Spectranet - the TNFS directory thread

[p13z]

With a new batch of Spectranets having been produced, and a bit of revival of interest, I thought it could be time to resurrect the TNFS directory.
The original thread dates back a decade, to the first batch of Spectranets, when WoS was Is, not Was.
Sites come, and sites go. Hopefully this thread will help keep track. So:

irata.online -
nihirash.net - Gopher client
retrojen.org -
szeliga.zapto.org - Includes IRC client, and a nice up-to-date list of modern games / new releases
tnfs.bytedelight,com - A new home for new Spectranets
tnfs.markround.com - Good things, and the easiest big database search since WoS Bridge
tnfs.millhill.org -
vexed4.alioth.net - The original and spiritual home of the Spectranet
zx.cm7.ch -
zxnet.co.uk - Some nice online Speccy programs / clients
zx.zapto.org - A strange celebration of crap BASIC

I also thought it could be time to revive my own TNFS, which was zxnet.zapto.org - and now zx.zapto.org
The original TNFS was a bit of a collection of oddities, the only USP being that it hosted a friendly front end for the old "WoS Bridge" (sadly not available for a number of years now). So I thought I'd find something else, err, "unique".
100% pure uncompiled BASIC, written, stolen or hacked and tied together seamlessly* with spaghetti. Creating, in effect, one multi-megabyte BASIC thing / game / atrocity - just for nostalgia and giggles. I intend to keep adding to and updating it, ad hoc. There is currently enough online to get the impression of what is going on. So far, the vibe is something like a terrible early Sierra adventure game, distributed as a type-in - or Cascade compilation tape:
[media]https://youtu.be/ki6_HjiuCjE[/media]

Be nice to see some replies with additions / updates / corrections / more descriptions / better descriptions for the list etc.
And from anyone wishing to pimp out their TNFS.

[Guesser]

Not much to say about mine. I mostly set it up to host copies of snapCterm and the installer for the Spectranet module version of Brendan's diagnostics ROM. The irc example program is on there too.
There's also the unfinished IDE filesystem modules but and hard disk formatter, but they're not much use to anyone since still I never implemented reading/writing files

It also has that other thing that we don't speak about.

[mdr]

Hi!

I've added szeliga.zapto.org and zx.zapto.org to my list of links on tnfs.markround.com. Your site is hilarious - I love the "doggers" that turn up in the secluded carpark and flash their headlights I keep getting stuck there though, should I be able to read the local information board ?

Anyway, a couple of updates for my site - I've added an over-the-top website for it at https://tnfs.markround.com which amongst other things has a downloadable SZX archive and instructions so you can get going quickly with the FUSE emulator. I've also added a bunch more recent games and a curated list of modern titles:



I'm updating it as often as work, family life and other projects permit - and I also keep getting sidetracked by Yazzie, that game is such a timesink it's ridiculous.

Cheers for making this list, I'll post any more big updates (or any new sites I discover) here as well.

[p13z]

I keep getting stuck there though, should I be able to read the local information board ?

Just me updating / adding things. There are a lot of loose ends - as long as it doesn't crash I tend to upload half-finished stuff to the public TNFS.
The information board now "works", and I'm working on some new bits.
Cheers for your TNFS, just what we needed - having lost some of the original big TNFS services. Helped motivate me to get a TNFS up and running again, too. It's great to see the Spectranet getting more love and a new lease of life.
And I have a minor bug report:
On your TNFS, on the "disc and tape magazines" menu - if you press an invalid key it freezes, and won't let you select an option.
( it gets stuck in a loop from line 107 to 111. Looking at the listing, I think line 111 should be "GOTO 100" - not "GOTO 107" ).

[mdr]

Thanks for the bug report. You're right; it was the GOTO - it was off by one! It's an artifact of the way I'm currently building the site through a collection of shell scripts on Linux that concatenate various files together (I'm writing a blog post on how it all works, will update here I've finished it). Anyway, it's fixed now. Cheers!

-Mark

[MonkZy]

I also thought it could be time to revive my own TNFS, which was zxnet.zapto.org - and now zx.zapto.org

This is very good. I will come back, the minigames are not so mini. Thanks for putting it back up.

