Retro tech blog. With Java bits probably.
I'm building a game for ZX Spectrum Next. It's called Deep. The protagonist is a patient waking up in a psychiatric hospital with no memory of how he got there. The Next port has been the hard part. I'd left it relatively late in the day to get the code functional on there. I'm using z88dk with sccz80, banked C across eight 16KB segments, a custom IM2 interrupt handler, and a hand-rolled display…
These agents are ridiculous. I've been more productive in my personal projects in the last week than I've been in the last 8 years. In the last three weeks I've: Written the +3 disk checker for the Plus3 I've been putting off for 3 years Started the ZX Spectrum Nextgame I've been planning since I got my Next Converted a 25k line Pascal/Delphi mod tracker to Rust and got it building on Windows,…
Well, not to jump on the agentic coding bandwagon or anything, I've totally jumped on the agentic coding bandwagon and implemented a Disk Check program in z88dk . Its taken me and copilot a couple of weeks, but I now have a functioning Disk Checker . Copilot (and sometimes Claude, thanks Claude) helped me write almost all of this. I knew very little machine code, but I did know C. Copilot fixed…
I never had an Oric growing up. In fact I'd never heard of them - my world was a sheltered bubble of ZX Spectrums, Commodore C64s and Amigas, and the odd Atari console I vaguely remember playing on round a friends house and scoffing at the "backwards" graphics (whilst secretly really wanting to play Ghostbusters one more time). However, a lucky eBay auction later where I am the only bidder landed…
So as we left it, we should have something like you see in fig. 1, the mains side of the PSU is wired up with the fuse and the optional lamp. On to the tricky bit! I was lucky, and had an existing DIN connector from an old non-functional c64 power supply that came with the c64 I bought from eBay, but you may not be. You can find the DIN connector here , and any 5mm diameter cable that has 4…
Bought on eBay 2019, and restored early last year (2020) sometime, this little zx spectrum's life had been a hard one. It became even harder when I applied my inexperienced cag-handedness to the situation. Believe me, don't practice soldering on something this age.. it's just too delicate! It was the first one I'd ever done, and was a huge learning curve. Since it was so long ago, and I have…
PSU in action - you too can build this! After watching the amazing Jan Beta build a c64 PSU from bits , effectively cobbling a 5v PSU and a 9v transformer together, I thought I'd give it a go myself. The c64 is that iconic 8bit computer we all loved back in the eighties. It has a very odd PSU which delivers both 9v AC and 5v DC to the main board, and pretty much nothing I've seen in the modern…
I thought I'd share my attempt at restoring the white logo on the ZX Spectrum. The ZX speccy logo on the 16k and 48k plastic cases can get very worn and faded over the decades.. it has been over 30 years since the lauch of this little machine after all! fig. 1 - faded :( Phil Ruston has a good blog on his method to achieve this type of restoration, but I thought I'd share my own attempt, conceived…