Spectrum Computing

Was discussing this yesterday with other members of my local computer club. That list is insanely wrong. Whenever escapist magazine (uh, dozen reorgs ago) had "best xyz" threads on their forums it was difficult to find *anything* that's over 5 years old being nominated. Most stuff was und...

But there aren't any real money to be made from such fake. Yes, you can make a small fortune by forgery of classical paintings and creating and "unknown" painting of Rembrandt or so and convincing people that it's real. But Spectrum games are different. If you make some fake, amateur, bad...

The way I see it, it would be super easy to create some fake history, by making a new speccy game today, and then post it online as "I found this tape I had bought in the 80's while cleaning up my parent's stuff" or some such. Given how chaotic the early days were, with anyone being able t...

4thRock wrote: ↑Fri Feb 02, 2024 4:54 pm In short, yellow simply looks better on RF or composite

This is the best answer I've seen so far. =)

Why are so many spectrum games so... yellow?

I recently implemented USB MIDI input and output (but not at the same time) on the ZX Spectrum Next using the Raspberry Pi. Video about receiving: https://youtu.be/sPF-Ab80IE4 Blog post about receiving: https://solhsa.com/#USBMIDIONZXSPECTRUMNEXT Video about sending: https://youtu.be/nRYQnVuJxJ8 Blo...

Tweaked it a bit, the output looks a bit more stable now.

https://github.com/jarikomppa/spriterot ... _stability

Sorry for the delay @R-Tape , I added a few features =)

https://github.com/jarikomppa/spriterot ... al_release

Nice one Sol. I don't know how much work it would take, but if anyone fancies turning this into a utility for non-coders*, I'd owe them a pint! *or perhaps rather people like me that can code z80 asm and speccy BASIC, but never took C beyond the fahrenheit to celsius converter, and then swiftly for...

I wrote an implementation of the three-shears sprite rotator. Source code at https://github.com/jarikomppa/spriterotator
Little bit more detail here: https://cohost.org/sol-hsa/post/1617419-sprite-rotator

I hope it's of some use to someone =)

This wasn't based on any computer science. I just approached it as a word game. So there might well be a better way to do it. "Alter Ego", at least on PC, had a table of 128 common words and then text was compressed by using values 127-255 for lookup to those words and the lower values we...

For mucho, I did the following: First, zx7 allows for a "dictionary", or a block of data that is in memory right before the decompression buffer, from which it can lz data from to get a better compression ratio right off the bat. I analyze the input data for most common word pairs and then...

R-Tape wrote: ↑Wed Apr 19, 2023 12:41 pm Can anyone give an example of what exactly to type, say to compile the simple example[...]

If you look inside the build.bat (it's a text file - on command line you can write "type filename" to print out the contents) you'll see the commands that need to be run.

My "mackarel" tool which I made for my own 48k dev can also be used to repackage other games. I think I experimented with manic miner and it worked fine. Basically the magic that mackarel does is compressing the loading screen as well as the game binary and generating a .tap file with thos...

Most of them, at least in finland, were just hex dumps, no assembly listing.. so you literally couldn't learn anything from them.

Back when type-ins started they didn't have (much) hex data and you might be able to learn something by simply reading the listings. Eventually though these degenerated into short loaders and pages and pages of hex, because naturally writing things in assembly yielded more impressive programs. I per...

Here's a code solution that works eerily well: https://cohost.org/tomforsyth/post/8918 ... with-three

For AY, common method is to capture the register writes (typically once per frame) - no information about the playback engine needed. Beeper works in a completely different way, so unless you either reverse engineer the playback engine (with or without prior knowledge of whether it's a common one or...

Programming ON a 48k speccy gives you one experience no other method can give:

Make a mistake and you have to start over, which is rather time-costly.

Or alternatively save to tape often, which is rather time-costly.

I'm actually more surprised that it seems to have given more or less "correct" answers, instead of just saying you're super psychic.

See also:
- A short hike (PC)
- Minit (PC)
- Damn, I was thinking of one cool japanese freeware game with a N minute time limit but can't remember what it was called.

Sooo... is someone planning to demake subnautica on the speccy? =)

7fff has made some fixes to nextsync, making it work on the latest distro as well as fixing some old bugs:

https://github.com/Threetwosevensixseve ... tsync_v1.2

I think we can all agree it was Atari's fault. If they just used the Xbox controller, we'd have all been better off. :lol: Sinclair went and made their own, incompatible pinout for the same joystick plug, and did not fix the "single fire button" issue while they were at it. Just sayin'.

1024MAK wrote: ↑Thu Nov 03, 2022 10:27 am The joystick port ‘standard” comes from the port provided on Atari’s 2600 system. Details of what became known as the Atari Joystick Port are here.

Kinda pity that the paddle a / paddle b did not evolve into an analog xy joystick. =)