• Play online
• Download JSSpeccy v20091121 (680Kb)
• JSSpeccy subversion repository

The idea is that it’s a lower-maintenance way of keeping on top of developments in the Speccy world, as something that can be updated on the spot as and when you encounter a story, with no obligation (indeed, no way at all) to write a long erudite commentary on every news story. Following an encouraging call for volunteers on WOS forums, I set the service up through CoTweet, and it’s been running successfully for a couple of weeks now. More contributors would be very welcome, especially non-UK people who can share their perspective of those wonderful developments in Spain, Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere which are being overlooked by the English-speaking crowd. Drop me an email / tweet with your email address if you’re interested, and I’ll send a CoTweet invite in your direction. No previous Twitter experience necessary!

(And, of course, all feedback and story submissions will be gratefully received via Twitter itself – tweet them to @speccynews.)

(continues for approx 1500 more lines)

Anyone typing it in in its entirety would be rewarded with this:

Download midibeep_minute_waltz.mp3

Not bad for an evening’s work. Mind you, I did take an ever so teeny shortcut, by writing a Ruby program to convert a MIDI file to BEEP format. (Any .mid file will do, although ones with a single instrument will survive the rather primitive selective-note-butchering process better. Oh, and anything much longer than this one will exceed the 48K Spectrum memory…) And now you can try it out too:

• Midibeep source/downloads at Github
• Midibeep Windows build (thanks to Karl McNeil)
• Minute Waltz (TAP, 38K)

A new version of JSSpeccy is out. It doesn’t run at full speed on an iPhone either (although it positively speeds along on recent versions of Safari on real computers), but it does boast the following changes:

• GPL v3 licenced, with prominent notices to make it clear that playing silly buggers like the above will not be tolerated (even if they do include source…)
• A bit of speed optimisation (about 15% faster maybe)
• A pimped-up user interface with shiny icons
• And most relevantly, entirely controllable via iPhone / iPod Touch touchscreen. In principle. (If you’re expecting an immersive gaming experience, you’ll be disappointed.)

So there you go – probably the best Spectrum emulator for the iPhone ever. And it’s free.

• Play online
• Download, inc source (674Kb)
• JSSpeccy Subversion repository

This makes it a good excuse for some experimentation with generative music. The secret is in the scale – it’s equivalent to playing only the black notes on a piano, and presumably has roots in oriental music (I previously rediscovered it while working on Haiku). To make it into something like a proper demo, rather than just a throwaway routine, I added a bit of subtle progression Cyberpunks Unity style, so it drifts in and out of randomness as the graphical effects change. It even has a proper ending…

In recent months Yerzmyey has been pushing for the revival of the 16K Speccy as a platform, so I’m pleased to announce that this demo is – so we believe – the third ever demo to run on it.

• Download Spectrumori-on (TAP, 4Kb)
• Spectrumori-on on Pouet

So, in a classic case of building a website to scratch a personal itch, and not wanting to let niggly licencing issues get in the way of a cool idea… Sleeper is my new website aimed at searching and mapping the European sleeper train network in its entirety. It’s been put together with Ruby, Rails (gosh, that’s rather apt isn’t it…), Geokit, Google Maps, Hpricot and my own freshly open-sourced Bahn library for snarfing data from Deutsche Bahn’s website, and hopefully it can give you a fuller picture than ever before of what actually exists in the wonderful world of sleeper trains. Right now it stops short of providing one overall definitive map of the network (it would probably crash your browser if I tried plotting it on Google Maps), but that’s on the todo list.

• Download Ode To Claire
• Ode To Claire on Pouet

On the musical front, Snakebite is a chiptune with a middle-eastern vibe, modelled after every Turkish Eurovision entry ever. It got third place in the competition, and originally they weren’t going to give out a third prize, but they had some spare food left over on the Saturday night, so I won a jar of sausages. Best. Prize. Ever.

