Spectrum Computing

Why didn't they use dithered red and white pixels for skin tone?

I don't fancy opening them but the bad one has pink rainbow capacitors and the good one has black capacitors. Maybe the black ones are modern? I don't know. Other than that they look identical when looking into that expansion hole. I think both circuit boards are green on the back and yellow on the ...

How about the a.i. for Lords of chaos? (Just kidding guys) It seems like advances are being made. Wouldn't mind knowing how the a.i. makes decisions. But I think the consensus was it was custom code per scenario and pretty dumb . I.e. the dalek thing that you see down the corridor to the right when ...

zx64 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 28, 2024 10:15 pm Are they both same issue?

How do I check?

That's weird cos it could be true. Maybe he heard word of mouth about the printers,then made up the rest.

Yes it works, and has 48k

Once,at school, a fellow pupil told me he altered the code in double dragon so that the heroes had spikes on their knees and the game was hacked so that their knee was a fatal move and blood(!) Came out of the injured enemies. I borrowed the tape which this game was on....it was blank. He just refus...

Different ULAs do affect loading. The state of the Ear socket contacts also has an effect (how clean they are and if they have enough springiness to make good contact). If the electrolyic capacitors are in a poor condition, the increased noise on the internal DC supplies will also have an effect. M...

I bought two rubber keyed spectrums. One loads games 80% of the time with old games bought off Facebook marketplace. The other about 10% of the time. I'm just wondering why this might be? I'm using quite a modern tape recorder with no tone settings, just volume. The volume has to be quite low to loa...

With all that free space you could implement a decent minimax algorithm. It would be difficult to implement in assembly of course

This reminds me of the time I got in trouble in primary school. I was ALWAYS the good kid, but when the teacher asked "what were the causes of the Great Fire of London" my hand shot up & I couldn't resist the urge to say "it was because there was too much arson about" got a ...

Thanks, wondered if that was a false memory or not.

As a child I fast forwarded past those bits because they were slow.

Did elite nick it from 2001?

Thought I saw it in that film as well

It got great reviews and had two sequels but I remember them being bad games. Well programmed, but it was just negotiating a maze while jumping over most enemies. The environment was almost totally empty,no sense of progression,no upgrades. The combat for example. You have a side view so you can't m...

What is it

It's kinda pointless really but a good idea.

It doesn't actually work, but having the ability to rewind and reload would have been great

Thrust 2 has an interesting loader that loads the game in small chunks. It lets you rewind to load one that failed.

Unfortunately though it's buggy. Half the time the reloading fails and you have to start all over again.

Cool I'll try that.

Any chance of porting it to c64

It would be a first to have a language for both that is fast and efficient.

I have two rubber keyed spectrums. On one hardly any of my games load from tape. I hear the noises but most games don't display the yellow and blue loading stripes. The other spectrum loads most games first or second time. Does anyone know why this is? I think I heard that one revision doesn't need ...

I much prefer assembler, I had trouble even with the modern C compilers. There's a bit of work to get started, you have to get a font , write a print string function (unless you want to use the rom print) write a print byte function. Then you have to experiment a bit with dereferencing pointers in a...

Just loaded commando from tape successfully.

Hopefully that doesn't mean most of my tapes are too old to be read.

Has anyone observed what percentage of games load after 40 years?

the snake example is good, seems faster than if it were made in BASIC. Im trying to compile it using CYGWIN which is a bash shell in windows :) I tried doing sh compile.sh Game/snake but it said it couldnt find FIRST.M4 because it was looking in ../FIRST.M4 So I moved the compile.sh into the same fo...

I made a little 9v amp with a 555timer and a few caps that could I powered from a splitter cable off the PSU. Using that fixed all my woes! is that using an 80's tape recorder? or a modern one. My modern tape recorder works better when I lower the volume. When I play sound through the speaker on fu...

A lot of people suggested getting a stereo to mono cable. Cos I'm using a modern tape recorder which probably outputs a stereo signal.

Im going to try that, then if it doesnt work i'll buy an old school tape recorder that outputs mono.

Looks interesting thanks.
I'll have a go at it.

Is it possible to create a string,then reference it in different places in the code? (Like a string pointer)

Can I dereference a pointer? (As in store a 16bit address at a certain address....then retrieve a byte or two from that stored address)