Spectrum Computing

Smeg! I must gave been carried away as I clean forgot to put up my last batch of type-ins here. Jim G is looking at the thread on t'other forum to keep up to speed with what he needs to add to his listings, so I can trim the post here down a bit. It came to my attention when I was midway through the...

To clear up any concerns: What I did here was, I took screenshots of musical scores from Wikipedia initially - that's where the clefs came from - then found that a lot of their diagrams were hosted in tiny PNG files where the stave was smaller than it had to be on the Spectrum screen - i.e. that the...

I figured that now I'm here, I may as well showcase (again, in some cases) what I've been up to when I've dug back into Spectrum programming and stuck with it long enough to see a project through to the end. What I'll put here is anything that won't be submitted to CSSCGC or the like - non-game prog...

Top banana, me old mucker. I'm nearly finished wading through Sinclair User in 1985, though I'm having a couple of days off to write my own program for a change. More links when I get over the finish line...

Taste-wise, they're like any plain water biscuit, the challenge is chewing the damn things. The romans might have occasionally soaked them in wine or beer to make them more manageable. A few years ago (circa 2005, I think) there was a documentary featuring the last few surviving veterans of World W...

Only yesterday I was wondering how easy it would be to make a Spectrum version of the (quite marvellous) Atari ST shareware game, Plop. It seemed easy enough, though I couldn't quite work out how to make the squares (that are one colour) fill with "stuff" (of another colour) and still show...

...and another update. Though it's annoying that both the -f and -w parameters affect the pitch produced by BEEP, I've at least sorted it so that BEEP *,15 produces as near to 440 Hz as Christian Zetnitz's Soundcard Scope will detect, and my ears can't tell the difference. The settings are -f 400 an...

Good to know there's a fix! Not so good to know it'll require soldering that might be beyond the limits of my already limited coordination, and definitely beyond the limits of my current soldering iron.

...and after a bit of looking around, and being somewhat disturbed at the way Sinclair chose to handle the QL's sound chip, I've found a program to play a musical scale... of sorts. It sounds horrific . But at least it does give me a series of BEEP pitches and frequencies, so I have something to wor...

Oddly enough, I've had a few troubles with my +2 and the Retro Computer Shack cable. On the LG LCD TV I had a while back, the screen would occasionally move left and right by a few pixels, seemingly at random intervals. On the slightly more modern Panasonic LED TV I have now, the picture is all over...

That'd be ranma_simon. I have to wonder, looking at the QL documentation, and a recent Spectrum machine code sounds program I've typed in: is it possible that the QL's BEEP command works exactly the same way as the Spectrum's CALL 949 routine? That's a piece of machine code that I can understand aft...

For the uninitiated: as part of my Type Fantastic project I've had to type in a few QL listings. So far it's been going OK, but I've reached a listing where the emulation is running far too fast. Jim Grimwood told me he uses QLAYW on some form Windows, which I have not been able to make work - I get...

All together now: "We bought it to help with your homework, and the household accounts..." the latter of which is actually contained in this update (see the November issue) which means Sinclair User's listings are complete to the end of 1984 . Sinclair User, issue 22, January 1984 http://w...

Top banana! I had that Usborne Guide to Better BASIC when I was a nipper. It was probably one I borrowed from the library in Great Dunmow on long-term loan, mind...

Hey! Great news! The Dacia Sandero... I mean... the Sinclair User archives for 1982 and 1983 are now complete! That's what I've been doing recently, and here's where you can find them: Sinclair User, issue 9, September 1982 http://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/zx/ttfn/SU8209-april2020.zip I have added: - ...

I think those DATA statements are supposed to be: 1220 DATA 6,1,197,33,15,0,17,20, 0,229,205,181,3,225,17,16,0,167, 237,90,125,254,255,32,237,193,16 ,230,201: REM first sound 1230 DATA 0,6,1,197,33,0,3,17,1, 0,229,205,181,3,225,17,16,0,167, 237,82,32,240,193,16,233,201: REM second sound Well mown! ...

Gaaaarghx! Now I need help myself. One of the programs I'm typing in - Refuelling from Sinclair User, November 1983 - uses some machine code. Unfortunately, this is the bit of the listing that has suffered the most with poor print quality from the original magazine and the high JPEG compression from...

I know Crisis has been tackling some bits and pieces in the later issues of Sinclair Programs, so I've been leaving that alone for now. I've just looked on the site, and it looks like the ZX81 listings from that issue are complete at least.

Right! With use of a screen recorder, I have finally worked out... something about why ZEsarUX 8.1 isn't running on my PC. The fraction-of-a-second launch frame says: "Invalid CPU percentage" I've got version 7.2 as well, and it says the same thing. Does this happen to anyone else, and if ...

It's a heavily-edited screenshot from Wibstars, another game you may know my RZXing capabilities for. It seems there were two people on this planet who liked that game: me, and someone who commented on the video on YouTube. I suppose what I could have done is - and this is not me attempting to curry...

Peter: you are right, in that on WOS, it's been... me and Crisis, I think. Just the two of us, we can complete the Type Fantastic if we try... This is one huge reason for me registering here - to avoid duplication of each other's efforts, we should coordinate what we're doing. And I reckon the best ...

Hi! I'm (not) Troy McClure. You may know me from such RZX Archive entries as Blood & Guts, Quetzalcoatl, and Dominetris. In reality: I'm Dr. Jim, I'm also known as The Mighty Dopethrone on t'other forum (registered in 2003 when all I was listening to was Electric Wizard), I reached my 40s last s...