Entries tagged spectrum

I've written parts of this story in the past, but never in one place and never in much detail. So why not now?

In 1982 my family moved house, so one morning I went to school and at lunch-time I had to walk home to a completely different house.

We moved sometime towards the end of the year, and ended up spending lots of money replacing the windows of the new place. For people in York I was born in Farrar Street, Y010 3BY, and we moved to a place on Thief Lane, YO1 3HS. Being named as it was I "ironically" stole at least two street-signs and hung them on my bedroom wall. I suspect my parents were disappointed.

Anyway the net result of this relocation, and the extra repairs meant that my sisters and I had a joint Christmas present that year, a ZX Spectrum 48k.

I tried to find pictures of what we received but unfortunately the web doesn't remember the precise bundle. All together though we received:

• A tape-deck.
• A 48k ZX Spectrum, with its glorious rubber keys.
• A pack of 10 (?) cassette-tapes.
• The first six were definitely the Spectrum six-pack:
  • The classic Horizons tape.
  • A version of Scrabble.
  • Horace Goes Skiing
    • From the Horace series.
  • A version of Chess by Psion.
  • Make-a-Chip - A logic-demonstration.
  • Chequered Flag, also by PSION, which was a terrible racing game. (Mostly this was terrible because it was in no-way a race. There were zero other cars on the track.)

I know we also received Horace and the Spiders, and I have vague memories of some other things being included, including a Space Invaders clone. No doubt my parents bought them separately.

Highlights of my Spectrum-gaming memories include R-Type, Strider, and the various "Dizzy" games. Some of the latter I remember very fondly.

Unfortunately this Christmas was pretty underwhelming. We unpacked the machine, we cabled it up to the family TV-set - we only had the one, after all - and then proceeded to be very disappointed when nothing we did resulted in a successful game! It turns out our cassette-deck was not good enough. Being back in the 80s the shops were closed over Christmas, and my memory is that it was around January before we received a working tape-player/recorder, such that we could load games.

Happily the computer came with manuals. I read one, skipping words and terms I didn't understand. I then read the other, which was the spiral-bound orange book. It contained enough examples and decent wording that I learned to write code in BASIC. Not bad for an 11/12 year old.

Later I discovered that my local library contained "computer books". These were colourful books that promised "The Mystery of Silver Mounter", or "Write your own ADVENTURE PROGRAMS". But were largely dry books that contained nothing but multi-page listings of BASIC programs to type in. Often with adjustments that had to be made for your own computer-flavour (BASIC varying between different systems).

If you want to recapture the magic scroll to the foot of this Osbourne page and you can download them!

Later I taught myself Z80 Assembly Language, partly via the Spectrum manual and partly via such books as these two (which I still own 30ish years later):

• Understanding your Spectrum, Basic & Machine Code Programming.
  • by Dr Ian Logan
• An introduction to Z80 Machine Code.
  • R.A & J.W Penfold

Pretty much the only reason I continued down this path is because I wanted infinite/extra lives in the few games I owned. (Which were largely pirated via the schoolboy network of parents with cassette-copiers.)

Eventually I got some of my l33t POKES printed in magazines, and received free badges from the magazines of the day such as Your Sinclair & Sinclair User. For example I was "Hacker of the Month" in the Your Sinclair issue 67 , Page 32, apparently because I "asked so nicely in my letter".

Terrible scan is terrible:

• https://archive.org/stream/your-sinclair-67/YourSinclair_67_Jul_1991#page/n31/mode/2up

Anyway that takes me from 1980ish to 1984. The only computer I ever touched was a Spectrum. Friends had other things, and there were Sega consoles, but I have no memories of them. Suffice it to say that later when I first saw a PC (complete with Hercules graphics, hard drives, and similar sourcery, running GEM IIRC) I was pleased that Intel assembly was "similar" to Z80 assembly - and now I know the reason why.

Some time in the future I might document how I got my first computer job. It is hillarious. As was my naivete.

Tags: personal, spectrum | 8 comments

Back in April 2021 I introduced a simple text-based adventure game, The Lighthouse of Doom, which I'd written in Z80 assembly language for CP/M systems.

• My game is on github here:
• https://github.com/skx/lighthouse-of-doom
• It was discussed on hacker-news at the time:
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26946130

As it was recently the 40th Anniversary of the ZX Spectrum 48k, the first computer I had, and the reason I got into programming in the first place, it crossed my mind that it might be possible to port my game from CP/M to the ZX Spectrum.

To recap my game is a simple text-based adventure game, which you can complete in fifteen minutes, or less, with a bunch of Paw Patrol easter-eggs.

