Introduce yourself!

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

Post by bigjon »

R-Tape wrote: Mon Feb 25, 2019 8:42 pm This is the official welcome to @bigjon, and also—bloody well check your PMs lad!

I want to get my hands on your 30 minute machine code tutorial :)
Howdy folks, I'm just an occasional dabbler in Speccy-related nostalgia at the moment. The 30-minute machine code tutorial I wrote 10 years ago is still available, kindly hosted by Arjun at https://chuntey.wordpress.com/2010/01/1 ... 0-minutes/
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R-Tape
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by R-Tape »

Welcome [mention]DouglasReynholm[/mention]. IT crowd homage? (Edit—of course it is, just realised you're called Richard)
DouglasReynholm wrote: Thu Feb 28, 2019 7:47 pm Right, back to my spot in the shadows..
Don't feel you have to!
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djnzx48
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by djnzx48 »

Hi [mention]bigjon[/mention], I just want to say thanks for your great tutorial! It really helped me when I first started learning machine code. But one thing in it confused me for years - when you say that EI is used to enable the keyboard and DI to disable it. That had me believing that interrupts and the keyboard were somehow linked and you couldn't do an IN without first turning interrupts on! Actually interrupts have nothing to do with the keyboard and only affect the ROM keyboard routine. But it's a nice tutorial for beginners and I still thought it was helpful ;)
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R-Tape
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by R-Tape »

djnzx48 wrote: Thu Feb 28, 2019 9:29 pm Hi @bigjon, I just want to say thanks for your great tutorial! It really helped me when I first started learning machine code.
I'll second that. The code was way over my head, but it introduced me to using an assembler, and gave me the confidence to have a bash. It was a great 'way in' to Jonathan's book

Thanks Jon (and Jon!)
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UltraNarwhal
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by UltraNarwhal »

Hello I'm UltraNarwhal, an indie dev for PC (Windows/Linux).
I'm also creating smaller games for older systems, now that there are easy to use tools available (AGD/NESmaker/RedPill).
My first release for PC is Project Hornwhale, out Q2 2019 (after several years working on it)
[media]https://youtu.be/dLt6kY--SEE[/media]

Currently released Speccy games being Blimpgeddon, OctuKitty and PTM.

I grew up with a 48K Speccy and after many attempts to upgrade to 128K models and getting failing systems, made the bigger upgrade to a Commodore 64 :shock: Had lots of fun on the C64 and bought many games in the few years I had it before moving on to 16bit Mega Drive and Amiga.

While looking for a game engine to make C64 games (not SEUCK) I discovered AGD.
Fabrizio Caruso
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Fabrizio Caruso

Post by Fabrizio Caruso »

Hi everyone!
I am a retro-enthusiast, collector and retro-coder.
I like coding massively multi-target games.

I am the developer of Cross Chase (a universal 8-bit game for all 8-bit platforms coded in C and compiled with tons of different compilers):
https://github.com/Fabrizio-Caruso/CROSS-CHASE
CROSS CHASE can be run on the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum, QL, Lambda 8300, Jupiter Ace, all Commodore systems, Atari, Apple, MSX, Amstrad, Oric, Thomson, etc. and about 150 more systems without ever modifyng the game code.

I am also developing a 10-liner in lots of different BASIC:
https://github.com/Fabrizio-Caruso/Mines
including of course Sinclair BASIC
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R-Tape
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by R-Tape »

Welcome [mention]Fabrizio Caruso[/mention] :D

I remember Cross Chase! It's nice to see you here.

(I merged your thread with the 'Introduce yourself' thread)
FelisSapien
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by FelisSapien »

Hey all!

It took a while but I've reacquired a Speccy! My original introduction was with a 16k model one Christmas. Stayed a Sinclair fan for quite some time... Many, many years (and many systems) pass and I felt the urge to pick something up for the collection. I now have a working +2 (fancied a 128k) and a 'donor'. Both were silly cheap. As it turns out I got the spares machine working with a memory replacement. The datasette is problematic though and my attempts at fixing that haven't been so successful :(

Anyhow, looking forward to some fun rediscovering the system. I also got a box of games and a small stack of magazines with my purchase so plenty to go at. Loading the tapes is a frustrating as I remember. Think I'll be looking for a more modern solution before too long - for convenience ;)
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Hi, [mention]FelisSapien[/mention]!

Always great to see people (re)acquiring actual hardware. Welcome to Spectrum Computing!
Every man should plant a tree, build a house, and write a ZX Spectrum game.

Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
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stupidget
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by stupidget »

FelisSapien wrote: Mon Mar 04, 2019 9:37 am Hey all!