[Hedge1970]

I’ve been chatting to the guy on eBay selling these cards for the last three weeks. He has identified what the problem is and is nearing a solution. As soon as he has it fixed I’ll be getting one. Always amazed what a dedicated electronics expert can build, internet for a 1980s icon

[mdr]

Quick update from me - I've been uploading a bunch of new content and added a new curated list to my TNFS site: a collection of the most popular scene demos from pouet.net. I'm personally not a big fan of the super-hectic flashy demos like Mescaline Synesthesia, and prefer the more stylish productions like Tiratok or We Are Alive which appear a little further down in the list, but it's a great collection of code that really shows off what can be done with the limitations of the Spectrum.

I'm going to add as many of these productions as I can over the coming weeks, but the most impressive I've seen so far have been the 48k demos - check out New View and Critical Error. Bleeper music and a real-time wolfenstein-style maze ? Awesome stuff. Simply incredible what can be done on such basic hardware.

<columbo> Oh, one more thing </columbo>... There have been a bunch of great modern games released recently, but a lot have been hosted on itch.io where the author has placed a "name your own price" download button. Feels wrong to host them for free on my TNFS if the author hopes to make a bit of spare cash for their efforts, so I've avoided uploading anything like that. But if you have written a game and would like me to add it so that it can be played from the site, let me know by email or PM.

Cheers,

-Mark

[szeliga]

There's a guy on facebook's "Sinclair Society" who said he has a server running at sickbay.ddns.net

[p13z]

There's a guy on facebook's "Sinclair Society" who said he has a server running at sickbay.ddns.net

Don't know if it is just me, or a temporary problem -
I can mount that URL - but I'm not getting any response from it at the moment.

edit to say:
Got it now, was just me being special.
Will update list.

[p13z]

Updated list:

irata.online -
nihirash.net - Gopher client
retrojen.org -
sickbay.ddns.net -
szeliga.zapto.org - Includes IRC client, and a nice up-to-date list of modern games / new releases
tnfs.bytedelight.com - A new home for new Spectranets
tnfs.markround.com - Good things, and the easiest big database search since WoS Bridge
tnfs.millhill.org -
vexed4.alioth.net - The original and spiritual home of the Spectranet
zx.cm7.ch -
zxnet.co.uk - Some nice online Speccy programs / clients
zx.zapto.org - A strange celebration of crap BASIC

[mdr]

So, a MASSIVE update for my site.

I've started work on merging in the latest TOSEC dump, and have added 7,000+ new games and 1,000 new demos to the site. There's now around 14,000 files in total hosted and playable from the menu system, including all the recent CSSCGC entries, modern games and more .

There's a lot of work to do over the coming days to sift through and remove duplicates, and go about getting the rest of the covertapes, utilties and other things from that archive online. But it's been a productive and fun project so far!

In doing so, I also had to completely re-write the menu and search system: The old system used hundreds of DATA statements in BASIC files to produce the listings; with the volume of new content, these files got too large to load into the Speccy's memory! I instead ended up writing a Linux-based server API which the BASIC code talks to over TCP to get listings, run searches etc.

The upshot of all that is that now the menus for games and demos are slightly slower to display each page as it has to make a couple of TCP connections to retrieve the listings[1], BUT the search is now practically instantaneous. And given how many titles and pages of results are now available (there are 1418 games starting with "s" for example), I imagine the search is going to be the easiest and most convenient way of finding what you're looking for and jumping around the menus.

I hope the additional content makes this trade-off worthwhile. Plus, now I've got this API server running I have all kinds of plans for chat, gateways to other services, bookmarks systems and so on. Just got to find the time to do it all Please let me know if you notice any issues with the new system, it's all very new code and there's also a server component I have to debug and optimise as well, so I imagine there will be a few gremlins to shake out.

Cheers,

-Mark

[1]=Took me a long time to work this out with Wireshark dumps and lots of debugging, but it seems as though the Spectranet streams extension uses 256-byte buffers, and if the sent data overflows that, then a read via INPUT will block forever. So my API now has to split responses into under 256-byte chunks, and signal to the client that a response was chunked. The client then has to re-open the connection and request the next chunk which for some menus results in 2-3 connections before all the entries can be displayed. I'm going to continue work on this though and see if I can optimize it, or see if there's just something about my implementation that's making it unhappy.

