Spectrum Computing

Men take only their needs into consideration - never their abilities. Napoleon Bonaparte Look there is no square-space for spectrum game development. If there were such a thing people would be churning out fappy bird clones on a daily basis. :lol: You got to put some effort into this, invest some t...

That is some sweet tracking goodness chrrris. Nice idea about beepolaFriday.

More interesting developments, the version of the manual that Trade Secret is referencing is the revision one. It was a little unclear what version was being used. This has now been resolved. Big thanks to PeterJ for the assist. You might be thinking 'well so what?' it clears up a question of attrib...

It is a very optimistic advert. It assumes a working understanding of BASIC & Maths. :lol: In an age where we now do the opposite and assume our audience are windowlickers it is rather jarring to see these kind of things :lol: no thought was given to the readers that today would be 'triggered' b...

I only noticed this when trying to find references in trade secret :lol: http://zxnext.narod.ru/manuals/Basic_Programming.pdf Page 170-188 seem to be missing from the zx spectrum programming manual pdf... Is there a complete scan available? the HTML version has neglected to retain the page numbers s...

True it depends what you compare it against, I would compare it against something like altirra. One guy in college wrote probably one of the best Atari emulators and what many consider to be one of the best 8-bit emulators while he was in college :lol: The documentation is some of the best I have se...

This might be interesting: https://archive.org/search.php?query=23659&sin=TXT&and%5B%5D=collection%3A%22computermagazines%22&sort=date The earliest mention I can find is in PCW in late January 1983, but it doesn't seem like it was being used for copy protection then. Strangely enough th...

Honestly I never thought of using archive.org in that way

Yea you are right about wrong dates being entered into the meta data. For example INPUT gets listed as being published in the 90s..

Yea, that is also in Trade secret. But this article pre-dates the publication. See I am starting to get the impression that Trade Secret was a combination of techniques from letters/articles that were published in newsletters/magazines. *put on tin foil hat* Perhaps that's why it never got a review ...

Lol I have faith that at least one autist hoarder has archived the entire website. It's just a matter of finding that exceptional individual and convincing them to share. I vaguely remembered a website that had listed of articles, but I couldn't find it. I guess this must have been it. I am not sure...

This is fantastic having multiple sources for the same technique helps a lot in documenting the technique. It is also useful in figuring out stuff like where a technique first emerged from. The article you link is December 1984, Trade Secret was published some time in 1984. It makes me wonder if the...

I don't know much about the RANDOMIZE USR 0 trick other than it was a way to fake microdrive support on a system that didn't have it? My understanding is, its for BASIC use. By forcing the error output to have nowhere to print it triggers the crash. This is what Trade Secret says In BASIC programs, ...

One thing that should make everyone uncomfortable.. This is just one un-implemented behavior of a core system. How many more behaviors are left unimplemented by emulators on core/primary systems they are presenting as accurate. Now consider that many of these same emulators have had continuous devel...

Here is a 1 liner version of a program from Trade secret. Its just a simple memory peeker, semi pointless but for me a simple program has no reason not to be a 1 liner. :lol: The one liner: https://s31.postimg.cc/pnm6n5593/PEEKER1.png 10 FOR I = 30000 TO 66666 : PRINT I ; "=" ; PEEK I : NE...

Use google translate, https://translate.google.com.ph/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=http://zxpress.ru/book_articles.php%3Fid%3D1478&prev=search I found this when searching for information on DFSZ. Original: http://zxpress.ru/book_articles.php?id=1474 Just my potato POV but this series is very ...

Figured it was only fair to share and get some feedback. Trade Secret talks about a method to cause a program to completely reset the machine on quit, no dumping the user back to the BASIC interpreter. 10 BORDER 1 : POKE 23659,0 : POKE 23658,8 20 FOR I = 1 TO 24 30 PRINT I 40 NEXT I 50 IF INKEY$ = &...

I think it will be Nyarlathotep on the DL.

Kind of like an anti Ian Weatherburn then (personality wise). :lol: One of the most frustrating things trying to find out about N.O.M.A.D was the main developer had left nothing behind about how he wrote the game. It was weird that for a guy that was so sure of his own genius that he didn't talk abo...

Did Joffa Smith ever talk about or write on how he wrote his games?

That is some nice minimalist coding magic

I saw a A Moore assembly snippet about testing if a machine was +2 +3 or 48k system in assembly. I thought this technique was very useful and added it to my swipe file of cool routines 8-) I thought to myself - I wonder how I would do this in BASIC. :lol: Its semi pointless but you never know right?...

Thank you guys for the help on this, clearing up the 128k basic issue with the listing and making the 48k program more robust.

In the end we might not agree on an issue, that is totally fine. Getting offended - that is just finding an uncomfortable view point. If it gives you pause for thought, helps you either re-evaluate how you think about an issue (said nobody ever on the internet) or strengthens your own resolve (most ...

Tools for Christians to indoctrinate there kids and vulnerable individuals & applications to better run the business of faith or cripto religious companies that just produce secular content? Like there is a big difference between say a Wisdom Tree and a company where the majority of its employee...