Spectrum Computing

Readers will be disappointed\pleased to hear that this campaign failed to reach its goal last night, falling short of the required amount by £3635 (61%) and attracting a meagre 85 backers. Undaunted, Elite Systems Ltd. say they are going to try again in a month or two with a reduced deck run that pr...

If you start the code from 32771 instead of 32768 (or zero out the first three bytes) you'll remove the Call to the routine that initially draws the attributes, then you can see the raw pixel data being redrawn behind the scenes every loop.

The emulator I was using didn't give me any problems but when I tried it on some others I had the flicker you mentioned. It should be fixed now and I've changed the code above (new data in the first line) if you want to give it a try.

I've had the idea for this for years, and with time over Xmas and New Year thanks to some lousy TV decided to see if I could get it to work. I'm sure it's been done before, the logic isn't that difficult to work out, but it was fun to code something that has no real purpose. So, Copy and Paste the b...

Well that was....really strange. I managed to crack the Fax Machine puzzle via a method that I don't think is the correct way to solve it but instead has to be one of the most incredible coincidences going. And I didn't hack the code or type numbers in at random or go through all the combinations ei...

The more I look at the TV set the more I'm convinced it's a microwave oven, though this being a Russian game maybe that's what their TV sets look like! What bearing that has on a possible solution I can't say, just throwing it out there.

You don't enter letters into a Fax Machine, you enter numbers. Now if there was only some way to convert the message from letters to numbers :?: Look at any phone handset, everything you need to convert the message is there. The result you get from doing that looks suspiciously like a mathematical e...

https://www.elite-systems.co.uk/elite/htdocs/user_home.php?show=92 "Following diligent investigation of the available information it has been concluded that the copyright in Manic Miner does not belong to Mr Smith."....."Link Legal has been instructed to seek from Mr Smith a public r...

If this does go ahead then the usual outcome for a deck of collector's cards usually follows the same pattern: 1) Sealed cards arrive. Buyer thinks about breaking seal and opening box for a while since then they will no longer be worth as much as one that is still sealed. 2) Buyer eventually realize...

Just to clarify, the 18 months I stated was from when the Next was due (Jan 2018) up to the stated maximum of June 30th 2019. The development date for the Next actually runs from May 2017 when the campaign closed making it slightly over an estimated two years. From your experience and what you say I...

As such I didn't expect delivery of the finished unit anytime soon and that's why I got a board too...boards are easy to make and deliver etc. Have you (or anyone else reading this) had any experience with plastic cases and keyboards, it would be interesting to know whether the estimated 18 months ...

It sounds a lot like you're looking for a reason to be miffed. It was a genuine question. Not being on Facebook I have no access to the closed Next FB group(s) and trying unsuccessfully (twice) to join the Specnext Forums without a confirmation email means I've probably missed some of the answers t...

Well, there are about 400 boards out there after all. I thought it was 130-140, give or take a few, as that's the number that backed the "Just The Board" option on Kickstarter. Do you know where the extra 250+ came from as I didn't think they were selling the board outside of Kickstarter?...

So do they mean the UK Calendar Q2 - April to June, or the UK Fiscal Q2 - July to September? No I'm not being negative, just pointing out how you can make things mean whatever you want :) But at least they've come out with a generalised date which is what I was looking for all along, OK it's a 'no l...

I'm happy to say that entrants to the Christmas 2018 Charity Prize Draw now also have a chance of winning a mint, unplayed, boxed copy of Spectrum R-Type, straight from the programmer. When coders finish a game then software houses will sometimes supply them with copies of the finished product and t...

Vega+ updated people with the likes of "In production!" "Shipping in 2 weeks!" "units are being shipped!" horsepoop multiple times. :lol: The Spectrum Next has had similar "horsepoop" announcements about shipping - "We’ll have our Nexts this Summer!"...

All you have to do is blow on it. Blowing fixes most technical problems - tapes and cartridges that don't load, batteries that seem dead, CDs and DVDs that skip, connectors that don't connect, PCBs that act up, cooling fans that run slow - all sorted with a quick purse of the lips. Blowing.....God's...

.....but maybe I'm not up with the kids! I think I can say pretty confidently that if you did indeed wear one of these shirts around "the kids" then they probably wouldn't be calling you 'sick' or 'dope' or whatever words young'uns today have for indicating approbation. I myself would go ...

Hah! Neat. A bit tough to use with custom fonts, though, which was what I initially wrote mine for. ;) Not really. As long as you're careful on what specific page boundary you put the font then it's just a matter of changing the LD H,n command to the appropriate value. While there are some values y...

And here's a 17 byte print routine....any more for any less?

Is there a specific reason you are using the ROM to put your text on the screen? If all you want to do is print some non-attribute text at a specific location then you will have a lot more control (and understanding of what you're doing) if you do the printing yourself. I can post a tiny no-frills r...

I was wondering if perhaps I am calling exomizer wrong - the following works for decompressing if using the 6502 decruncher:- exomizer level test1.dat,0 -o test1.pak If you are using this command then you are running it in the wrong mode, you need to replace "level" with "raw" f...

Mind, it’s still a gamble (for me) if the keyboard on the ZX Spectrum Next will meet with my expectations.... Like you I made use of a fair amount of third-party Spectrum keyboards, some good, some bad, and companies like DK'Tronics didn't seem to have a problem designing and knocking them out to u...

Try https://archive.org/search.php?query=msx%20programming

There are a few MSX programming books there that might be useful to you.