Introduce yourself!

Introduce yourself. Pimp your website, competition, event or other activity here, as long as it's Spectrum related.
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

Welcome [mention]boriel[/mention] borand [mention]Luzie[/mention] !
Dr beep
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Dr beep »

Introduce yourself....

On this forum I am quite new. On WoS I have been active for years.

I am born at the end of 1967, so whenever you read this post you can calculate my age.

I had a ZX Spectrum from 1983 up to about 2015. I was using emulation much more than the real machine
that I donated my computers (ZX Spectrum and 2x ZX81) on Ben Versteeg.

On the ZX Spectrum I coded several games. Since 2007 I mainly coded minigames and
hosted a few years that competition. In 2011 I wanted to port my SHOGUN-game to the ZX81.
When I ported that game I discovered that in 1K hires was possible.

A demo drawing circles and I thought can I code a game with this technic.
The result is 74 hires games (at the moment of writing this) coded in 1K.
The games will come available on this site.

I also coded several 1K lowresgames and I use a technic that was not supported by
my old ZX81 emulator for the ZX Spectrum si I rewrote my emulator and made it better than it was.

I am still improving the emulator at the moment of writing this and I still have a few ideas
for new 1K hires games to come. If you have an idea just let me know....
I will take a look if I can fit it in 1K.

Greetings,
Johan "Dr Beep" Koelman
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R-Tape
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by R-Tape »

boriel wrote: Sun May 10, 2020 2:03 pm I'm the creator of the ZX Basic Compiler.
Welcome Jose! PM sent.
Luzie wrote: Sun May 10, 2020 6:35 pm I´m Bernhard from southwest germany. After starting on ZX81 I "naturally" went to ZX Spectrum 48k when it was available. (Instead of going to C64 as most german people had). For me the Speccy is more to the heart, than just only a computer. But this you know, people on this forum :D
Welcome Luzie! I find it very interesting that some people went 'against the grain', e.g those who made the less common choice, or stayed faithful to the speccy when the 16bits took over. I'm ashamed to say that this doesn't apply to me: back in the day (but not now of course), I envied the C64, and dropped the speccy like a stone when the 16 bits arrived. For shame!
Together with my friend once I found a hack for infinite lifes in Booty. We are the first publishing it in CRASH although it takes additional time to send it to UK via snailmail. This was 1:1 copied from other people afterwards "as their fund" :lol:
Haha brilliant. The lengths we used to go to!
Main interest is "whats going on" in Spectrum Software and Hardware. Assembler Routines. Betadisk-Programming and Emulators. And almost everything that comes out new for the Speccy todays.
Amen to that :D
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

Welcome to an old WoS mate, [mention]Dr beep[/mention] !
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Alessandro
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Alessandro »

Nice to see Johan here as well! Welcome [mention]Dr beep[/mention] :D
Patrik Rak
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Patrik Rak »

akeley wrote: Sun May 10, 2020 7:05 pm ... your emulator is just so, so good.
Thanks, man. I feel humbled hearing such a high praise... Glad you like it!
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Ivanzx
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Ivanzx »

Patrik Rak wrote: Mon May 11, 2020 12:40 pm
akeley wrote: Sun May 10, 2020 7:05 pm ... your emulator is just so, so good.
Thanks, man. I feel humbled hearing such a high praise... Glad you like it!
You should get used to it, Patrik, in the spanish scene your emulator has an excellent reputation and many people has expressed their happiness to be able to have a portable Spectrum :)

Dekuji!
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Morkin
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Morkin »

Ivanzx wrote: Mon May 11, 2020 2:12 pm You should get used to it, Patrik, in the spanish scene your emulator has an excellent reputation and many people has expressed their happiness to be able to have a portable Spectrum :)

Dekuji!
Agreed - it's a thing of beauty... :)

Image
My Speccy site: thirdharmoniser.com
pobtastic
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by pobtastic »

Hey everyone,

I got my first Spectrum (48K) around 1985 I think? It wasn't "mine" to begin with, it was a family computer but eventually I guess they got bored with it and as I'd taken to coding and making stuff - it then migrated into my bedroom.

