Spectrum Computing

Are bears Catholic?



No wait, that's not right

1024MAK wrote: ↑Wed Sep 13, 2023 11:18 pm And we do need to define/decide what published actually means.

Did anyone ever decide what to do about Too Much Wine, the first telesoftware release of the 21st century?

That's not worldofspectrum.org anyway...

You can find the schematic for the tape board in the +2 service manual https://spectrumforeveryone.com/wp-cont ... Manual.pdf

The short would be something after the inductor, possibly C323 if it's not a short in the motor or switch wiring.

It's not a resistor, but an inductor. The value according to the schematic is 82μH. For it to have burnt up something else in the circuit is presumably shorted out. Do you mean that when you plug the tape board in it kills the machine? That would be consistent with it having a short on the 5 volt ra...

R-Tape wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 4:02 pm One word: Horses 2.

I finished one chiptune cover this year that took me* a year, I doubt I'll manage another one by Christmas

*I get distracted...

R-Tape wrote: ↑Sat Sep 02, 2023 8:35 pm The deadline

This is still for Woot 2020 right? Oh. I see.

I seem to remember reading that @Guesser frowned on using such things, but I've never had any issues (touch wood!). The issue with the drive swap switch arrangement is that they short the output of IC18a directly to ground. :shock: (It also stops you from copying stuff to the internal drive, but th...

Why guess if there is a specification. Luckily emulator authors are always very well behaved when implementing snapshot export code, so finding snapshots with data stuffed into unused/reserved bits from an original specification to support extra hardware for their particular emulator basically neve...

So what you have to offer instead? Use szx because it's not perfect but most of the bugs caused by confusing design issues have been squashed out of everyone's implementation by now. Or create something new where every piece of configuration and memory block is its own block with extensible tags so...

Weiv wrote: ↑Mon Aug 14, 2023 8:04 am Some of configuration field bits I stated for now:

Yay, arbitrarily assigned machine configuration bitfields too! Speed-running all the mistakes of the last 30 years of emulator snapshots like we've never learned anything.

If you want to have yet another new snapshot format that no-one supports the usual route is to write another emulator.

Or you could write a converter from szx but in that case you may as well put your coding effort into an szx viewer/editor that might be useful

Gasman released one many years ago (used for speech samples in his game Celebrity Arses iirc) that I think he called "samplepack". Later someone else made a windows exe (wav2ay?) to do the conversion instead of using Matt's original perl script. It generates correctly weighted 4-bit sample...

This one creates great output (but you have to think of things you wouldn't do yourself )

https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html

The spectrum doesn't really care about audio waves. All it's interested in is edges , and the number of clock cycles that pass between them. https://sinclair.wiki.zxnet.co.uk/wiki/Spectrum_tape_interface The reason you see 16 1 bits at the start is because the data block starts with FF to indicate i...

A 256kB speccy would have been a complete waste of money as almost nothing would use all that memory. Look at how much actually made use of floppy disks...

R-Tape wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:55 pm By now we've probably defined everything that definitely isn't Stonkers, so it's whatever's left!

With a bit of imagination it could mean "Atic Atac"...

Sure it's not hermetically sealed, but it would be a bit of a stretch to call the rubber key 48 ventilated. A few slots on the base covered by the PCB, and the edge connector slot blocked off by a peripheral can't be conducive to much convection.

There is a service manual for the 128 but it's rather vague and I'm not an expert on the power supply circuit. Likely TR4 is dead, but might not be the only thing.
pinging @balford

Definitely a problem with the switching supply circuitry in that case

It does sound poorly. First thing I'd do if you're not getting anything from the UHF output is check voltages to see if you have 12V to the video chip

[deleted]

Look at/take photos of the motherboard around the RGB socket, but also how we'd have to know how the SCART cable is currently wired too.
I'm guessing the cable's got a capacitor stuffed inside, connected to some signal line or other that made it sort-of-work previously.

Has the machine been modified to provide a proper RGB blanking signal?

The other thing to realise is there's no one right answer, there's many ways to skin a cat, and how you design it will depend what kind of devices you need it to be compatible with. Like people making mass storage interfaces generally just don't bother at all trying to make them work with other simi...