It took a while but I've reacquired a Speccy! My original introduction was with a 16k model one Christmas. Stayed a Sinclair fan for quite some time... Many, many years (and many systems) pass and I felt the urge to pick something up for the collection. I now have a working +2 (fancied a 128k) and a 'donor'. Both were silly cheap. As it turns out I got the spares machine working with a memory replacement. The datasette is problematic though and my attempts at fixing that haven't been so successful :(

Anyhow, looking forward to some fun rediscovering the system. I also got a box of games and a small stack of magazines with my purchase so plenty to go at. Loading the tapes is a frustrating as I remember. Think I'll be looking for a more modern solution before too long - for convenience ;)
Get yourself one of these:

https://www.bytedelight.com/?product=di ... ck-edition

Plugs into the back of the Speccy and allows you run games from an SD Card!!! They're ace!!!!
FelisSapien
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by FelisSapien »

stupidget wrote: Mon Mar 04, 2019 11:34 am
Get yourself one of these:

https://www.bytedelight.com/?product=di ... ck-edition

Plugs into the back of the Speccy and allows you run games from an SD Card!!! They're ace!!!!
Thanks for the link. I'll add one to my hardware wish list!

For now I've found an 3.5mm jack to cassette adapters to be a nice interim fix, in that I get the retroness of a tape-like load but with less faff. OTLA helps with load times too, though I've only just started playing with that.

Next jobs are to fix the terrible audio and an odd blink I get on the video out. I'm assuming this is a feature of using SCART. It could be by TV too but I don't think other sources are showing the same symptoms.
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Hedge1970
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Hedge1970 »

bigjon wrote: Thu Feb 28, 2019 8:43 pm
R-Tape wrote: Mon Feb 25, 2019 8:42 pm This is the official welcome to @bigjon, and also—bloody well check your PMs lad!

I want to get my hands on your 30 minute machine code tutorial :)
Howdy folks, I'm just an occasional dabbler in Speccy-related nostalgia at the moment. The 30-minute machine code tutorial I wrote 10 years ago is still available, kindly hosted by Arjun at https://chuntey.wordpress.com/2010/01/1 ... 0-minutes/
Great guide I’ll be returning to it again once I finish my “beta” basic game. It’s while writing this that I realised I needed machine code but I never quite [mention]bigjon[/mention]

Thanks again
bass-on
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by bass-on »

Hello!

About 28 years ago, I wrote a couple of text adventures for the Spectrum that John Wilson was kind enough to publish.

Feeling a little nostalgic a couple of weeks ago, I dug my old +3 out of the garage, and also began to have a play around with Spectaculator on my PC. As can happen with these things, this set me off down a rabbit hole where I ended up deciding to see if I could edit / improve one of the adventures. Playing it today, it's clear that, in addition to everything else that's wrong with it, I had to make compromises with the game due to running out of memory in The Quill. After a few days messing around with WinPaw (unsuccessfully), UnQuill, UnPaws, and The Quill and The Press, I had a version that I was a little happier with.

On the same day that I finished my editing, the lead turned up in the post so I could finally plug my +3 into a TV again. Searching through my disks, I was a little annoyed to discover that 21-year-old me had reached the same conclusion as 48-year-old me with the original game. There on one of the disks was a program to create a master for a "remix" version of one of my games, Deek's Deeds. I'd obviously been able to get my hands on a copy of The Press and had sought to fix some of the issues with the original release.

After yet another lead from Amazon, and some tinkering around with Audacity and MakeTZX, I was able to create a TZX file of the unreleased 1991 "remix" of Deek's Deeds, which I'm happy to make available.

During my editing of the now no-longer-needed version last week, my elderly eyes were having a little trouble with the scanned pdf of the manual for The Press, so I ended up creating a copy in Word. Docx and RTF versions are included in the zip file containing the TZX, in case anyone finds them useful or at all diverting.
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Ivanzx
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Ivanzx »

These are the stories we love to hear ;)

Welcome here!
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Fahnn
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Fahnn »

Hello, everyone! I don't think I've ever done one of these "introduce yourself" things before so I'll try not to ramble. But I know how some of you enjoy these stories, so it might go on a bit.

My name's Jim, I got a Spectrum in late 1984 following a summer of incessantly going around to my mate Steve's house to play games and write really bad BASIC programs on the Spectrum that he already had. I pestered my parents so much about it and under the auspices of it being a joint birthday and Xmas present, they eventually gave in! "Nine-day wonder", said my dad, but I got an unbelievable amount of use from it over the next five years, so much so that I had to replace the keyboard membrane twice. I got an Amiga in about 1989, so the Spectrum inevitably saw less use after that, but I remember taking the Speccy to university to mess around on in 1992-3, so I was still using it regularly almost ten years later. Unbelievable value for money, really.

In 1987 I wrote a game (using PAW) called Homicide Hotel that was - according to Derek Brewster in his CRASH review - the first PAWd game that he'd seen. Very generously he gave it 84% (and I mean very generously, because the game isn't really very good at all and has a highly unsatisfactory ending). I remember getting a complimentary copy of that issue of CRASH (no. 44, I think) through the post a good week before the magazine was out in the shops, which I found really exciting at the time. The game sold just short of 50 copies (mail-order at £2.75!) and I think my overheads were 40p per tape, 10p per jiffy bag and about 20p postage, so I reckon I made about £100 all in. Ironically, I'd had a phone call from some guy shortly after the CRASH review was published (I really wish I could remember which software house he said he was from) offering me £120 for the game, but I kind of wanted the adventure of doing it myself (plus I was still only 15 and wary of being ripped off) so I said "no". No regrets though! I really enjoyed the experience and wouldn't change it for anything.

