ZX Spectrum

Just wondering what people's experiences have been like with this device?

If you remember the Speccy scene in the 90's, you must have no doubt downloaded some games from the old ftp.nvg.ntnu.no FTP server.

After World of Spectrum came along, I had mostly forgotten about it. This week I remembered and took a peek... and what a nice surprise, the old geezer is still there, complete with a README file from 1995/03/11 signed by Arnt Gulbrandsen.

Have a look, there are even some messages from the comp.sys.sinclair USENET newsgroup.

Good times.

... a version of which is somehow still running to this day!

I'd struggle to place the year, probably 1983 or early 1984, but the first game I ever played on our first ZX Spectrum was "Maze Death Race".

It was a blatant Rally-X rip-off, from a time when intellectual property rights felt more like guidelines than actual rules. You move around a maze, collecting flags, avoiding other cars and oil patches. You can select the speed of the other cars, and that's about it.

Most of all, I remember it being janky as anything. The graphics felt like they were falling apart, with UDGs flashing in and out of coherence, jerky movement, blurping sound effects...

But I had no frame of reference, no point of comparison. To my 8 year old self, the mere fact that a recognisable car was moving around on our TV under my control was mind-blowing. I honestly had no idea that the glitchy graphics were anything other than purposeful - that instability seemed to add to the allure somehow. It felt like a window into a weird world I'd only had hints of before then...

And that cassette inlay art... nowadays it looks amateurish; back then it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen!

A shameless bit of self-promotion.

It's 3 years since I got it into my head that I wanted to make a Spectrum game. I'd done BASIC in my salad days, but never machine code... How hard could it be?

I picked the ancient 1982 arcade game The Pit, which had never been ported to the Speccy and looked like a good fit. Here's the original:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTIjYc-ZH-A

I spent a month drowning in ASM, but finally finished it... and here is what I came up with:

https://youtu.be/YQeyKqAeEaY?t=128

https://dokdave.itch.io/the-pit

My main goal, as well as learning machine code, was to get it as close as possible to the arcade - not easy given the Spectrum's limitations.

Luckily, The Pit helped me out - its colour scheme is basically the Speccy palette. It is based on 8x8 blocks, like the Speccy. It's horizontal res was similar as well. Only the vertical res was challenging.

In the end, I settled on having the screen flip between top and bottom, rather than be single screen. But it seems to work fine.

The most rewarding part of the project was focusing on the fine details - the weird title screen, the font, the high-score and instruction text.

And the biggest challenge was actually making the gameplay feel like the arcade. Not easy when you're terrible at the game and can barely finish the first cavern.

Oh, and, of course, machine code...

Honestly, it feels a bit like a fever dream. It's so different from the modern programming languages I'm used to. Needing to think of memory as something you actually need to care about and consider is so alien to me. No variables, as such; self-modifying code; considering how quickly you can get a new screen generated and copied to the "TV"... By the end of it, I was thinking in t-states and frames and little else.

It's all gone now, of course, lost in a whirlwind of pandemic and other distractions. I doubt I could remember a tenth of the things I learned in that month...

But maybe I'll get the urge one day and dust off the old assembler again. Maybe I'll wonder anew at how the hell bedroom coders did it back in the 80s, without the convenience of modern IDEs, debugging and such.

As a nice bookend to this project, later that year I opened my copy of the Crash 2020 Annual and found this...

My fanboy scream probably registered on seismographs!

ZX Spectrum and ZX80 on display at the museum on Mountain View, California.

Good looking mechanical keyboard project for the ZX81 (or the modern equivalent, the ZX81+38), including all the designs and schematics.