[flatduckrecords]

So, a MASSIVE update for my site.

I've started work on merging in the latest TOSEC dump, and have added 7,000+ new games and 1,000 new demos to the site. There's now around 14,000 files in total hosted and playable from the menu system, including all the recent CSSCGC entries, modern games and more .

There's a lot of work to do over the coming days to sift through and remove duplicates, and go about getting the rest of the covertapes, utilties and other things from that archive online. But it's been a productive and fun project so far!

In doing so, I also had to completely re-write the menu and search system: The old system used hundreds of DATA statements in BASIC files to produce the listings; with the volume of new content, these files got too large to load into the Speccy's memory! I instead ended up writing a Linux-based server API which the BASIC code talks to over TCP to get listings, run searches etc.

The upshot of all that is that now the menus for games and demos are slightly slower to display each page as it has to make a couple of TCP connections to retrieve the listings[1], BUT the search is now practically instantaneous. And given how many titles and pages of results are now available (there are 1418 games starting with "s" for example), I imagine the search is going to be the easiest and most convenient way of finding what you're looking for and jumping around the menus.

I hope the additional content makes this trade-off worthwhile. Plus, now I've got this API server running I have all kinds of plans for chat, gateways to other services, bookmarks systems and so on. Just got to find the time to do it all

Holy moley! That's amazing Mark. Sounds like a solid and much more sustainable approach to shift the heavy-lifting onto the server, nice work.

[1]=Took me a long time to work this out with Wireshark dumps and lots of debugging, but it seems as though the Spectranet streams extension uses 256-byte buffers, and if the sent data overflows that, then a read via INPUT will block forever. So my API now has to split responses into under 256-byte chunks, and signal to the client that a response was chunked. The client then has to re-open the connection and request the next chunk which for some menus results in 2-3 connections before all the entries can be displayed. I'm going to continue work on this though and see if I can optimize it, or see if there's just something about my implementation that's making it unhappy.

Aha! That explains so much. I was working on something to pull e.g. the top ten SCR artworks from ZXArt (I thought it would be nice to have a 'slideshow' feature) but I kept getting stalled connections locking up the Spectrum. Maybe a wee intermediary proxy to chunk up the data stream would work? Probably far easier to do it all server-side (caching, JSON parsing) but I wanted to try and do it all from BASIC!

Anyway, congrats on anther great update and thanks very much for sharing all this hard work with us!

[mdr]

Another update from me. It's been a while due to work and other real-life commitments, but I've just added around 2,300 new utilities and tools from the latest TOSEC archive, bringing the total up to just under 16,500 titles online.

I've also migrated the utilities and tape magazine sections to my new search API which has also had a minor update I did a month ago but never announced: You can now search for any title from wherever you are in the given category - no more jumping back to the main menu and selecting a different start letter:



This should make the site a lot more pleasant to use and a lot quicker to find what you're looking for.

Hope you enjoy the update! My next project is getting the collection of YS/SU/Crash etc. covertapes online and browseable; I have a plan on how to do this but am hitting a few problems with Spectranet, but that's a topic for another thread if I can't figure it out in the next few days...

[MonkZy]

[mention]mdr[/mention] Your TNFS server is incredible! I will have a dig after I get back from a weekend away.

I do have one request, but I am not certain how easy it would be : Can you indicate if a .tap works on 48k machines? I use SpectraNet on a 48k+ so have to use trial and error and see if I get a '4 Out of Memory'. I can imagine to do this across the entire share could be very difficult, and also I guess most users have 128k machines.

Many thanks for this fabulous resource!

[mdr]

[mention]MonkZy[/mention] I have a vague idea on how we might do that. I've been toying with the idea of briefly showing a screen before the tap loads with a 3-5 second countdown timer - if you do nothing, the TAP will then load. Otherwise, there could be options to enter comments, review a title, add compatibility notes and maybe in the future add it to a list of user bookmarks.

I think something like that would be the only way forward as there is no detail in the TAP files or names (unless they explicitly state 48k or 128k like Yazzie for example). Would also be a nice way to get some user feedback and comments etc. on the titles.

[mdr]

Had a free few days so decided to crack on and implement that comments system I mentioned in my last posts. You can now read and add comments for every file on the site!

