Spectrum Computing

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we're open!

Barely two minutes into 2024 and I've thrown the first spanner in the works. @uglifruit may know what I mean. @Jbizzel doesn't because I spared him last time out.

As the Mojon Twins once said: Bwa ha ha ha.

A shame Maplin never sold a knitting machine interface for the Spectrum. Although there were two women in t'old days (both of them north of 60 now, if they're still alive) who made knitting pattern generators for the ZX81 and had them published in magazines of the time. See exhibit A ... and exhibi...

Crikey o'blimey. I've been away for the entire crossword and still ended up third overall? Not bad. Is that worth... half a corned beef sandwich? Or will I have to settle for Spam? Or a jar of Aldi's beef paste?

Right, time for more fun with the Next...

I will get round to this wonderful bundle... eventually. Maybe the 29th, maybe as late as early January. But I'll do it, and I'll do it on the Next (apart from the Gigascreen thing). I might start planning for next year's offering already - there must be something I can hold back from the CSSCGC tha...

Earlier this evening, I've opened my Next (properly, as in, opened all the boxes), started it up, and it's all looking promising. It loads from tape, it loads NextBASIC from the SD card, I've discovered the NMI menu, and I've got a PS-2 mouse kicking around somewhere to plug into it if I want. About...

Okay, I know the real answer (I think): no sane BASIC program could stretch into the 65000s so you should technically clear that address (so your BASIC can't get up there) but it's just theoretical. 64K should be enough for everybody. (And +2 owners can rejoice in having 16 free bytes up there -- t...

Gah! That's the one I tried to type in during the dark days of 2020 and it was missing half the listing... which was a load of DATA statements full of machine code.

I know what 4-5 is as well. We all do... it's Jetpac. 4-9... Bomb Jack? (It's an ugly, ugly sounding game.) I'll get 4-7 as soon as someone else does, because I know I've heard it before. I'll be away from t'interwebnet all day tomorrow (later today, actually) so I fully expect to end up losing the ...

Is Carl Paterson a Mercyful Fate fan?



And is his shift key broken?

PQR didn't quite finish R-Type, so after letting a few others in... I'll finish it. ...no, I won't... I'm not entirely sure there are nine differences; are the two red/green lumps counted as one difference between them, or two? So, as for the Hysteria Spot The Difference, there are three to go: 8: O...

And finishing Green Beret: "Konamii" with two is. I've done the wordsearch and made a few interesting discoveries: This must have been made with a make-a-wordsearch program, because (a) so much has been packed into a small space that it'd need s complicated algorithm to do it, and (b) some...

ALSØ: who's been putting extra BASIC keywords in the wordsearch? I've found TAN, PI, LN, IN and TO and they weren't listed. Not really surprised to see four of them there, mind... ALSØ ALSØ: now that PQR's had a go, I'll get more in. You snooze, you lose. - Hysteria: the right picture has an extra h...

All right then, more Hysteria spot the difference (I didn't know what game it was, so cheers for that)... - two red dots on the bottom-right robot-man-whatever-it-is icon on the right, they're yellow on the left - another one of those flying things is poking onto the left edge of the screen on the r...

Right, well... I thought most of them would have gone by now. Anyway... 1-1 in the music round: not at all sure of this one, but it sounds like it should be from The Addams Family (by comparison with the SNES soundtrack). 1-10 is very, very definitely Auf Wiedersehen Monty. I'm never any good at the...

It was broadcast nationally, not just to the HTV area. Was around about 1984 to 1986 - that's my guess. (shows TV Times, 1-7 August 1987 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsyPuDhdG3Y It's odd, because I was an ITV kid and I don't remember Video & Chips at all - only the theme tune (it'd have be...

Not a problem! It arose out of a Discord conversation about a children's game show I remembered called Treasures Of The Mindlord which was a proto-Knightmare effort on a tiny budget... ...someone you may know filled in most of the (still meagre) information on UKgameshows.com - which had previously...

Other than "how small can you make your BASIC listing" competitions, there are times when it is a good idea to use all the NOT / SGN / INT PI and VAL tricks outside of trying to cram a bare-bones listing into a 1K ZX81. I do it all the time when making CSSCGC entries or WOOT! programs, bec...

I think there needs to be a host's handbook for people like me who just thought what a fun thing to enter without realising the whole weight of history behind it. :lol: Acknowledge submissions (even if it's replying to an email that says "I've got it"), get reviews out promptly but make s...

I'm currently totally confused by the QL emulator, I get a choice of TV or Monitor when I start which either puts me into split screen or full screen mode. I need to read the manual. For the record, all my QL games come with a couple of procedures pre-installed to switch between one and the other o...

All this talk of golf and not a single "MASHED POTATO!"? Anyway... I had that generic Game Boy Golf game back in the day, played it to death, cheated on it harder than Lance Armstrong, and my records show that it's a 128 KB cartridge. However, it was heavily based on a NES (well, Famicom) ...

I had suspicions which caused me to download a QL emulator over the weekend :D QemuLator, I suspect. Am I right? If so, everything I write is suitable for a standard QL, though if I was to go barging onto The QL Forum to see if I could cajole its users into writing something for their favourite mac...

Dr Who fans will be familiar with the concept of time travel which is the only way to explain how a crap game was entered before the close date of the last competition and reviewed before the start of the next. I've never seen one before, no-one has, but I'm guessing it's a white hole. Will it be t...

Geh! What's this? No sooner is the 2023 competition over than there's already an entry for 2024 before the year has even started, meaning that I don't get to put the first entry in at 12:01 am on 1st January for the first time since 2021 because I couldn't enter my own competition (but had an entry ...

My first Kickstarter Next was delivered by Yodel and it was fine. Just thank your lucky stars it's not Hermes! If it was Hermes (or Evri as it is now) I wouldn't be bothered. Because where I am, we have Sharon, and she takes her job very seriously. Such is life when you're (most likely) north of 60...

R-Tape wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2023 1:34 pm Out of stock. I hope I don't embarrass myself by asking this, but what computer is it a board for? Looks like a Speccy-but-not.

RF socket, EAR, MIC and 9V DC all on the left of the board? And the expansion port and keyboard membrane sockets where they are?

It's a ZX81.