Tag: ZX81
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Still pondering over BASIC
Last month I put a bit of effort into fixing BINSIC – the collection of Groovy scripts that allows the execution of Sinclair ZX80/81 BASIC programs – and I have been thinking about the thing that they offer that modern computers don’t: the ability to switch on and just write a simple program to solve…
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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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BINSIC plotting working
At the risk of being attacked as an enemy of all that is good, I have to confess to being less than riveted by the Olympics, so far. So I have made far more productive use of my time in seeking to recreate the computing experience of 30 years ago – by working some more…
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Running BASIC on the Raspberry Pi
Actually, I ran BINSIC, my very own dialect of BASIC on the Raspberry Pi – it is very slow (a bit slower even than a ZX81 back in the day) but it does work. Haven’t had a chance to investigate what happens if I tweak the settings on the thing – possibly I might be…
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Some fixes for BINSIC
I have made a few small, but important, fixes to BINSIC, the reimplementation of BASIC I have built using Groovy. You can download the jar file (which can be run in any standard Java environment) from here: http://88.198.44.150/binsic.jar Here’s another BASIC “game” (it’s amazing that this sort of thing used to fascinate those of us with…
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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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Another software death march begins…
I have a new software project now … BINSIC … Binsic Is Not Sinclair Instruction Code. Instead Binsic is my attempt to reimplement Sinclair’s ZX80/ZX81 BASIC (with a few pieces that were deeply frustrating through their absence all those years ago) as domain specific language using Groovy. I have spent a fair bit of yesterday…
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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 