Now it's 2019 and I've recently got back into the whole Spectrum scene, really glad it still seems to be so active and I'm amazed at some of the games that have since appeared (Buzzsaw and splATTR in particular are just phenomenal, but there's plenty of others). It's so cool that people are still producing this stuff, and to such a high standard.
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Ast A. Moore »

Hey, [mention]Fahnn[/mention]! Welcome to SC!

Image
Every man should plant a tree, build a house, and write a ZX Spectrum game.

Author of A Yankee in Iraq, a 50 fps shoot-’em-up—the first game to utilize the floating bus on the +2A/+3,
and zasm Z80 Assembler syntax highlighter.
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PeterJ
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by PeterJ »

Welcome [mention]Fahnn[/mention]

Great to have you on board.
Ralf
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Ralf »

Hi Jim! Welcome aboard :)

And if you ever wished to do some more programming on Speccy, there are friendly people here who will always help you with advice.
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Fahnn
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Fahnn »

Ralf wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 8:52 pmAnd if you ever wished to do some more programming on Speccy, there are friendly people here who will always help you with advice.
I'll almost certainly do that. I've recently recovered all the other games I wrote from my old tapes (was kind of amazed they were still readable, but there doesn't seem to have been much degradation at all, as far as I can tell). They're all rubbish of course but it's got me thinking about writing more stuff. I tried to learn how to handle machine code back in the 1980s but never really progressed beyond the rudiments; maybe it's time for another attempt now I'm older and more patient.

And thanks everyone for the lovely welcome. You don't get that on most internet forums!
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mr.spiv
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by mr.spiv »

Hello and greetings from .fi.. Started with Speccy in mid -80s and now after many years of being lost in other platforms the circle is closing and back on Speccy. Today I still have +2A, +3 and few FPGA ones. I do occasional crappy coding on Z80 when I need a break from daily working life 8-)
..More black tea..
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PeterJ
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by PeterJ »

Welcome [mention]mr.spiv[/mention]
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Ivanzx
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by Ivanzx »

mr.spiv wrote: Fri Apr 12, 2019 7:37 pm Hello and greetings from .fi.. Started with Speccy in mid -80s and now after many years of being lost in other platforms the circle is closing and back on Speccy. Today I still have +2A, +3 and few FPGA ones. I do occasional crappy coding on Z80 when I need a break from daily working life 8-)
Moi Mr.!

Mita kuuluu? :) Welcome here, it is good to have people from Finland here, my kids are half finnish :)
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zack4mac
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by zack4mac »

Here goes
Hello from North Wales near to the supposedly sunny Rhyl anyone from my neck of the woods remembers the local computer shop Joe Micro? long gone

I never had a Spectrum growing up and sorry to say I never gave the machine a chance, this was my loss. By the time I even heard about ZX Spectrum I was using a Commodore 64 and with it came a lot of unnecessary childish snobbery which I would later experience myself having owned the ATARI ST sadly this continues with the AMIGA.

But in hindsight what made all these machines great for me was they were the equivalent to a good book or listening to a radio station, they made you think about what you were trying to do, from getting it to print or playing a game. No drag and drop no fancy film footage within a game, just your own imagination that produced the backdrop this being intensified by the likes of Zapp and for the spectrum user its relative Crash.

School holidays and staying up into the early hours with my parents completing bubble bobble and wizzball in shifts. Happy times that I doubt will be relived on any XBOX or PlayStation.

Anyway I want to try and experience not just the ZX spectrum machine but also the community. I hope that I can one day have a special place in my heart for the spectrum that I hold for the C64 and ST.

Jon ;)
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8BitAG
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by 8BitAG »

zack4mac wrote: Sat Apr 13, 2019 2:17 pm Here goes
Hello from North Wales near to the supposedly sunny Rhyl anyone from my neck of the woods remembers the local computer shop Joe Micro? long gone
S'mae, Jon. :) Did you know the history behind Jo-Micro? https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north- ... fe-2845843

Also, I believe one of the Jo-Micro staff set up Broadsword Computers in the town too.
8-bit Text Adventure Gamer - games - research.
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zack4mac
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Re: Introduce yourself!

Post by zack4mac »

Hello I never met the man himself and had no idea about his interests, fascinating. I can vaguely remember a bloke named Chris who originated from London, was running it not long before it closed. I cant remember the year but it was when the Atari Falcon, A1200 and Amstrad GX4000 came out, in fairness the independent computer shop could not compete with the like of Dixons and Currys who cut deals with manufacturers direct. I take it you know the locality?

Jon
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