Most lists have been ported over to the new system including the "Hall Of Fame" (which I've also bumped up to the top 30 most played games). When you view one of these new lists, any game which has comments attached to it will show a little yellow icon, e.g.



Now when you select a file, you'll get a sort of "splash" screen which displays the comment count, most recent comment, options to read or add comments, and a countdown timer. The file will automatically load in 10 seconds, or you can jump straight to it by pressing the L key. This also gives you the option to back out and return to the previous menu:



I know this introduces an additional hop before you get to play your game but I hope the extra functionality makes it worthwhile (and like I say, you can always skip it by pressing the L key if you don't want to wait). My hope is that as well as general comments on the game, people can also add their own compatibility reports, or flag a title as being broken etc. This now means you can read the comments and if you notice one saying e.g. "128K only", then you can go back to the list without loading it if you have a 48k machine (as per [mention]MonkZy[/mention]'s request).

The comments system itself works very much like the Message Wall; you can browse comments (there's no limit on the number of comments per file) and add your own:



So yeah - I hope you enjoy the new feature. It did involve a massive overhaul of pretty much all the BASIC code as well as updating the server API, so although I have tested it as well as I can I expect there are a few gremlins still lurking. Let me know if you discover any bugs or unexpected behaviour, either via the site Message Wall, PM me here or email me.

Cheers,

-Mark

[Hedge1970]

@mdr Great site, just admiring the depth of content, very impressive stuff. BTW where are the CSSCG ?

[mdr]

[mention]Hedge1970[/mention] Hi! Glad you like the site. I saw your post on the message wall; I feel like that sometimes - it's crazy to see the 1980s computer I grew up with connected to a HDMI monitor and the Internet!

There's a lot of CSSCGC games in amongst the regular games, but there's currently no central list of them all. It's on my to-do list to make sure I've got all the latest entries uploaded, and then make lists for each year so they're easily browsable. I have recently re-written the lists handling to use my server API and it's very easy to add new sections now so I hope to have that done soon-ish (and update some more of the other lists while I'm at it). I'll post updates here and on the site itself when I do it.

Cheers,

-Mark

[Hedge1970]

I have recently re-written the lists handling to use my server API and it's very easy to add new sections now so I hope to have that done soon-ish (and update some more of the other lists while I'm at it)…

I’ve never looked into writing files with a Microdrive as it always seemed a bit pointless given the speed. But now we are online these readable and writable text/lst files become much more interesting for dynamic content. I don’t run a webserver but I do know that you can get pretty creative with this simple toolset. I expect a simple email system could be written and a simple interface would be possible with Basic. I would struggle to understand how to make it secure but for fun - email on a Speccy - it all seems doable with the support of a modern server…

Anyway I digress, the search is fantastic and given the load speeds of the games over http it’s just so useable, love it.

[mdr]

To the weirdo who keeps loading SQIJ, I see you....

It's now finally at number one on the most "played" games Hall Of Fame, you can stop now

[cmonkey]

To the weirdo who keeps loading SQIJ, I see you....

It's now finally at number one on the most "played" games Hall Of Fame, you can stop now

Yay! That weirdo be me! I promise I'll stop playing it now that I've got it to top of the charts!

[mdr]

Heh, we made it to the latest episode of The Spectrum Show!

[mdr]

Hi all!

It's been a while but I have just made a pretty big update to my TNFS site. I had to move things around in the main menu to make room for some new features, so sorry for messing with anyone's muscle memory!



The big news is that there is now an articles section and thanks to the amazing work of Robert Hazelby (http://theretroranch.co.uk/), there are a couple of great articles now readable on the site: There's a review of Amiga PD conversions of Speccy classics as well as an exclusive interview with the Rose Tinted Spectrum YouTube channel:



I'll be making more changes and improving the articles "engine" over the coming days, adding proper pagination and so on, and we're also working on getting some more articles and features loaded up - if you have anything you'd like to contribute just email me (speccy [at] markround.com) or drop me a DM.

Hope you enjoy!

-Mark

[Guesser]

I've made some improvements to my streaming music thing. It's now closer to a proper jukebox rather than just playing a random track, and you can stop songs/play something else when a track ends rather than having to reset the speccy.
I've also "remastered" some of the audio files to make them slightly less of a hissy mess.