Spectrum Computing

@Bizzley so are you a backer of either the ZX Spectrum Next or of the Vega+? Mark I'm a Spectrum Next backer, backer No. 3034, standard £175+£10 boxed version. I wasn't originally going to back it since I have no real need for a Spectrum with all the versions I have in the attic but got involved in...

As others have said crowdfunding is a risk and you do have to accept that you are not guaranteed anything. It's just the way it works. 99% of the time it works fine. Just sad that the 1% happened to us. According to Kickstarter themselves 9% of projects that are funded and have succesfully created ...

The only thing that disappointed me is the lack of ULAplus, and only from "political" issues. Also, it's supposedly fully open source, but when the sources were released a couple of months ago... the VHDL code of the FPGA core is mysteriously missing. And the lack of additional cores, tha...

I think crowd-funding started out with noble intentions but as soon as people realised the lack of accountability involved they saw how they could take advantage of it. I don't mean they planned to take the money and run right from the start (but apparently some did!) but that the whole "you're...

In my last post I said I wasn't aware of any other promised release dates for the Next, I missed this one..... ""we can now line things up and put forward the completion date of mid July. We’ll have our Nexts this Summer!" People keep saying that the original manufacturing company pul...

[Is this asking questions about when it's out? Maybe they're not quite sure and don't want to keep promising dates and never delivering. They have had some setbacks. I'm not sure when asking for something as basic as a rough give-or-take-a-few-months date for delivery of an almost completed item be...

If you want to point out a certain subset of problems that the Vega+ had that the Spectrum Next hasn't then I can't stop you. I agree with you, the two points about stock footage and trolls fortunately have not afflicted the Spectrum Next but I think you have to agree that there are other similariti...

I expect they will start to ship end of Jan or so I'm guessing based on progress so far. I genuinely wish I had your optimism and all I ask is that the backers be told what is going on. If they want to say the thing won't ship until July 2018 then OK, I may not like it but I'll accept it and bide m...

I started this Thread because of a meme I posted recently about the ZX Spectrum Next computer and the comments that followed. I don't think it's fair to people who only want a laugh and don't care too much about the Next to fill up that Thread hence this one. If anyone has anything good or bad to sa...

Hehe. Looks like the Next's honeymoon period is over :mrgreen: There is a slow, growing, disquiet about this project which is not being helped by the ethos currently held by the people developing it that their end goal seems to be absolute perfection rather than actual useability. The latest delays...

url=https://imgflip.com/i/2nbsxi][/url]via Imgflip Meme Generator

And of course there's the controller: Turn Left, Turn Right, Brake, Accelerate, Use Item and Drift/Hop - those are the most important ones which you'd need if you wanted the proper feel of the game even though the original maps a few more functions on to other buttons. That would be fun to implement...

Hi. I've been thinking (not for the first time) how realistic is the idea of a Mario Kart style game on the Speccy? If you're talking fast, true 3D then not realistic at all. You could compromise by making it a 2D top-down view a-la super Sprint or one of the similar Codemaster titles, you might ev...

Andrew and Philip tell the story behind Super Robin Hood themselves at www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTwQ-qmJ07c . The Spectrum conversion was carried out by Mark Baldock as stated in the video and in other sources. Fun Fact. The twins needed a retail copy of Spectrum Super Robin Hood when they were putti...

Here's a 5 byte smaller and slightly faster version of the above, done by replacing IX with DE. I've also fixed the bug with the wrong length of the strings. calcstring ld bc,5 add hl,bc ld b,c ld de,totalstring+5 ex de,hl calcstring1 dec hl dec de ld a,(de) add (hl) sub 106 jr c,calcstring2 sub 10 ...

Here's a very simple and small z80 routine to add two five digit numbers held as ASCII strings together using string addition rather than 16bit conversion. It's generalised in that it will add any five digit "number" to another with a resultant less than 99999 but can be optimized by reduc...

By the way, does anyone know how the artists copied the art in a predigital age? Did they use a pantograph to produce a sketch, then paint over it? In my experience they just started drawing on the Spectrum screen, usually with Melbourne Draw, without any aids. Seeing Mark Jones accurately draw out...

sub hl,de Unfortunately, that one doesn't exist. It does if you use the SjASMPLus Assembler. It's one of the "fake" instructions the assembler supports and then internally converts to an equivalent. I'm so used to using them now I forget that other assemblers don't support them so my bad....

Here's another version of the 'powers of 10' method. This one is rolled up with CALLs. Enter with HL holding number to convert. conv16bit ld bc,mess16bit ld de,10000 call conv16bit1 ld de,1000 call conv16bit1 ld de,100 call conv16bit1 ld de,10 call conv16bit1 ld a,l jr conv16bit3 conv16bit1 ld a,-1 ...

If you look at the bottom of page 9 in Issue#1 you'll see where the makers of the Human Centipede films got their inspiration from
And you'll never look at that picture again the same way....hehehe.

You can take anything out of context if you try hard enough.

Have a look on eBay, RCA phono to HDMI cables go for around £3.50, converter boxes for around £7. Whether they work or not I can't say but for £3.50 it's got to be worth a punt.

MOBI files can be viewed on what is basically a Kindle emulator for all supported models to make sure everything displays properly without having to spend a penny on hardware. It's the official Amazon Kindle Previewer and can be downloaded for free at : https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8...

Have you had a look at the (free) Calibre software as this can convert between a whole slew of popular epub formats. From the documentation: Input Formats: AZW, AZW3, AZW4, CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, DJVU, DOCX, EPUB, FB2, FBZ, HTML, HTMLZ, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, T...

I was hoping for some actual hard information! Everything you need to know is here : https://computerarchive.org/files/comp/books/ZX%20spectrum/CompleteSpectrumROMDisassemblyThe.pdf Every single byte of code, every routine and subroutine, what registers are used, when they are used and how they are...

This is sort of how it was done for Gameboy road rash. I coded a similar thing for a Gameboy version of Formula 1 for Psygnosis that never progressed past the proof of concept stage. They wanted to see a working 3D road so I used the HBLANK method to slide individual lines into curves etc. I've got...