Download gasman_-_snakebite.mp3

• Download Snakebite – MP3 (2.5Mb)
• Download Snakebite – STC (5.1Kb)

Goldfinch¹ is an attempt at remedying the “walled garden” syndrome in the world of ZX Spectrum mass storage – there are plenty of software projects doing exciting things with IDE and CompactFlash and ethernet on the Speccy, on top of multiple competing hardware interfaces, and for one reason or another they end up having ‘baggage’ that prevents the casual tinkerer from properly harnessing that existing work for their own stuff – so writing a program that reads ’some file’ off ’some disk’ is a bigger deal than it ought to be. The reasons for this might be technical (the disk access code is too tightly coupled to a Basic extension, or an emulation layer, or something else, and only one person in the world understands the whole package), legal (licencing problems prevent the source code from being released), or the entire project being locked away in perpetual vapourware hell (ahem).

So. The initial goal of the project is to create a set of libraries for C and Z80, in z88dk library format (because z88dk is the one project on the scene that solves the issue of code re-use), for accessing mass storage systems in a natural, device-independent way, at whatever level of abstraction is appropriate. It’s in a ridiculously early stage right now, but this is the sort of thing we’re talking about:

#include <stdio.h>
#include "include/divide.h"
#include "include/block_device.h"

int main() {
  unsigned char buffer[512];
  unsigned int x,y;
  BLOCK_DEVICE *device;

  /* Open the block device for the DivIDE master drive */
  device = divide_open_drive(DIVIDE_DRIVE_MASTER);
  /* Read block number 0 from it */
  read_block(device, (void *)buffer, 0L);

  for (y = 0; y < 256; y += 16) {
    for (x = 0; x < 16; x++) {
      printf("%02x ", buffer[y|x]);
    }
    printf("\n");
  }

  return 0;
}

Here we’re opening the attached DivIDE disk as a block_device, and reading and dumping the first sector from it. But beyond the first line, the same bit of code could equally work on a ZXCF-attached disk, or a .TRD image on a FAT16 filesystem, or an .MGT image that’s just been streamed over Spectranet… as all of those things will implement the block_device API. And likewise, there’ll be a standard API for accessing files, so that C programmers can do the familiar fopen() stuff without worrying about the underlying filesystem.

As for what this means for the end user – hopefully, by supporting all of these technologies (DivIDE, ZXCF, TRD, FAT…) through common standard mechanisms, we’ll get away from the situation where Fatware is “the DivIDE firmware that reads TAP files off FAT with a pretty menu” and ResiDOS is “the DivIDE+ / ZXCF / (your interface here) firmware with Basic extensions to read and write to FAT”, and into a bright new future where all of those capabilities will operate together, rather than having every lone genius reinventing their own bits of the wheel.

…And with a bit of luck, we’ll generally lower the barrier towards doing Interesting Things with mass storage on the Speccy, and end up with all sorts of applications that not even I’ve thought of yet. (I have my own ideas about how to take this further with dynamically loaded modules and things which kind of segue into a whole new operating system for the Spectrum, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.)

¹ Not a particularly meaningful name, just that there was one in my garden on the day I happened to name the project.

Spokesman for Leeds Metropolitan University on the radio: “Macdonalds paid us to perform an independent study…”

Bollocks they did.

If you were paid for it, it’s not independent. Getting money for something is the exact definition of “dependent”. Call it impartial, unbiased or neutral if you like. It might even be true. But “independent” actually means something real and verifiable that backs up your claim to be impartial. It doesn’t mean “we’re unbiased because we say so, honest”, and when you start using the word as a free pass to avoid scrutiny, you go from being possibly biased to actually lying about the fact. Which is not good for your credibility as a research group. Stop polluting our language, you tossers.

A simple question, with a simple answer, but one which is curiously absent from the internet. Googlejuice ahoy!

Stick this at the bottom of config/deploy.rb:

namespace :deploy do
	desc "Override deploy:cold to NOT run migrations - there's no database"
	task :cold do
		update
		start
	end
end