Archive for the ‘Spectrum’ Category

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Oxford Spectrum meetup, 20 October 2007

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

From 2pm, The Gloucester Arms After a hiatus of goodness-knows-how-long, Oxford will be home to another Spectrum pub meet on Saturday 20th October, from 2pm at The Gloucester Arms. Well over a dozen illustrious inhabitants of comp.sys.sinclair and the World Of Spectrum forums have indicated their interest already, so it’s promising to be a good one.

Limited crash space will be available for long-distance travellers (I could probably accommodate about 5-6 before things start getting, um, cosy), so drop me an email if you’d like to take that up. You may also want to get in touch to swap mobile numbers, in the unlikely event that we have to move on to somewhere else before you arrive (due to our group being SO FREAKING HUGE) or if you think you’re likely to get lost on the way or something. On that subject, here’s how to get there (full map):

From the coach station (Gloucester Green): Go round the back of the concourse, and head for the far left corner of the market square – the Gloucester Arms pub is in front of you. There, that was easy…

From Oxford train station: Go out of the main entrance towards the horrible green spire, then keep on heading in that direction past the big glass buildings on your left, over the bridge and continue down George Street (the one with Cafe Orient and Jessops on). At Old Orleans and the Cock And Camel pub, take the left turn. You’ll see the Gloucester Arms up ahead.

See you there!

Posted in Spectrum | 9 Comments »

Leaving summertime behind

Monday, September 10th, 2007

This demo received 4th place in the Sundown 2007 Oldschool Demo competition, out of, um, 4 entries. I could blame that on the not-quite-optimal projector settings it got shown under, or (more likely) the intense competition from the other entries. But actually I won’t, and instead I’ll sit contented in the knowledge that I got to explore some new concepts and techniques in Spectrum demo coding, without really knowing how they’d turn out, and managed to get them to a state where they didn’t totally suck. (Provided you’re willing to use a bit of imagination.)

The plan was to create something approaching a lo-fi YouTube-stylee home movie of scenes from a summer day – but with all visuals generated in real time, of course, as per the usual demoscene custom – drawing on the already-lo-fi graphics of the Spectrum, some crafty image processing, and some fine photos taken by Natalie (whose Flickr stream I previously plundered for Gallions Reach). And now, in a post-modern self-referential ironic twist (or something), you can watch it as a YouTube video.

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Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 5 Comments »

Will It Blend?

Friday, July 13th, 2007

A product of about one day of not very hard work (because why would you want to be stuck behind a laptop when there’s so much else going on at Shucon?), Will It Blend? is our tribute to everyone’s favourite iPhone destroyers, willitblend.com. It was put together in collaboration with Factor6 who did the music and additional graphics, with textual contributions from almost everybody. Which are largely unreadable, in more ways than one.

Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 4 Comments »

ZXpaintyONE

Friday, July 6th, 2007

So I wanted to enter the ZX81 Graphic Competition 2007. But I didn’t particularly want to type out block graphics character by character into a Basic program on an emulated ZX81 keyboard. So I wrote a ZX81 art package. In Javascript.

It does make sense – Javascript is one of the few languages you can write graphical applications in that’s truly cross-platform – as in ‘doesn’t require Windows users to install a massive runtime and a bundle of libraries’. Well, in this case we do require them to install Firefox, but come on, who’s going to object to that?

It’s dead easy to use (painting in three shades of grey is hardly rocket science after all) and it exports directly to ZX81 .P format courtesy of a neat Basic snippet from Russell Marks. So if you’re feeling artistic, give it a go – you don’t even need to download it. (But if you do, you get the additional perk of being able to supply an overlay image to trace around.)

Update (2008-07-12): Now features a handy clickable palette, as requested by Yerzmyey – so that people with less than three buttons on their mouse can use it. You’d think that a Mac user like me would have thought of that, really…

Posted in Demoscene, Javascript, Spectrum | 6 Comments »

Samplepack – Spectrum AY sample playback made easy

Monday, May 28th, 2007

I’ve used a fair bit of sampled sound in my recent Speccy productions, and when you’re using a cross-assembler like Pasmo that lets you shuffle PC-sourced data around in the Spectrum memory without really thinking, it’s easy to forget what a big deal that is. Up until now, high quality* samples have been out of reach of people who would rather not mess around with assemblers… and so, by popular demand, I’ve put together this pack that will let reasonably-competent Basic programmers convert WAV files and play them back on the Spectrum’s AY sound chip. Instructions, source code and example files are included in the package, so go and have a play – if it means more digitised gameshow hosts in the Crap Games Compo, I’ll be happy…

Download Samplepack (ZIP, 73Kb)

* The term “high quality” is, of course, relative. We’re talking 4-bit audio as opposed to 1-bit here.

