Tag: zx80
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More than a game: the Game of Life
Conway’s Game of Life has long fascinated me. Thirty years ago I wrote some Z80 machine code to run it on a Sinclair ZX80 and when I wrote BINSIC, my reimplentation of Sinclair ZX81 BASIC, Life was the obvious choice for a demonstration piece of BASIC (and I had to rewrite it from scratch when…
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Relive the ZX81 experience on your desktop
BINSIC – my reimplementation of ZX80 or ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000 or 1500 for US readers) BASIC is now available for download in binary form – look at the page on the site: Binsic Is Not Sinclair Instruction Code. It comes with Conway’s Game of Life for the authentic black and white text based feel…
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Progress with BINSIC
BINSIC – Binsic Is Not Sinclair Instruction Code – my effort to re-implement Sinclair ZX80/ZX81 BASIC as a domain specific language via Groovy (and eventually a runnable Java JAR file), is making more progress. Right now it supports: IF … THEN … ELSE GOTO GOSUB … RETURN LET FOR … TO … STEP … NEXT…
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Just like 1980
There have been (conservatively) 16 “Moore generations” since 1980 – that is to say computing speed should have increased by – approximately 4 million times. But computation requirements grow to fill the computing power available and BINSIC now runs at about the same speed, when executing the same code, as my ZX80 did when hacking…
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And a tougher regular expression problem
So, here’s a tougher regular expressionproblem – one I have not yet worked out myself. BASIC‘s essential looping structure is a FOR (STEP) … NEXT loop. In ZX80/ZX81 BASIC (the dialect I am aiming to emulate with the BINSIC DSL) this is of the form FOR v = num TO num STEP num… NEXT v,…
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Back from the dead (almost)
The graphic you can see here is the partially recovered code of a program I wrote thirty years ago – “hexmon” – to display chunks of ZX80 memory in hexadecimal format (at least I think that’s what it did). I am determined to fully recover it – but as you can see it works well…
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First bit of assembler
According to my diary for 22 March 1981 – this is the first piece of working assembler (actually it was Z80 machine code as there was no assembler program) I wrote: LD IX(400Ch) INC IX LD HL, 402Bh LD B, 0Ah LD A (HL) LD (IX + 0), A INC HL INC IX DJNZ RET…
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Thirty years ago today…
According to my diary I spent my spare time mucking about coding: loading the BASIC version of “Lunar Lander” – from Basic Computer Games – on to my ZX80. So much for putting away childish things. Related articles Breadboard 81 (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com) More computing nostalgia (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com) Twenty, Thirty, and Sixty Years Ago (blogs.windriver.com)
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Breadboard 81
Not everything about computing is on the internet. Sometime around this point thirty years ago my brother and I went to a computer exhibition in London – “Breadboard 81” There are a couple of references to it findable through Google. But not much. It was a fantastic experience – but perhaps also the end of…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 