Eventually when it broke, I bought a +2 with paper round money (I'm pretty sure I was too young to be doing a paper round but hey ho!) and did eventually get a +3 after that as well. Mainly as the keys on the tape deck kept snapping and overall I felt like the build quality was really lacking. I was pretty disappointed with the +3 as well because of the audio issues but I'd learnt assembly by this point and had written a bunch of games and utilities so I was well and truly hooked!

I unfortunately sold EVERYTHING at some point on (early) eBay as I'd had some money troubles, the only thing I've kept is a BugByte Manic Miner, JSW and an interface 2 ROM cartridge of Jetpac. Such a shame, as I had some very nice things like complete Rainbird box sets for Guild of Thieves, The Pawn, Starglider, etc, etc, etc... but well, emulation is fantastic and the wealth of information out there on the internet helps me and all of us to relive our past whenever we like :ugeek:

Nowadays I'm a professional software developer, and in my spare time I recreate Spectrum games using FUZE4Switch (see also; https://fuzearena.com/help)
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PeterJ
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by PeterJ »

Welcome [mention]pobtastic[/mention],

I had seen the Raspberry Pi version of Fuze, but not this one. Looks really impressive, especially the kids guide to programming. Excellent stuff.

https://www.fuze.co.uk/uploads/8/0/7/1/ ... tbook1.pdf

Do you have any links to the Spectrum games you have re-created?
pobtastic
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by pobtastic »

Unfortunately Fuze is a bit nervous about copyright infringements, so it's not on anything "official" just short clips on twitter from a while back;

Manic Miner
https://twitter.com/Pobtastic/status/12 ... 6897087488
This is more or less complete now, the jumping needs some work ~ it's not identical to how it should behave...

JSW
https://twitter.com/Pobtastic/status/12 ... 6323990528
Doesn't have ropes yet, a bit of a WIP still!

Hungry Horace
https://twitter.com/Pobtastic/status/11 ... 4799934464
Now complete!

Unfortunately none of them have sound/ music as it's incredibly difficult in Fuze to make similar noises :cry:

I've also done a bit of work on Jetpac but nothing sharable yet! It's fun!
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PeterJ
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by PeterJ »

Very impressive [mention]pobtastic[/mention]. Even the font looks authentic!
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XTM
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by XTM »

Hi all,

yep, another WoS Forumite, some of you will remember me. For those who don't, I'm from Cologne, Germany and got my first Speccy 16k in 1985, then upgraded onto 48k/+2 models shortly after. Played tons of games till the early 90s and while the Speccy games certainly got eclipsed by their console counterparts for me, the nostalgy stays.

My original nick "XTM of TMG" (TMG is the name of my demo crew The Mad Guys which was active from 1989 to about 1997) is a bit clunky so I'll use a shortened version here.

From my avatar, you can see I'm a huge David Hasselhoff fan. NOT! Well, according to some English WoS member sometime back in the 2006 or so, The Hoff was still "super popular" in Germany (what can I say, that bloke knew more about my country than I did *sarcasm*) so to smite him I switched to a Hoff avatar and have been using it ever since ... so to reflect that I'll use one here too, just a different picture - it's almost like an XTM trademark. Nah, I'm really not a fan, I've watched a few Knight Rider episodes as a kid but in hindsight they were pants anyway.

I'll keep using the WoS forums for the chit chat/trashtalk (since there are still some nice people there who aren't on SC because they are mostly active in that area), but having a second port of call is always nice innit! 8-)
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ketmar
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by ketmar »

oh, there is introductional thread here! so if you're interested, i am from xUSSR. Speccy (actually, Robik) was my first "really personal" computer. before that, i was at regional computer "club" with MSX computers. of course, i wanted MSX, but there was no way to get it (at least for the price we could afford). so i got Robik, which was 48K Speccy clone, with totally incompatible timings, and without a disk drive. i never had 128K, and never had a disk drive, so it was hard to program in asm. tapes sux! ;-)

my first emulator was something called "spectrum.exe", it ran on 286, and i still don't know what it was. it didn't even used external ROM, afair. yet it was able to play 2-channel music on PC speaker, and that was cool.

