Spectrum Computing

I think it is unfair to compare the commercial classic titles to the stuff that came after because the intent and development cycle/constraints are so different. The main thing that strikes me and causing the nostalgia rose tinted glasses to crack was seeing just how little commercial coders cared a...

I was hoping that at some time in the future the 'phantom typist' of fuse would be made script able. This would be a great application for the Phantom typist. look at the progress list, open the file. poke a bunch of memory locations, is it different than the stock memory map? if so name a file acco...

One thing that is interesting is where the majority of a countries published spectrum output being in Latin alphabet when they themselves used Cyrillic. Serbia From what I understand there was an active user base, therefore there must be more titles from Serbia that are as of now not documented on w...

I figure this was the only way you could practically do a Plotto style interactive fiction game/RPG on the spectrum.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/06/plotto/

It was weird how most of the educational machines ended up in a landfill. I think its something to do with the way that schools/colleges wrote off old stock. You rarely saw that stuff going to boot sales or charity shops. It's a shame when you think how much all that stuff cost originally even with ...

We used to use the BBC in school, all the way through infants & primary school we had them. Even when I was in secondary school you would still see them around with a mix of 186/286 PCs during the 90s :lol: I thought the keyboard was good - it was a solid bit of kit. But then you would expect th...

a lot of patients and time on their hands For the confused I am not talking about an under-employed doctor/dentist lol patience... please forgive my spelling mistake. :lol: :lol: In other news, I wanted to model the effect of concealment of information within systems by interested actors. That is a...

The answer to your question... http://bfy.tw/Hwvu For googlephobic Keyboard Mappings ----------------- There are two main keyboard mappings available on the Options menu, default mapping and logical mapping. For default mapping most of the keys are the same on the Beeb and PC but these are not: PC B...

That is the thing, while the end result of having a huge collection of fonts would be fabulous, the work required to get to that point would be a brutal slog. I figure it would take someone with a lot of patients and time on their hands (that is why I figured a retiree would be in the best position ...

Looking at the archive I was curious a.) how often custom fonts were used b.) did the same group of fonts get used across many different games or was it a case of many individual fonts getting designed? Because its a continuous block of memory, of a known length. I think it could be extracted automa...

Today's project time was spent looking at custom fonts. Here is an open major project for an interested person - a great retirement project actually. Go through the archive, and rip every instance of a custom font. Found an unintentional great source for inspiration on the youtubes - I was just watc...

PeteProdge wrote: ↑Tue May 01, 2018 5:41 pm What really surprised me is the 16-bits using the Sinclair ROM font!

Strangely, the Spectrum version uses a custom font.

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sXQoGcMN1U[/media]

That is so random...

Obrigado, muito agradável.

Thanks Alessandro, much appreciated. I should have dug harder and actually googled this. :lol: 10 year old blog post: http://szeligaski.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/redefining-zx-spectrum-character-set.html 3 months ago: https://markhardisty.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/how-to-rip-a-zx-spectrum-games-font/

So looking through OUTLET and the rather excellent work of djnzx48 https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=425&hilit=font#p5596 got my noggin' jogging - is there an easy way to load a font to use in a.) a BASIC program b.) an Assembly program. Being a simple potato while I...

:lol: *found the documentation for the Ryzen* I am curious about the thermal performance of the AMD - I am somewhat out of touch with the hardware side of life, years ago AMD was notorious for thermal issues with the chip but now according to the inter-webs they have resolved this. If I can fry eggs...

Emulators are brilliant but at the same time frustrating :lol: Well back from vacation now all refreshed and ready to actually finish some open projects :twisted: Today's project time was spent procrastinating and deciding to re-organize the den to improve 'productivity'. New PC on the way, on of th...

Congratulations, I wonder what the TAS version would be..

Considering how popular The Quill was I am surprised a magazines didn't do a feature on this. Perhaps the company didn't give them a big enough bung

The Frog Path loading screen is fabulous.

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/mag.php?issue_id=2934&page=76 It seems like its a multi part utility, the compression portion builds the database/tokenizer then you have ex pander reverses the process according to the review. I haven't used it but it seems you are looking the compressed tokens ...

You are being way to hard on yourself. Sure given enough extra time everything can be made better but producing something to a strict time limit is always going to end in compromises creatively. You probably already have a bunch of ideas/motif for next week, all that extra experience in time managem...

You can really find the top tier deals!

I think its sad that its not a accurate representation of the object being preserved. I get why its not done. but will suck for the future researcher trying to document this stuff. To know that it once existed but was cast aside is sad. We can't know the context why someone would look for that infor...

That's what makes this kind of thing interesting, is the outliers that break policy. I figured showing a loading screen is supposed to give as best an idea as possible to someone who has never seen the program before what sitting in-front of a TV in the 80s with the tape was like. Sure for most load...