I guess while I'm sharing silly fun things fun.joe.codes/ascii-photob...
ZX Spectrum, SAM Coupé. Award-winning website developer. Oban, Scotland.
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I guess while I'm sharing silly fun things fun.joe.codes/ascii-photob...
Heh, I was going to ask what is it good for, but I googled it and now I want to know what CANT it be used for?!
BLOBBY! NOOOOOOOO! :((((((
Nightdive please pick this up and finish it
Ace! That looks very smooth. (And funnily enough I’ve been thinking about spinning blue boxes today too!)
…oOH EEE Ooh… Diddly dunn (diddly dunn)
Duke Smoochem delayed for another five years while i go back and add 10,000 flags to every fucking level
Hahah! That's great.
A wee bit of music I wrote for a racing prototype, which didn't get used. Abridged here so you get the flavour of the full track. I would love to work on a full soundtrack with this kind of vibe!
Good luck, I hope it helps! If it does seem to be improving things you can get 3D printed tools to hold the shutter and turn the spindle. Makes it a *lot* easier if you have loads of disks to do! I got mine from RMC/The Cave but a bunch of folk sell them online now.
Pull the shutter back and have a look at the disc surface under good light. It’s common for mould spots, especially if they’ve been stored in a loft etc. Can be cleaned gently with cotton bud and deionised water. Or, maybe one very bad disk has dirtied the new drive heads, and a clean would help.
Please do NOT stare directly into the Untempered Schism.
Agreed!
Hook it up to your workshop beer fridge AND your sound rig. 8-bit dance party! 🚨🔉👾
Door/window alarm sensor?
Hahaha. When I eventually figure out *how* it works I'll add the voice-over in post.
FUZZWEED IS COOL
Have you ever wanted to try making a plasma effect using Spectrum Next's "Layer 3" tilemap mode but don't know how plasma effects are done or how tilemaps work? Well don't ask me, but I did manage to cobble this together. 😎✌️🌊 #demoscene #zxSpectrumNext #z80n
No probs! I only discovered it *after* I needed it last Chrimbo. I made a thing with music that I could only get it to work in 48K. Busy's wee routine just hooks into the ERRSP etc (and catches it) so it cleanly bumps the Speccy into 48 without the user having to choose. (Can load in either mode).
Here's a handy wee routine by Busy that you can use to enable USR 0 mode. It's a machine code routine but the archived TAP file can just be concatenated onto the front yours to make a universal 48/128 tape file. (Source available too). spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/27522/...
Look, you caught me out last time. But this one is DEFINITELY Brodick Castle.
After a couple of well received issues of our free #ZXSpectrum magazine @breakspace.bsky.social, work is well underway for our 3rd issue, which will cover games released 1 July - 31 September 2025. We would welcome any feedback or fun letters to our letters page: breakspaceinbox@gmail.com Cheers!
Ah, thank you. I was just being a wally. I didn't realise you could specify a NEX file to be loaded in launch.json; I'm so used to using SNA with DeZog I never thought to try that, sorry! 🤦♂️ It's working now, but I did manage to upset ZEsarUX in new and exotic fashion along the way! 😎
Can I ask a wee toolchain question? Are you building/debugging a NEX or a SNA? I'd like to use Z80n mnemonics (NEXTREG etc) in a SNA so it can be debugged, but sjasmplus won't do that 48 mode, conversely it won't SAVESNA in Next mode! I just wondered if you had a workaround (DEFB the Z80n opcodes?)
This was an absolute treat last year so I'm planning to go again. (Saturday ticket booked—hopefully travel plans will coalesce shortly!)
I also looked at 90 porn sites for this reason
Just removed the date label from an old book and discovered that someone has drawn a design for a teapot that can serve either tea or poison how's your day going?
Honestly just shut up and listen to us.
#KeepBitsocketing
Maybe because Apple/Google would immediately take 30%
💰 RedBubble took 60% of our “profit margin” in “fees”, so we’ve moved our gift shop somewhere less money-grabbing vole.wtf/gift-shop/
Well, here's a turn-up for the books: yours truly being featured in an article on El Reg! It's all @thelastpsion.com's fault, of course 😆
I mentioned it in the alt text, but this is using the English language patch by TrekkiesUnite118. segaxtreme.net/resources/gr...
Ace, have fun!
Oh according to the instructions L.C.P. *can* be saved to tape. (I'm sure I saw an LGR or RetroRecipies episode about the C64 version which faked all that!)
I think it could be the de facto standard the Spectrum never really had for disks, so do I wonder if it will lead to more novel ideas like your virtual pet suggestion. (There were plenty of incompatible drives in the past of course!) Then again with emulation tape load/save is near instant anyway.
Those Cubes were a bit after my time! I never had a Tamagotchi either, but I *DID* import a Godzilla Dreamcast VMU. I was the coolest kid in the playground for about one afternoon in 1998.
Ahh! Yeah, those do look familiar.
Would be a nice project for a modern DivMMC etc where your pets' stats could be saved and recalled very easily. 🤔
I forget how it works exactly, I think the "research ID" is a sort of password system that tracks progress. IIRC the disk-based versions had a unique serial number but didn't actually save anything to disk either.
How about Little Computer People? spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2897/Z...
No one decides where the wind blows. Only the wind can determine that. A true adventurer is like the wind!! Grandia / Sega Saturn / Game Arts / 1997
I feel like I've just glimpsed the fundamental harmonic structure of the universe. (AND learned a bit of 6502 along the way, cheers!)
🎺🙌
Ah that's far deeper with MIDI than I've ever gone. Beside volume changes it looks like the EWI is sending pitch bend and glide control codes too? (I had to look up MIDI "registered parameters"). That's a lot going on! You can drop that stuff though?
