Scramble Next

SCRAMBLE is a love letter to the classic tabletop and arcade scrolling shooters. Pilot your ship through a hostile planet, bomb the ground installations, shoot down the air defences and keep an eye on your fuel.

Six stages, one base to destroy

1. Mountains
2. City
3. Cavern
4. Fortress
5. Tunnel
6. Outer Base

Beyond the outer base waits the enemy base, a boss fight. Destroy it and the game loops with a tougher difficulty. Every stage you clear scores a 500 point bonus.

Features

• Pixel-smooth hardware scrolling on the ZX Spectrum Next, using tilemap and hardware sprites
• Parallax mountain backdrop on the Layer 2 stages
• Original chiptune soundtrack and sound effects on the TurboSound AY chips
• Random pickups: fuel, extra lives and a smart bomb that destroys every enemy on screen
• Hard mode with no pickups and a higher score. The title screen shows a marker next to your hi-score if you set it on hard
• Hi-score saved to the SD card on the Next
• Pause with ENTER
• A title-screen legend page that cycles between the enemy list, the pickups and the controls

Included in the download

File	Platform
scramble.nex	ZX Spectrum Next (the main version)
scramble128.sna	ZX Spectrum 128K, with AY music
scramble48.sna	ZX Spectrum 48K, with beeper sound
scramble.p8	PICO-8

How to play

Controls

Key	Action
Q / A	Up / down
O / P	Left / right
SPACE	Fire laser
M	Drop bomb
ENTER	Pause
H (title screen)	Toggle hard mode
Kempston joystick	Also supported

On PICO-8, use the arrow keys, Z (laser) and X (bomb).

Aim of the game

• Your laser shoots straight ahead, so use it against flying enemies.
• Bombs fall in an arc, so use them against ground targets.
• Your fuel drains constantly. Bomb fuel tanks to refuel. Run dry and you crash.
• Hitting the terrain or an enemy costs a life.
• Stay low on fuel or lives and the matching pickup may appear, but only briefly and never two of the same at once.

Scoring

Target	Points
Ground rocket	50
Flying rocket	80
Missile silo	80
UFO	100
AA turret	100
Fuel tank	150
Fuel drop pickup	25
Smart bomb pickup	100
Extra life pickup	1UP
Stage clear	500 bonus

Running it

• Next: copy scramble.nex to your SD card and load it from the browser, or open it in an emulator that supports Next files such as CSpect or ZEsarUX.
• 128K / 48K: load the .sna snapshot in any Spectrum emulator (Fuse, ZEsarUX, etc.) or on real hardware with a snapshot loader.
• PICO-8: load scramble.p8 in PICO-8 (load scramble.p8, then run).

Created using Claude AI