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Hello,
Lately we are only finding games developped with MPAGD instead of AGD.
AGD was created by Jonathan Cauldwell in 2008 and we can work with the Spectrum snapshots and extract the AGD source file, that's to say
a sequence of high level commands defined by the author, thanks to a C converter (special for every CPU).
MPAGD (Multi Platform Arcade Game Designer) was also designed by Jonathan Cauldwell in 2019, this time the tool uses the project data to
create an assembly file instead of saving a 'tokenized' version of the data as AGD does.
We could not extract data from these snapshots because our Converters only understand the data from std AGD files.
Fortunately, Kees van Oss has created a new converter that can deal with these MPAGD games.
I have been betatesting the output files and that way we have found some cases that had to be added to the converter.
The MPAGD games will be published in packs as the AGD games, to differentiate them I will add (***) after the game name to denote
that it is an MPAGD game in the list of games per pack.
cheers!
Pere Serrat

Hello,
This is pack #68 of MPAGD converted games. It comes with these new games cheers
Kees van Oss & Pere Serrat

The (***) denotes it is an MPAGD game And some screenshots

and some more ...
enjoy!
Pere Serrat

Pere - does that mean that the MPAGD games run faster, since it converts it to assembler vs. an intermediate type language?

lcurtisboyle wrote: ↑Wed Apr 02, 2025 4:18 am Pere - does that mean that the MPAGD games run faster, since it converts it to assembler vs. an intermediate type language?

I asume that Jonathan decided to compile to ASM when he created the MPAGD in order to improve speed and even size for the binary files.
Of course this affects only the Spectrum final binary file.
For the other computers the procedure needs two conversions. First we must extract from the Spectrum binary (snapshot) an AGD command list, that later we process with a customized C app that creates a 6x09 assembly file that finally gets converted into an executable with a 6x09 compiler.
So the final result will depend on the AGD to assembler converter efficiency.
Talking about our 6x09 machines, the result is the same for an AGD game than for an MPAGD because the final AGD->ASM converter is much the same.
The problem has been that decoding tokenized code is much easier than decoding asm code. This 'new' hard work has been done by Kees van Oss along a lot of time.
cheers!

lcurtisboyle wrote: ↑Wed Apr 02, 2025 4:18 am Pere - does that mean that the MPAGD games run faster, since it converts it to assembler vs. an intermediate type language?

I asume that Jonathan decided to compile to ASM when he created the MPAGD in order to improve speed and even size for the binary files.
Of course this affects only the Spectrum final binary file.
For the other computers the procedure needs two conversions. First we must extract from the Spectrum binary (snapshot) an AGD command list, that later we process with a customized C app that creates a 6x09 assembly file that finally gets converted into an executable with a 6x09 compiler.
So the final result will depend on the AGD to assembler converter efficiency.
Talking about our 6x09 machines, the result is the same for an AGD game than for an MPAGD because the final AGD->ASM converter is much the same.
The problem has been that decoding tokenized code is much easier than decoding asm code. This 'new' hard work has been done by Kees van Oss along a lot of time.
cheers!