Spectrum Computing

The current buzz is all about 'generative AI' but it can only ever be derivative as Adam Conover explained in that last video. As Einar said, you have to be competent in the subject field to spot its errors, so AI will never truly replace competence. It will for example produce code by consensus (vi...

NSFW - contains lots of swearing. I tend to agree with Adam on this.

When I bought Stunt Car Racer in a newsagent for £1.99. Or maybe at a push £2.99. It must have been 1991. I had played it on an Amiga and loved it. It did not disappoint. The gameplay was all there. I could not believe it.

Count me in for eagerly awaiting Melchior's Mansion. No development tweets in a while, I do find those interesting too.

patters wrote: ↑Sat Feb 25, 2023 12:59 pm I liked the way The Register wrote up the 'incident'. The metaphor is very fitting:

https://www.theregister.com/2015/05/22/ ... r_dispute/

The penny finally drops...

So that's why Einar has an elf for an avatar. I did wonder.

It seems both of those forks are now incorporating each other's changes. According to its release history, the chris-y one pulled changes from ohnosec but I had some significant issues fixed since that happened. The one I posted is up to date with changes in chris-y main branch, as shown in the GitH...

That's quite an old version of zmakebas. There are newer ones with significant fixes:
https://github.com/ohnosec/zmakebas

I've reported a few issues myself that have been rectified by this maintainer. Shameless plug, but my Syntax highlighter for Sublime also highlights zmakebas files (see my sig).

I liked the way The Register wrote up the 'incident'. The metaphor is very fitting:

https://www.theregister.com/2015/05/22/ ... r_dispute/

That's interesting. I sometimes get a mangled screen and unresponsive system after resetting my DivMMC Future. Usually a power cycle or two fixes it.

The choice of serial dongle is important. I had tried to use a cheap FTDI one which worked fine on PC but on Mac would only transfer to the Z88 and fail to read any transfer from the Z88. In the end I bought the Tripp Lite Keyspan USB Serial port which is quite pricey at around £35 but works perfect...

Since I started this thread I have tried to use ChatGPT for various programming tasks in my job and it's been absolutely dire - producing non-working crap time after time, or really failing to grasp the requirements, or making firm assertions that are just wrong. I tried this afternoon to get it to ...

Luzie wrote: ↑Thu Feb 09, 2023 6:23 am Don´t know if threre´s a solution in that thread, but maybe: viewtopic.php?p=65342#p65342

Ha, I was going to link to that megathread I made, but you beat me to it!

It works better with higher-level languages where there are also tons of examples around the internet. If you ask it for something in Z80 it makes some major mistakes, but I've seen it write UNITY code that genuinely works, and for some quite fiddly requests too. I asked it to write some Z80 ASM to...

I decided to try ChatGPT this week for some work coding tasks and found it to be useful only for providing the outline of an approach. The code it wrote was pretty awful. In most cases it produced non-working code, and while correcting errors would randomly forget some functional requirements. As I ...

I used a couple of those exact tapes for my Spectrum programs. Unfortunately I re-recorded the early part of one tape so much that it distorted and I was unable to recover the data for my very best BASIC game, back when I digitised the waveform in the late 90s. Like a fool, I tossed the tape, and ev...

Eyeballing that list, it really is astonishing how many incredible titles have been made *40 years* after the Spectrum's debut.

@presh recently shared something decent in this regard:
viewtopic.php?p=98923&hilit=runout#p98923

Oh wow, that Iooks so cool and intricate, all mapped out. Cheers @pavero and what an ingenious BASIC program @IvanBasic!

TMD2003 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 7:48 pm But it's taken the Koreans nearly 50 years to get that far...

And it's taken most of us roughly 40 years of Speccy ownership to get this far

I did an unpicked and commented version of the BASIC listing for this and, to make sure I had fully understood it teleports and all, I made sure it was definitely possible finish the game. Well even working backwards from the data it took me ages to prove to myself that it did indeed have an end tha...

I bought a replacement case from there, having found a real keyboard mat cheap on eBay, and used it for a bare board 48K I had bought from Retroleum. I'm not too impressed by the stamping of the metal keyboard overlay. It's quite off for the key cutouts. Maybe it would work better with their own rub...

There is a recent [2021] update of zxmakebas that sorted out a few bugs I reported to the author, and he said there were numerous copies and forks around - so the bug fixes, including FN I think might not be in your version) I would recommend this version of zmakebas: https://github.com/ohnosec/zma...

you may find it easier to just make esxDOS remount your SD card. Hold down BREAK (CAPSSHIFT+SPACE) while you do the reset, and esxDOS will behave the way it does on power on, with a full SD card remount. All open files will be closed, and all taps will be unmounted. Wow, great tip. I had no idea ab...

I'm talking about the TV speaker picking up magnetic interference from the tube due to poor electrical shielding. It's a very distinctive sound, always very loud when I played Speccy games. I consider it one of the three "sounds of the Spectrum", along with the Beeper and AY chips. Here's...

This is a good documentary, I watched this recently. It does re-use a lot of VT from the Commercial Breaks BBC programme that most of you will know well - but it's well worth a watch as there's a lot of thoroughly researched additional factual detail.