Amazing!
What we really need is a square-to-circle machine!
👈 Member 1000 🏆
Haha, brilliant! I love a bit of fun in ostensibly Serious Software. I sometimes throw the occasional "reticulating splines…" in place of an otherwise boring "loading… please wait" message, but I'd never thought of dropping hints about a pay rise! 😆
Cacophonic! 🤘🤪🤘 (Can’t wait to hear it!)
we used to build household shrines to Going On The Computer and it's no coincidence that as we abandoned these we started straying further from god's light
leaping out of bed at 5am on hearing my coward central heating trying to turn itself on
This is absolutely amazing. Perfect art. https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrewt/115056697540191327
I don’t think it’s “L00K R@RE!” or anything but I’ve been keeping an eye out for a copy for AGES. Usually it’s the Uridium/Fireird double pack that shows up. First time I’ve seen this version for sale!
Apropos of nothing, the postie dropped this off today… 🔥🤺
Yeah a combined load-and-set-flags instruction would be very helpful.
> and a , JP m is a fast bit 7 check too Ooh that's good!
More Fun Henging It
📺 NEW THING 🎵 Brace yourselves for VTV, our music video TV station featuring HUNDREDS of odd/terrible novelty songs vole.wtf/vtv/
That’s right. The multi colour effect is so seamless you forget it’s doing something “impossible”. Roger the Pangolin is pretty gnarly too. All great work.
Have you seen Joefish’s latest Spectrum game? It’s kind of an R-Type cute-em-up with lots of influences, not least Parodius. Still WIP, but it’s looking great: ionian-games.itch.io/go-go-bunnyg...
haha, yeah I'm hopeless at it, but it's good fun. The Switch version is good, has a nice tate mode. I'm pretty hopeless at Radiant Silvergun but it's a hoot too.
Hahah yeah
Ah, nice one. Yeah it’s a great shop, whenever I need something I usually can’t help chucking a couple of Spectrum games in the order too. 😁
That's looking spotless! In the past I've used Dataserve Retro for replacement belts, etc. They might have what you're looking for? www.dataserve-retro.co.uk/contents/en-...
Yeah, very clever and simple! I never saw that (or Manic Miner, somehow) until years later though.
And check out the loading screen art! 😍 It was also the first dynamic loading screen I'd even seen, I thought that was fascinating. (The blocks near the bottom are a sort of counter that change colour as the game loads). There are fancier examples elsewhere but I'd never seen such a thing before.
I was quite late to the Spectrum but I had only seen pretty early, clunky games so Firelord fairly astonished me when I first saw it. And despite me not having the instructions inlay and not knowing what to do, it became one of (maybe _the_) most-played game on my Spectrum.
Ah yes, that Monday morning feeling
I’d better repost this 'cause it'll be dark soon and they mostly come at night. Mostly.
Sonic Heroes Official Guidebook! This has some really important tips for playing the game!
adult life is the unending, fruitless pursuit of something that makes you feel like sonic adventure 2 did when you were 11
Well the good news is my game Millie & Molly works on the #Switch2. I expect a massive uplift in sales with people hoping to push their new hardware to the limits ;) And it’s on sale for less than £2 from the shop courtesy of @thalamusdigital.bsky.social
Smashing! Glad that helped. Have fun!! ✌️💾
Good luck! Any of the tape images on that page should work. (I remember comparing them in the past but I don't think there were significant differences). Datel took over selling the PlusD (when MGT moved onto the SAM Coupé), so that tape is a little later.
Which tape did you use? The MGT PlusD System Tape is the best place to start. (Once you get it working, I'd reccommend you upgrade to BetaDOS as it fixes a bunch of bugs, but starting off with ordinary G+DOS is fine). spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/0011111
Ach it will be worth it just for the Batman Forever demo. And playing Dizzy in an off-putting shade of green.
“Wide load!” etc. “you’re going to need a bigger boat” and so on and so forth. Eheheh. (I quite like the CPC actually, this would be a nice addition!)
“What front-end framework are you using for that?"
👨🍳💋👌 Related: I was today-years-old when I (a professional website developer) learned that JS has default parameters now. #TIL!
Hey! The Needs: ReCovered launches this Friday and includes our cover of "火炎狐に氷の刃 [テンプル城]", known here simply as "Festival Temple Castle", from all-time N64 great, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon! 🎏🏯 For pre-orders and links to our other releases, check out nostoppingepoch.bandcamp.com!
Very useful! Thank you for sharing. I bought an RPi Pico and a couple of 74LVC245 to try something similar for Spectrum +3, but I didn’t get very far!
Sinclair QL without a keyboard? No problem, use a USB one instead. 😊 I’ve just created a @raspberrypi.com pico board which can act as if it’s a keyboard matrix. With correct software should be able to be used on any machine with 8 scan and up to 12 sense lines.
If you want to really class up your place, let me recommend the BURGERLIER (...yes, that's the official name in the McDonald's/SetMakers catalog) (1980)
0x002A
incredibly sorry to say that this is some of the best writing i have read this year
Yep! Counterintuitively, under the games menu you can find “128K BASIC” and “48K BASIC”.
¡Muchas gracias!
I was inspired by your post earlier! I’m away from my Speccy but I thought I’d knock something together in mobile Spectaculator “over lunch” …but now I see it’s gone 5pm! 😅
#FollowFriday 🍹🏖️📲 @ambientcoder.com @whathosnorkers.bsky.social @jimblimey.com @breakspace.bsky.social @fuzzweed.co.uk #ZXSpectrum #BASIC
Cool! 😎
Nice to see a “not interested” these days that’s not just a “maybe later”!
silly mood
Oh this is DELIGHTFUL, my smile kept getting bigger and bigger!
