Spectrum Computing

Phase shift keying could have made the 0 and 1 the same length without requiring more bandwidth, and still having an edge per bit (allowing for easy timing recovery, and the wide variability of tape recorder speeds). e.g. you encode a 0 as a low to high, and a 1 as a high to low of the same length....

Cool little game! What a novel idea it is, but it's quite tricky to see what's going on at that size, even on an emulator at 2x magnification. My first attempt got me a final score of 2242, just going in little circles to draw and then selectively erase parts. The hardest bit is trying to compensate...

Mine is 256 by 192, same as last year :mrgreen: More seriously, I'd like to get at least one new game out this year. I spent some of 2023 working on porting my Spectrum games over to the PC, so I hope to finish that. In the process, I've had a few PC game ideas that would probably be feasible on the...

Hello Chooks , welcome to the forum! :) I'm not a hardware expert by any means, but have you checked to make sure it's not the television? The rolling you describe makes it sound like your set can't lock onto the vertical sync (the horizontal black bar in your picture). If your TV has settings for v...

I've always had this problem with ZX Spin too, in version 0.666, though I've noticed that the ROM beep works when you emulate a 128K Spectrum.

R-Tape wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 3:39 pm Shouldn't that be XOR 16? But it does indeed make a sound - I'm confused!

Bit 3 controls the MIC output; some emulators will produce sound from both the speaker and MIC. Of course, it's barely audible on a real Spectrum - I need my ear right next to my Issue 2's loudspeaker to hear it.

From this thread: ZX Spectrum products that are not what they seem...

PaulJ wrote: ↑Sat Aug 15, 2020 11:26 am The game on the cover of the Sixty Programs is Firebirds from Softek. A nice little shooter, but definitely not in the book!

A fantastic early Christmas present! Of the included programs, I've finished Rosetta (a nice little puzzle), half-way through Roasty (have had a break from it after getting trapped in the bottom-left corner of one screen), and am really enjoying Parsley Sage and the 7 Bins of Sunak - it's like a gre...

Did Vic-20 had something like colour clash? Yep, you either had 2 colours per character in high resolution mode, or 4 colours per character in multicolour mode. However, there's some restrictions on how those colours can be used, and I'd say it's actually stricter than the Spectrum. The Wikipedia p...

Semi OT: is the FLASH interval immutable or is it possible to speed it up? I have some memory flashes (pun intended) of something blinking at faster speed, but perhaps it was a software flash. The FLASH interval is fixed in the ULA - the paper and ink colours are swapped every 16 frames. Anything w...

[...] There's some strange code which then gets a value from port $38 and then checks the first byte at address 0. If the normal ROM is there this will be $f3. The code returns if this is true or does some other code - which calls $220 which doesn't appear to be a valid ROM address. Maybe some sort...

I'm not sure what the difference between "not enough memory" and "insufficient memory" is, apart from of course it being an excuse to sell more dolls. Perhaps we could have a different "Chuntey Field" figure for each kind of tape loader e.g. a stern looking prison guard...

From 2016, we have Steve Broad's Merry Christmas From Horace:

We need the traditional version of the Xmas tree, where the buyer has once again, for the tenth consecutive year, underestimated the tree height/overestimated their room's ceiling height, when buying the tree. Thus the top of the tree is mashed against the ceiling and teetering to one side. ⬜⬜⬛⬛⬜⬜⬜...

I was talking about the ZX Spectrum in the pub last night, and the landlord overheard us and because of his mangled memory, came up with a beauty for this thread: "Do you remember Jet Pac Willy ?!!!" We've already got that: Caves of Doom ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh-dbmx1_t8

Could you give a basic explanation how buffering works, or the pros and cons of the two methods? I'm guessing buffering couldn't work for diagonal scrolling? Wikipedia has a nice overview of software and hardware double-buffering. It should be mentioned that the 128K machines are capable of hardwar...

Is it dumb of me to ask "Why can't Jonathan Cauldwell just add a scrolling engine to AGD?" :oops: Not at all, it's perfectly reasonable to ask if you haven't the experience to know the answer yourself. We all have to learn somehow :) How hard can it be? Depends on what type of scrolling y...

Could use a code block with @ signs (or any similarly "full" character like a hash) and spaces. I'm not sure a whole BBCode plugin for this is a good idea, especially if it ends up breaking in the future. @@@@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@ @ @ @ @@@@@@ Perhaps have some reference ...

Apparently I hadn't looked hard enough, as I found the video this evening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWYaz1HOkzw I'm still not sure why I had such trouble searching for it earlier, but either way, I'm glad to have the link now :) As for that channel rnhunt , they have some interesting stuff on...

I've been looking for it but can't seem to remember the title - it might not even be up anymore, but I suppose some members here might have watched it too and may have the link bookmarked. Basically, the video was a slideshow presenting the restoration process of a Radar Scope arcade machine. The ca...

For those of us with eyes which can't/won't defocus properly, there's a Javascript tool that lets you simulate the viewing experience here: https://piellardj.github.io/stereogram-solver/ Obviously, you can't get the 3D effect this way, but you can get a sense of the image's depth by tweaking the dis...

Of the newer homebrew games, Cosmic Payback uses them pretty frequently, with a few puzzles built around their characteristics.
[self-promotion ends here]

I think "re-released" in this context means that it's now available on itch.io. The tape from the new webpage is identical to the one in the SC archive.

Sir Lancelot has all three elements you mention. It takes ages for the animation to finish, you really need pokes to make the game bearable.

For questions 1 and 2, the answer is "quality over quantity". A well rounded and carefully considered collection is surely worth more than a thousand copies of Make-a-Chip.