Video Pool

A 1985 pool game for the ZX Spectrum with a top-down view, released under the US Billiards name. Cue sports were a productive subject in the eight-bit era, since they needed neither elaborate animation nor large environments yet supported endlessly repeatable play.

The underlying problem is computationally interesting: calculating ball rebounds, friction across the cloth and energy transfer through collisions. On a Z80 with tight memory that meant simplifying the physics to whatever the machine could resolve between frames. The result is usually approximate rather than accurate, and an experienced player quickly identifies where the model matches reality and where it diverges. That is not necessarily a flaw, because learning the specific implementation becomes part of the challenge.

The ZX Spectrum offered one advantage and one obstacle for this genre. Its relatively high resolution allowed a clean, legible table, but the attribute-based colour system meant ball colours interfered with one another whenever two balls came close. Programmers worked around it with restricted palettes or a monochrome table surface.

Control comes down to setting the direction and strength of the shot, and in some implementations applying spin. With no mouse as standard on the Spectrum, aiming is done from the keyboard or joystick, which demands patience when fine-tuning an angle by single degrees.

You can launch it in the browser here on OldGame.cz and judge for yourself how well eight-bit cue physics holds up.