Spectrum Computing

For the record: my enjoyment of the two Perturbator albums "I Am The Night" and "Dangerous Days" (an excellent soundtrack for doing what you now all know I do with that last program on the Next Dumping Ground) is compromised by the intrusion of Isabella Goloversic. She would be a...

I can try. If you want exactly 1000 Hz, get your assembler out and do it that way.

Also: at the third stroke, the time sponsored by Accurist will be... 6... 15... and 20 seconds.

FOR A=1 TO 3: BEEP 0.1,23: PAUSE 45: NEXT A

Excellent Jim! How blue and green are you real stats then? Sunday afternoon, before I made the program: very much green. Monday, during filming: green. Tuesday evening: worryingly yellow. Today: a dreadful mixture of green, yellow and red. None of these have been using the program, more an assessme...

If all those hex addresses and valyes can be converted to decimal, it shouldn't take too much to turn that into a .POK file. Or are you looking for a fix to make it work on real hardware? The presentation looks absolutely pony for 1988, though - trapped in the No Man's Land between 16/48 Tape Magazi...

Presenting, program number two for the dumping ground... ...actually, I'm not going to explain it. I'll just leave it here , and let the magic of YouTube unveil the most unbelievable revelation since a Brazilian and a Greek said they were going to make a 21st Century "Son Of Spectrum". The...

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis has a level that is all blue on black. Not cyan but blue! Nearly invisible on the typical fuzzy TV. CORE did much the same - but the colours fade to ever-darker shades as the battery in the space suit runs down. If the screen gets to blue on black, you're in d...

The ZX Spectrum. Giving you both of the 4-colour palettes of a CGA-equipped PC from 1982 onwards. Better still, without the washed-out pastel-shading caused by using #55 as the "low" level for the colours instead of #00. You want Spectrum colours on a 1980s PC - you need EGA! Strangely en...

Daveysloan wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 10:27 am Hard As Nailz, the longest I've ever seen anyone play for is 9 seconds...

And it took about 100 attempts to stay alive that long. Never let it be said I wasn't fully dedicated to my year in the control room of CSSCGC Towers.

Pah! I've got Minecraft running on a 1K ZX80. Beat that.

I've heard stories. Here's one about Fantasy Software . And another one about Martech-connected developers Emerald Software . I have always been wondering about this... "martek" was the invulnerability-mode cheat code in the "retail beta" version of Heretic. By the time of the f...

Despite all the above, I'd still go for The Power House purely on caring so little about the quality of their products - i.e. presumably not at all - that they let Sqij! through the net... twice ! Still, we did get a couple of much-improved homebrews out of it, and 37 years' worth of cheap jokes at ...

Flash Gordon Correct! FLASH! 1! Saves absolutely none of us! If anyone was wondering, there's been a month of "pick a musical artists and write a deep critique of every album in that artist's discography" over on the "social" media network of my choice. I chose Bruce Dickinson -...

EdToo - with a bit of luck, you've just received my latest crime against NextBASIC. Thunderbird tells me I've sent the message and the attachment that goes with it, but the window didn't close itself. If it hasn't arrived, nail a piece of parchment to my front door that says "send it again&quo...

Right - I've got something that works, provided by Matt Langley on the Faceache page. I have found no way of changing LAYER 1,2 palette entries with the LAYER PALETTE n,p,b command or BANK b POKE x,y then LAYER PALETTE * BANK b. But there is a way to do it with three REG commands. So: tr=200 LAYER 2...

Well, that's interesting. PALETTE 0,135,200 is what sets the paper and border to rusty-orange (which I intend to be transparent). That's the only palette entry I've found to be effective so far. So is that me actually changing the border colour? In the main program I intend to use this with (and may...

Further to this, I'm in a jam needing to change colours on LAYER 1,2 while using a custom palette. Knowing that PAPER = !(INK) is one thing I didn't know before. What I need to do is have LAYER 1,2 with black ink on a transparent background - which should, as I understood it, have meant redefining t...

I didn't want to boil down this part of the world to just 'motorbike races', but it's all I could find on the Speccy as representative. Someone is going to have to change that. *cracks knuckles* Maybe some kind of "heritage quest" around the Isle of Man, as that's what I did when I went t...

I have no resolutions. I could say "I will spend time programming the Next", but after it took as long as it did to arrive, that's just what I'm going to do anyway , time of year irrelevant. It has proved to be a useful distraction from the cold conditions outside, even if this does mean b...

The 5 key on my Next is already taking a pounding.

Next BASIC programmers will know why. And for those of you who don't know, %this %is %a %huge %clue.

That article is well worth a read for anyone who sees the QL as some forgotten machine that was here today, didn't work very well even with the dongle, and was gone tomorrow, drowned in a sea of much more expensive PCs and Macs and cheap-and-nasty-but-serviceable Amstrad PCWs. Especially if you thin...

For the record, I've eaten surströmming and I wasn't sick. The worst part of it is how foully salty it is. Take your average anchovy and double it, and you're somewhere near the salt level we're dealing with. The stench of rotting fish is a mere secondary problem. Don't put it on your porridge. Mayb...

The only time I ever saw "nasty" was on the sound selection screen for Batman. "Useful" deleted the sounds as Batman is moving around. Were Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond trolling us? It was actually useful to have the "nasty" sounds on, to be able to judge where Batman...

Can confirm: porridge with black treacle works well. Is that in the Porridge Roulette database? Can also confirm: as of this evening, I have a very rudimentary skeleton for a Next game with a sprite moving around on the screen making beep-beep noises. Most of my effort has gone into the title screen...

You keep dangling the carrot about a Next entry, my inbox is waiting :lol: I've just been making* some tiles and sprites for the last three days. At least some of the test routines can be dropped straight into the game with very little fuss. You'll be waiting a bit longer, though - even crap Next g...

Not that I want to risk losing, but thinking again, a utility can be made even crapper by crowbarring a game element onto it (see most games in the Education genre category!). Fun To Learn would have made an excellent CSSCGC entry. It's a bunch of educational games (Hangman being one of them), it's...