@fuzzweed.co.uk Ahahah!
@fuzzweed.co.uk Haha, I misread that as "laser" and though oh no what's he building now š
@fuzzweed.co.uk 1170 bytes! Starting from 0x386C running up to 0x3D00 where the character set starts. They're all 0xFF so often used by 48K games that use IM2 as an interrupt vector table (at 0x3900) to force a jump to 0xFFFF.
@sloanysoft.itch.io Itās a cool feature! Iām really not competitive (or generally good enough!) to grace online leaderboards but that one did encourage me to replay ANP2 for a stealth or sharpshooter run.
@fuzzweed.co.uk You do lose compatibility with certain games, but thereās an awful lot of $FFs in that (famously unfinished) ROM that could be put to good use! Not to mention ZX0 compression to squeeze in even more #possibilities
@fuzzweed.co.uk Hahah, yes! @samcoupe.com does neat little carts for SAM / Spectrum (and their respective interfaces!) Hereās my SAM pretending to be a Spectrum, but Iāve patched the 48K ROM with art by Grongy.
@fuzzweed.co.uk Itās a treasure trove of Speccy knowledge! Mark (1024MAK) on the SC forum linked it for something else a while ago, so I bookmarked it (and saved a copy, natch) straight away.
@fuzzweed.co.uk If you can find another address that activates the ųSpeech then maybe. Those notes say something about $1000 being āmirroredā. If you could get in that way then no need to call $38 at all.
@fuzzweed.co.uk Nah I donāt think you can get around it. The ųSpeech pages in/out on even/odd reads to $38 so you canāt avoid the system interrupt handler (keyboard etc). You can do additional stuff tho. Not the Speccyās fault, itās Currahās weird design!
@fuzzweed.co.uk No, it's memory-mapped so it gets paged in when the CPU reads $0038 (which is the usual IRQ). It does its business then calls $0038 again paging itself out and allowing the system (keyboard, FRAMES etc) to run. I guess it would work in IM2 if you made sure to call $0038 anyway? See link for details:
@breakintoprogram.co.uk Put your spare Apple sticker on it and Iāll see if we can get it past our office manager. āWe need it for testing websitesā. š
@breakintoprogram.co.uk We werenāt really allowed a microwave in the office so we cunningly disguised our misdemeanour by buying a shiny silver one from Argos and slapping one of those on the door.
@jimblimey.com If you can disable the Omniās built in DivMMC it should be fine? (The ports will clash otherwise I think). It will do the āUSR 0 modeā thing that puts you into 48K BASIC anyway though.
@jimblimey.com Dāoh. Yeah. Well it will be worth the wait! š
@jimblimey.com Yeah good call I reckon!
@jimblimey.com Theyāre also good for messing about with RS232, but you need at least two of them to play with Sinclair Networking. If you do get one Iād highly recommend Tom Dalbyās ZXPicoMD instead of a real Microdrive.
@jimblimey.com Yeah, for me it was Microdrives; so futuristic! Now having tried the +3, as well as Beta Disk (TR-DOS), I reckon the best Speccy disk system is PlusD (by MGT, later Datel). I get the need to āscratch the itchā of using the +3 though! (The 3" disks are expensive, slow, small, single sided; annoying!)
@mattround.com We were lured-in early-on with their nice API but Iām glad we decided to roll-our-own. Always felt like it would be ceding too much control over our links but the convenience was strongly appealing.
@squidgybuffalo.bsky.social Yeah, fast and fluid FPS metroidvania kinda thing. Mad weapons and ridiculous power-ups. The remaster takes the good bits from the Saturn and PSX versions, (but at a nice modern frame rate!)
@fuzzweed.co.uk Hahah. Itās the journey not the destination.
@fuzzweed.co.uk Yeah that rings with what Iāve heard anecdotally. You can tape over the hole, but itās maybe not reliable. I pretty much just use HD drives and DD disks.
The DD drives I do have are not keen on disks that have been thru an HD drive but in my case I think thatās more to do with head alignment etc.
@fuzzweed.co.uk @robsmithdev.bsky.social has some very illuminating videos about ST/Amiga multiformat disks (thatās a special case but explains how each are supposed to work)
youtu.be/HhTfBSIANfI?...
@fuzzweed.co.uk Is that because Atari uses FAT12 and 9 sectors per track?
I need Greaseweazle for PlusD and SAM disks because theyāre 10-sectored, TR-DOS uses 16 sectors. Apparently USB FDD tend to be fixed to 9. I think Amiga disks also use 10 sectors?
@zxvintage.bsky.social I did not take the time to map it though, and consequently never got very far! I did play it again and again though.
(Itās also the only tape I remember having that I donāt have now, it must have gone missing along with my Spectrum +2A. Perhaps theyāre still out there, somewhere!)