• You enter simple commands such as "up", "down", "take rug", etc etc.
• You receive text-based replies "You can't see a telephone to use here!".

My code is largely table-based, having structures that cover objects, locations, and similar state-things. Most of the code involves working with those objects, with only a few small platform-specific routines being necessary:

• Clearing the screen.
• Pausing for "a short while".
• Reading a line of input from the user.
• Sending a $-terminated string to the console.
• etc.

My feeling was that I could replace the use of those CP/M functions with something custom, and I'd have done the 99% of the work. Of course the devil is always in the details.

Let's start. To begin with I'm lucky in that I'm using the pasmo assembler which is capable of outputting .TAP files, which can be loaded into ZX Spectrum emulators.

I'm not going to walk through all the code here, because that is available within the project repository, but here's a very brief getting-started guide which demonstrates writing some code on a Linux host, and generating a TAP file which can be loaded into your favourite emulator. As I needed similar routines I started working out how to read keyboard input, clear the screen, and output messages which is what the following sample will demonstrate..

First of all you'll need to install the dependencies, specifically the assembler and an emulator to run the thing:

# apt install pasmo spectemu-x11

Now we'll create a simple assembly-language file, to test things out - save the following as hello.z80:

    ; Code starts here
    org 32768

    ; clear the screen
    call cls

    ; output some text
    ld   de, instructions                  ; DE points to the text string
    ld   bc, instructions_end-instructions ; BC contains the length
    call 8252

    ; wait for a key
    ld hl,0x5c08        ; LASTK
    ld a,255
    ld (hl),a
wkey:
    cp (hl)             ; wait for the value to change
    jr z, wkey

    ; get the key and save it
    ld a,(HL)
    push af

    ; clear the screen
    call cls

    ; show a second message
    ld de, you_pressed
    ld bc, you_pressed_end-you_pressed
    call 8252

    ;; Output the ASCII character in A
    ld a,2
    call 0x1601
    pop af
    call 0x0010

    ; loop forever.  simple demo is simple
endless:
    jr endless

cls:
    ld a,2
    call 0x1601  ; ROM_OPEN_CHANNEL
    call 0x0DAF  ; ROM_CLS
    ret

instructions:
    defb 'Please press a key to continue!'
instructions_end:

you_pressed:
    defb 'You pressed:'
you_pressed_end:

end 32768

Now you can assemble that into a TAP file like so:

$ pasmo --tapbas hello.z80 hello.tap

The final step is to load it in the emulator:

$ xspect -quick-load -load-immed -tap hello.tap

The reason I specifically chose that emulator was because it allows easily loading of a TAP file, without waiting for the tape to play, and without the use of any menus. (If you can tell me how to make FUSE auto-start like that, I'd love to hear!)

I wrote a small number of "CP/M emulation functions" allowing me to clear the screen, pause, prompt for input, and output text, which will work via the primitives available within the standard ZX Spectrum ROM. Then I reworked the game a little to cope with the different screen resolution (though only minimally, some of the text still breaks lines in unfortunate spots):

• bios.z80

The end result is reasonably playable, even if it isn't quite as nice as the CP/M version (largely because of the unfortunate word-wrapping, and smaller console-area). So now my repository contains a .TAP file which can be loaded into your emulator of choice, available from the releases list.

Here's a brief teaser of what you can expect:

Outstanding bugs? Well the line-input is a bit horrid, and unfortunately this was written for CP/M accessed over a terminal - so I'd assumed a "standard" 80x25 resolution, which means that line/word-wrapping is broken in places.

That said it didn't take me too long to make the port, and it was kinda fun.

Tags: cpm, retro, spectrum, z80 | 4 comments

Recently I've been getting much more interested in the "retro" computers of my youth, partly because I've been writing crazy code in Z80 assembly-language, and partly because I've been preparing to introduce our child to his first computer:

• An actual 1982 ZX Spectrum, cassette deck and all.
  • No internet
  • No hi-rez graphics
  • Easily available BASIC
  • And as a nice bonus the keyboard is wipe-clean!

I've got a few books, books I've hoarded for 30+ years, but I'd love to collect some more. So here's my request:

• If you have any books covering either the Z80 processor, or the ZX Spectrum, please consider dropping me an email.

I'd be happy to pay €5-10 each for any book I don't yet own, and I'd also be more than happy to cover the cost of postage to Finland.

I'd be particularly pleased to see anything from Melbourne House, and while low-level is best, the coding-books from Usbourne (The Mystery Of Silver Mountain, etc, etc) wouldn't go amiss either.

I suspect most people who have collected and kept these wouldn't want to part with them, but just in case ..

Tags: books, spectrum, z80 | 3 comments