in the final issue of Amtix CPC (pictured right), I created Anaglyph Aliens, which uses the 3D effect by moving aliens towards you, flying out of the screen.

There are a few interesting things about this program:

• The aliens are defined using two UDGs butted together. I created them using my UDG definer program. These images are then enlarged at various sizes to make the 3D aliens. This is highly efficient, enabling all the aliens to be created from just 16 numbers.
• The images are drawn in BASIC but are then grabbed as sprites using a short machine code sprite routine called ESD Advanced (ESD 2), that I wrote for The Basic Idea book. This enables a huge amount of sprite data to be created without readers having to type it in. For a listing in 2024, when people can just download anything, it doesn't make much sense to have huge amounts of sprite data to type in. I wish I had thought of this technique in the 90s when I was contributing listings to magazines. My Fishtank program, in particular, could have been shorter and had more fish varieties.
• I wanted to make the set-up process part of the user experience. While the sprites are being drawn, I took the opportunity to show the instructions and make it like a title screen. There are sound effects for the aliens as they're drawn, almost like they're bring printed. You can test your glasses on the aliens while they're being created.
• The first thing the program does is poke the machine code into memory. I added a print statement in this loop, so that whatever's on the screen rolls off. This creates a nice effect for very little code. Again, this would have been a good addition in previous listings.
• I used symbols from the Amstrad's extended character set to create the random skyline, giving it a bit of an Amscii feel.
• The keys are sometimes a little bit less responsive than I'd like. Perhaps someone can take this idea further and craft something in machine code using the 3D effect, which would likely be faster and more responsive.
• In the online version of the game, I've added a menu for choosing whether you have red or green glasses. This does not feature in the magazine listing for space reasons.
• In the online version, I also added a tune at the start of each game. I was keen to have a tune but didn't want to have a lot of music data in the listing, so I had the idea to play the machine code data as a tune and found a part of the code that worked well. I added a short C note after each code note to make it feel more musically centred. It's an odd little ditty, but didn't require any additional data.
• The online version also includes a speed optimisation, using defint to set all the variables to integers, and then overriding this for the mem variable used to poke the sprite management machine code. Thanks to eto at CPCWIKI for this optimisation.
• I signed the game with a symbol in the bottom right corner that I used in some of my programs in the 80s/90s, including The Further Adventures of Fred, Piano Chords Tutor and 3D Mapper. It seemed appropriate for what is highly likely to be the final Amstrad type-in listing I write, given that Amtix CPC is ceasing publication.

See the code listing

Here's the code listing, as it appeared in Amtix magazine. It's much more readable than many of my listings from the 80s! I think this listing achieves quite a bit for its length and would have gone down well in the 80s/90s, although without eBay it was much harder to get hold of 3D glasses then unless they were bundled with the magazine. You can use the Auto Type feature in Winape to paste this program into your emulator.

The version of the game that you see in this browser window adds a menu for choosing your glasses, as well as a couple of other small features and a speed optimisation.

Where next?

• Cool Scratch Projects in Easy Steps - Discover how to make 3D games in Scratch, the beginner-friendly programming language widely used in schools.
• Make 3D anaglpyh website effects in CSS - See how to make your website pop by creating anaglyph effects with CSS.
• Sean's Amstrad CPC homepage, including Amstrad type-ins and my Amstrad BASIC programming tutorial.
• Download my disc of Amstrad games and utilities