Spectrum Computing

I was just trying to find the latest updates for the If1 bis, but Dans site seems to have disappeared?

I owned Robot Messiah, so it was in the shops. Also met Christian Urquart at the ZX Microfair in about 1985. Owned the game, talked him at the same microfair,, he was charging a pound for a large poster, more if you wanted it signed. I remember being encouraged to buy the game by him and his associ...

I owned Robot Messiah, so it was in the shops. Also met Christian Urquart at the ZX Microfair in about 1985.

Actually, hobby craft did do a textured black card stock that was extremely close to the original ultimate boxes. That was probably 5 years ago though. I made a box after measuring sabre wulf very accurately. Then I did a knight lore box only to discover that it was different by quite a few mm overa...

I made a start on instruction booklet versions of pentagram and gunfight, in a similar layout style to knight lore, underwurlde etc. it looked alright, but remains unfinished, lack of time etc. I saw Marks beautiful pentagram box and felt inspired!

Also Jetpac and Pssst too.

Hey, 37 hours is nothing. Try 4 days for me 😂 I tried to compress the main code block from Xevious. Previous tests got it down from 40270 bytes to; 10051 with zx0 9937. (IIRC) with shrinkler. I was hoping zx5 would achieve better, but still waiting! It has compressed a few SCRs to smaller than zx0 a...

Mine was Lunar Jetman. Bought from WHSmiths in Bletchley. Took back twice, and when I requested a refund the 80+ year old lady at the checkout had the audacity to ask if I knew how to load games

Actually, aged about 11, I may have over-estimated her real age!!

It wasn’t till I read through all the versions that I realised they weren’t what I was using!

Well, either way, here it is, just give it the RCS encoded screen address in HL ld bc,4000h ;screen address lp1: ld a,b cp 5bh ret z cp 58h jr nc,skip xor c and 0f8h xor c ld d,a xor b xor c rlca rlca ld e,a skip: ldi inc bc inc bc jr lp1 27 bytes or 96 when used along with deZX0

Einar, having just browsed your GitHub stuff in greater detail, it seems you’re missing the smaller RCS decoder that I put on WOS some years ago, weighing in at 27 bytes. If you don’t have it, I’ll give you the code if you like?

Having read the stuff on GitHub, am I correct that zx0 has the ability to utilise a ‘dictionary’ at a different location to where the code decompresses?

This really is wonderful. Any chance of an overview of the compression methods?

Yes, it suddenly occurred to me that it was so much smaller to code, and there is only 8 bytes of date, two of which are an 06, 04 (ld b,04) at the start of a routine, so technically 6 bytes only.

This is the new routine to set the board; init_board: ld de,data20 ld hl,0ffc0h ib1: ld bc,0602h ld a,(de) ld (hl),a inc e ib2: inc l ld (hl),c ld c,00h djnz ib2 ib3: ld (hl),03h inc l inc a ld (hl),a inc l jr nz,ib1

Yes! Development has definitely slowed, but it has continued.

The board initialise routine is now 26 bytes with 6 bytes of data

Oh dear!! I always seem to have a habit of premature posting when I think I’ve done something good!

Well, actually I’ve saved more than I thought!

Now

497 bytes!

Now I really didn’t expect to save a whopping 6 bytes!!

Can’t wait to try this! I need to dust off the old toastrack and fire her up!! Looks incredible.

Christmas cheer to all! After almost an entire year of faffing around trying desperately to save an odd byte here and there and failing, I woke up yesterday morning and came up with a Solution to save 4 bytes!! ..so now my little chess thing has now broken the 500 byte milestone. 499 bytes! I’ll pos...

No problem Peter, time flies and all that!!

I think they can be applied to all the 8 bit registers.

Not sure if any of these might help. Found these in my archives. Next Line down WRT HL --------------------- 24 inc h 7C ld a,h E607 and $07 200A jr nz,end 7D ld a,l C620 add a,$20 6F ld l,a 3805 jr c,end 7C ld a,h D608 sub $08 67 ld h,a 16 bytes Next Line Down Circa 1998 Spencer Winset ------------...

Oh how I used to love those microfairs!! At the horticultural halls in Westminster if I recall correctly?! Great places to meet the programmers and surprise that my dad knew more than one of them!!!!

Generally the blocks are printed from the furthest away first, then the ones in front overwrite what lies behind them. In some cases there are checks to negate printing stuff that will eventually not be seen, but in the interests of speed, that’s often overlooked.if you look at one of the animated g...

No need to worry about iy. But being able to use one of the alternative register pairs for addressing instead of Ix may give the possibility of saving a few bytes.

Just HL’ ?