Update (2007-05-30): Windows users of the world can now rejoice, for Karl McNeil has rewritten the sam2ay.pl script in FreeBasic, neatly avoiding the need to install Perl, and packaged the whole shebang up with other essential tools to do the WAV to TAP conversion all in one go. Download WAV2AY (328Kb)

Update (2007-10-11): Another update from Karl McNeil… the latest WAV2AY package now includes a utility to batch-convert a folder of WAV files and allow them to be played back on command from the 128/+2′s ramdisk. Download WAV2AY v2 (1.0Mb)

Update (2009-09-06): Karl McNeil has released version 3 of WAV2AY, with some mostly cosmetic tweaks that shuffle everything into one seamless executable package. It works a bit faster too… Download WAV2AY v3 (1.0Mb)

Update (2010-06-02): And here’s version 4 (which Karl actually put together a while back but somehow it got buried in my inbox – oops, sorry!), with a new Windows GUI… Download WAV2AY v4 (1.5Mb)

Posted in Spectrum | 17 Comments »

Clangers on the dancefloor

Monday, February 12th, 2007

[Screenshot: Clangers on the dancefloor]
This was my 256-byte intro for raww.orgy 2007, and it’s a slightly lazy production, this one. Back in October I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of my core effects for Koopaville boiled down to a 64-byte routine plus 4K of tables, so I did the obvious thing and filed it under “things to crunch down to 256 bytes and recycle as an intro”.

The title. What can I say about the title? Well, it’s Snakes on a Plane but several billion times better, isn’t it.

Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 2 Comments »

Through Yeovil

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Is it really almost a year since I last entered a Speccy music competition? Coo. This one got third place at raww.orgy 2007, and there’s not much more to say about it – I knocked it off in a total of about 3 hours I guess. The title is a shameless attempt to ride on the success of previous years’ entries Through Poland and Through Russia, but unlike Factor6′s entry Through England I made no attempt to continue the theme musically. Like I said, shameless.

Download gasman_-_through_yeovil.mp3

Posted in Demoscene, Music, Spectrum | 4 Comments »

Koopaville

Monday, October 16th, 2006

For the last demo party of the season, the UK’s very own Sundown, it was back to the Spectrum and another collaboration – with Equinox coming up with the goods on the graphical side. In the end only about half of our ideas actually came to fruition, but I’m pleased to report that the successful ones included the raster scene that I previously billed as “one of the cleverest effects I’ve ever done” but wound up abandoning to write Haluzkynation instead. The final cut received first place in the Oldskool Demo competition.

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Posted in Demoscene, Spectrum | 6 Comments »

OpenZXRom 2006-06-18 (back to BASICs…)

Wednesday, June 21st, 2006

Since succeeding at loading Basic programs into memory, I’ve been forging ahead at attempting to make sense of them. We now have an interpreter that can deal with a (very) modest subset of Sinclair Basic: INK, PAPER, BORDER, NEW, CLS, REM, GO TO, RUN, STOP, RANDOMIZE and CLEAR. As a teensy drawback, the only numbers it can handle right now are literal integers – there’s code in there that can parse almost any numeric expression, but nothing to actually do the maths.

Download OpenZXRom 2006-06-18

Posted in OpenZXRom | 2 Comments »

OpenZXRom 2006-06-03 (Houston, we have loading stripes!)

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006

OpenZXRom now has the all-important tape loading routine in place. There’s quite a lot involved behind the scenes – listening for signal edges, identifying the moment when the leader tone turns into data, keeping track of checksums, picking apart the header block – but it’s all doing it’s job, without a hint of Sinclair code to be found.

It doesn’t do anything after loading the file except sit around and sulk (although machine code programs that borrow the loader routine should be more enlightening) but the fact that it’s starting to do stuff that actually looks and feels like the original ZX ROM is occasion enough to put out a new release, I reckon.

Download OpenZXRom 2006-06-03

Posted in OpenZXRom | 2 Comments »

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