Spectrum Computing

Juan F. Ramirez wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2020 3:13 pm Did anyone say Xeno?

Oh, gosh! Completely forgot about it.

Xeno, obviously.

pavero wrote: ↑Sat Jan 04, 2020 11:29 pm
https://maps.speccy.cz/map.php?id=ValleyofRains
(My 1500th map. )

Oh, wow. That is not a small number.

This is great! You know, if you move the keyboard polling routine from BASIC to machine code (at least for the painting tool controls), you can easily handle simultaneous keypresses for diagonal movement and continuous drawing.

Voted there as well.

Not sure about the +2, but on the +2A you don’t even need to press PLAY on the Datacorder to load games. The circuitry is active all the time.

Cool. Looking forward to it!

TheGoodDoktor wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2020 5:45 pm I'm particularly interested in reverse engineering old games and seeing how the programmers back in the day did stuff.

Awesome, [mention]TheGoodDoktor[/mention]! Great to have you on board, Mark.

Welcome to SC, [mention]barry[/mention]!

Just tested it on my Toastrack and +2A. Couldn’t load it on the former no matter what. This is almost a guarantee that it won’t load on a 48K machine. As I suspected, the loader needs to be reworked. It loaded fine on the +2A, but I could hear that Bit 6 wasn’t being toggled properly. I think the ga...

AndyC wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2020 5:00 am It was nice to see a revised version of the original for the +2A, albeit without the superior ring binding of the old orange covered one.

Yeah. Mine’s falling apart, although all the pages are there and overall it’s in pretty decent shape.

If I have some time, I’ll test your loader on real hardware, but keep in mind that such short zero/one pulses will only work for digital audio/high-quality signals and not for tape (due to its bandwidth limitations), and that when outputting to port 0xfe, you need to toggle Bit 6 (right now it’s per...

Are you saying that the 128K also included the original 16K/48K floating cloud city covered manual? No, I’m not. I’m pretty sure the Toastrack just came with the two manuals you’ve mentioned. Don’t quote me on that, though. I’m not a collector; only need the hardware for testing purposes. By the wa...

Was there in fact no comprehensive BASIC manual for this particular model? If not, does anyone know why not? It seems a bit odd. The only two new BASIC commands were PLAY and SPECTRUM (with the latter being not very useful for programming per se), so there was no need to write up a whole new manual...

R-Tape wrote: ↑Tue Dec 31, 2019 6:16 pm Anyone got any ZX resolutions for 2020?

I have a couple. Already started working on some prototyping and it looks promising. Mostly silly text effects.

I have no idea what the musician for the 128k version of Ghouls was thinking - I suspect that he was told "make a kinda medieval choon for this game" without having actually seen a Ghouls arcade at all. I forget if he talks specifically about Ghouls here or not, but it’s worth a watch any...

Haven’t noticed any slowdown on my end. Granted, I rarely used the main site; mostly the forums.

Just load up Ghouls n’ Ghosts and let the catchy tune calm your nerves . . .

Tu-wee tah ta-dah da-da-dum,
Tu-wee tah ta-dah da-da-dum,
Tra, da, da, da, dum da-ra-da dum-dum . . .

Lynxman wrote: ↑Sun Dec 29, 2019 9:56 am I checked the output with my scope and it's about 2,5 V square wave and all positive, like in his video.

That should be plenty. Congratulations.

WIWC wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2019 11:20 pm True, you can turn into a duck. Is it something happening in the arcade too?

Yes:
https://youtu.be/odPJN_lZJgY?t=62

WIWC wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2019 11:20 pm Anyway, I don't see any vote for Ghouls.

Oh, shoot. I missed the fact it’s a poll. Voted.

I kind of remember Ghouls n’ Ghosts more, because it’s by the Follin brothers. And you turn into a duck. So, I’ma go with that.

Morpheus wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2019 8:50 pm

Ast A. Moore wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2019 8:27 pm viewtopic.php?f=22&t=2132

Thinking more in terms of the 48KB models rather than the 128K/+2 but interesting nonetheless.

Will also work nicely on a 48K Speccy.

Morpheus wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2019 6:56 pm Did anyone ever fit the 220nf capacitors on the lower RAM to help with the “jailbars” ?

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=2132

And it doesn’t hurt to combine several capacitors of different values in parallel, say a 47nF and a 1µF one. Each capacitor will operate at a different frequency, because their efficiency is very frequency dependent. In some cases, however, it’s mostly gilding the lily.