of course, being a programmer myself, i was interested in writing my own emulator. and i did that several times! ;-) 3 times in Delphi, almost two times in C, and once in D. my first emulators were based on Z80 cores i found in internet, but later i wrote Zymosis.

as i never owned 128K, i am mostly interested in 48K software (because this is what brings back my childhood memories). i am also not interested in supporting TR-DOS or +3DOS in my Z80 code (but my emulator supports 128K/+2/+3, and TR-DOS).

i always wanted to write some Speccy games, but never progressed beyond some engine prototypes.

i love platformers and shooters, my favorite games are Zynaps and Rex. i found JSW too hard (but loved to play Phantomas). and i am avoid playing AGD/Churera games (for various reasons; don't take it personally, please, it's my internal mental bug ;-).

i wasn't very active in any online/offline Speccy communities.

i also love to write walls of text in bad English (which is quite obvious from this post, i think ;-).
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jdanddiet
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by jdanddiet »

Hi, Graeme Mason here, have been meaning to sign up here for a few weeks having started using this site more for research than the *cough* other one.

Apologies in advance for spamming my speccy-related features - Scuba Dive in Retro Gamer soon!
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XTM
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by XTM »

Greetings, Graeme. I've been reading your articles in Retro Gamer and on your site for years. Nice to have you here!
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PeterJ
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by PeterJ »

Welcome [mention]jdanddiet[/mention],

Great to have you here Graeme.

Peter
OscarSchnitzer
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by OscarSchnitzer »

Hi All,

Another newbie saying hello. I bought my 48K rubber key back in late 1983, here in Australia. For A$399 in Myer, to replace my ZX81. Back then Sinclair software and hardware were hard to find around here, but there were a handful of sources.

Ended up moving on to a CPC6128 a few years later, but had fond memories of the Sinclairs.

I've recently received my Spectrum Next which has got me all enthused for all things Sinclair once again, although I've still got my 48K in its original box :)

I didn't know about this forum until recently, I mistakenly thought the main "scene" was at WoS which appears to be slowly imploding. It was a big relief to find this lively forum!
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PeterJ
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by PeterJ »

Welcome [mention]OscarSchnitzer[/mention],

I think you are our first Australian! Were there any Australian Spectrum specific magazines back in the day.
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Rorthron
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Rorthron »

Welcome to SC!
OscarSchnitzer
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by OscarSchnitzer »

PeterJ wrote: Sun Jul 05, 2020 9:21 am I think you are our first Australian! Were there any Australian Spectrum specific magazines back in the day.
Hi Peter,

I know there were Australia-specific magazines for other platforms, but I don't remember any for the Spectrum.

For a while I subscribed to ZX Computing (not Australian, obviously!) which was my main source of information, until I switched to Your Spectrum.

For Australian magazines I remember there was Australian Personal Computer which was PC-centric, not much home computer stuff. And there was an Australian version of Your Computer which wasn't too bad for home computer stuff.

There wasn't a huge range of Spectrum software available locally, but my budget was quite tight then too, so that was a good match :) I did end up buying games such as Penetrator, Chequered Flag, Starion, etc, from local shops.
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Van_Dammesque
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Van_Dammesque »

Hi Guys,
ZX Spectrum fan. I live in the North-East of England. 40+ years of age (just). :P

I had a ZX Spectrum + then upgraded to a +2. Always had a big (28 inch TV to play on too, old TV types, for the time, but great pic quality).
Then upgraded to the Amiga.

Still like to occasionally read the old mags for nostalgia, as most of my paper round money went on them!
Have a bizarre fascination in Spectrum loaders and the Randomize USR xxx effects! :geek:
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

Welcome aboard, Jean-Claude! ;)

If you love the Spectrum,this is the best forum to talk about it!
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XTM
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by XTM »

That's not Jean-Claude, it's Alex (Wagner)! ;)
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Van_Dammesque
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Van_Dammesque »

Juan F. Ramirez wrote: Sat Jul 11, 2020 12:51 pm Welcome aboard, Jean-Claude! ;)

If you love the Spectrum,this is the best forum to talk about it!
Thanks! :)

Added this to my FVD speed dial page. :idea:

I like my speed dial pics on my HD so here is mine for you to use, best used on a dark background:
Image
It is just the website's logo.
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