Spectrum Computing

12. After Burner

12. Puffy'S Aga ???

I've seen it before, but that cat face that appears at 4:24 just represents everything that makes me cringe about these 'Spectrum Graphics Showcases'. I mean, it's an utterly fantastic pixel drawing of a cat, but the colours? I don't believe it's a 'bold, artistic choice by the artist' to use primar...

Yeah, one of our professors has a complete collection of Argos catalogues. At some point it was the biggest print-run in Europe, apparently! All very well citing it as a valuable research record of what people were buying over the years, but as I remember it we bought very little from Argos, and th...

SpeccyKev wrote: ↑Mon Mar 14, 2022 5:04 pmPS Your Sinclair sucked. Always thought they tried to hard to be funny and just ended up sounding like a load of giggly schoolboys.

I rather think that was the point...

For me, it's right about now. I'm afraid I found the game-reviews-only format of Crash a bit too heavy when I was younger. I loved the cover art of Crash but I was a definite YS reader, since it did techy bits, then later covered more of the puerile teen lifestyle thing. With my parents only paying ...

If I was dong something along these lines - I'd consider writing the text as a .txt file, and dumping it into Speccy memory above RAMTOP. Then it can be loaded/saved using CODE, and read in BASIC with PEEK. This is the best idea if you are going to do a multi-load. Use CLEAR to lower the RAMTOP (wh...

You could build a dictionary of words, or write your own form of shorthand where you use some of the keyboard symbols that you'll never normally type as substitutes for common words or sets of letters, e.g. '@' represents 'a' followed by a space. '#' for 'the' + space. Look at what you've written fo...

Thanks, two Dominic Robinson games that presumably share a bit of the control code, but both have the same quirk. If you press '0' to start, then try keys '6' and '7', at first they move you Up and Down until you press '8' or '9' or '0' to Fire. Then the '6' and '7' keys switch over to moving you Le...

Maybe something I should think more about too, but can anyone name any (good) games that have Sinclair joystick control selected automatically? I'm aware that Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy can be played with a Sinclair joystick without having to select it first, although you still have to press ENTE...

The Zelda G&W though, it's just a nice little piece of nostalgia. I know I'm the sort of nerd Nintendo aimed it at. At least the damn things are rechargeable! I sometimes wonder about pushing myself to play through the original Zelda, as I really loved the later games (Awakening, Ocarina, Twili...

Try & links below.

You shouldn't really be expecting more than two colours in a character space from a Spectrum anyway. That's just crazy talk.

Interesting to look at the prices of tech and toys in some 80s Argos catalogue scans I've seen on-line. Not paid for any though. Presumably there are torrent sites for this stuff that people are getting these from before turning into opportunistic online shops? The downloads of some of those home-sh...

Since the video out is already the whole picture, I don't see how converting it could mess up the video timing even if it tried to. The biggest problem of converting formats is the addition of lag, particularly if the converter has to capture a whole frame of the image before passing it on. Timing a...

Underwurlde was never playable!

I got the Zelda Anniversary Game & Watch for Christmas. It's really cool. https://i.postimg.cc/wyCrmN0p/zelda-gameandwatch.png It's a neat gadget and a great tribute, but the first few NES Zelda games are barely playable even with the nostalgia goggles turned up to full. And while Link's Awaken...

There was a DOS-based Spectrum emulator called SPEC256. The way it worked was by modelling 8 bits for every 1 bit of Spectrum memory. Thus every time you copied a byte from RAM to the screen, you were actually copying eight bytes to a 256-colour screen. Initially all bytes were either 255 (for a 1 b...

Those mini Game & Watch are lovely little devices, but they chew through the button cell batteries at a hell of a rate.
I think I've got Mario's Cement Factory, Donkey Kong Jr and Super Mario Bros somewhere. That last one has an impressive variety of levels for an LCD game.

Yep, happening again today on Chrome under Windows 10, using a /forums/ bookmark.
Again, works fine if I go to the main page first, then click FORUMS. I'll change the bookmark to the home page and try that a few times.

I was hoping to be able to set it up in a sort of 'console mode' for a show, without too many options available to the user to b*gger it up. It'd be a shame to go to all the effort of supporting all those gaming controllers with their various pads and sticks and not support a basic N x buttons USB j...

Depends how you want it to work. Do you have a different address to jump to for each value, or is it always the same address? With a table, you could have either a 1/0 byte meaning 'jump/don't jump' (if that works for you), or you have a 2-byte address to jump to. But you have ONE entry for EVERY PO...

I was also thinking about a table, but wouldn't it be slower than my example? The table will only do one check - it will go straight to the answer it needs. It might not be quicker than the first check in your example, but by the time you're doing a third or fourth comparison against the same initi...

May have fixed this - I noticed the bookmarked URL I was using as a link to the forums included a 'session ID' as part of the URL. I edited and removed this so the link is just to spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/ and - so far - it seems to work OK.

Lately when I access the site, if I use a link that takes me direct to the forum, the page comes up but is frozen. None of the links respond to a mouse-over or a click and the page seems to be permanently busy doing something. However, if I arrive at the main spectrumcomputing.co.uk title page, then...