Spectrum Computing Forums

More interesting developments, the version of the manual that Trade Secret is referencing is the revision one. It was a little unclear what version was being used. This has now been resolved. Big thanks to PeterJ for the assist. You might be thinking 'well so what?' it clears up a question of attrib...

It is a very optimistic advert. It assumes a working understanding of BASIC & Maths. :lol: In an age where we now do the opposite and assume our audience are windowlickers it is rather jarring to see these kind of things :lol: no thought was given to the readers that today would be 'triggered' by be...

I only noticed this when trying to find references in trade secret :lol: http://zxnext.narod.ru/manuals/Basic_Programming.pdf Page 170-188 seem to be missing from the zx spectrum programming manual pdf... Is there a complete scan available? the HTML version has neglected to retain the page numbers s...

True it depends what you compare it against, I would compare it against something like altirra. One guy in college wrote probably one of the best Atari emulators and what many consider to be one of the best 8-bit emulators while he was in college :lol: The documentation is some of the best I have se...

This might be interesting: https://archive.org/search.php?query=23659&sin=TXT&and%5B%5D=collection%3A%22computermagazines%22&sort=date The earliest mention I can find is in PCW in late January 1983, but it doesn't seem like it was being used for copy protection then. Strangely enough there's an alm...

Honestly I never thought of using archive.org in that way

Yea you are right about wrong dates being entered into the meta data. For example INPUT gets listed as being published in the 90s..

Yea, that is also in Trade secret. But this article pre-dates the publication. See I am starting to get the impression that Trade Secret was a combination of techniques from letters/articles that were published in newsletters/magazines. *put on tin foil hat* Perhaps that's why it never got a review ...

Lol I have faith that at least one autist hoarder has archived the entire website. It's just a matter of finding that exceptional individual and convincing them to share. I vaguely remembered a website that had listed of articles, but I couldn't find it. I guess this must have been it. I am not sure...

This is fantastic having multiple sources for the same technique helps a lot in documenting the technique. It is also useful in figuring out stuff like where a technique first emerged from. The article you link is December 1984, Trade Secret was published some time in 1984. It makes me wonder if the...

I don't know much about the RANDOMIZE USR 0 trick other than it was a way to fake microdrive support on a system that didn't have it? My understanding is, its for BASIC use. By forcing the error output to have nowhere to print it triggers the crash. This is what Trade Secret says In BASIC programs, ...