@fuzzweed.co.uk You do lose compatibility with certain games, but there’s 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!) Here’s my SAM pretending to be a Spectrum, but I’ve patched the 48K ROM with art by Grongy.
@fuzzweed.co.uk It’s 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 “mirrored”. If you could get in that way then no need to call $38 at all.
@fuzzweed.co.uk Nah I don’t think you can get around it. The ųSpeech pages in/out on even/odd reads to $38 so you can’t avoid the system interrupt handler (keyboard etc). You can do additional stuff tho. Not the Speccy’s fault, it’s Currah’s 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 I’ll see if we can get it past our office manager. “We need it for testing websites”. 😉
@breakintoprogram.co.uk We weren’t 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 Omni’s built in DivMMC it should be fine? (The ports will clash otherwise I think). It will do the “USR 0 mode” thing that puts you into 48K BASIC anyway though.
@jimblimey.com D’oh. Yeah. Well it will be worth the wait! 😅
@jimblimey.com Yeah good call I reckon!
@jimblimey.com They’re 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 I’d highly recommend Tom Dalby’s 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 “scratch the itch” 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 I’m 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. It’s the journey not the destination.
@fuzzweed.co.uk Yeah that rings with what I’ve heard anecdotally. You can tape over the hole, but it’s 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 that’s more to do with head alignment etc.
@fuzzweed.co.uk @robsmithdev.bsky.social has some very illuminating videos about ST/Amiga multiformat disks (that’s 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 they’re 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.
(It’s also the only tape I remember having that I don’t have now, it must have gone missing along with my Spectrum +2A. Perhaps they’re still out there, somewhere!)
@zxvintage.bsky.social I didn’t have access to a lot of games when I got my Speccy (no intraplayground-backup-network at my school, alas) so I was stuck with Horace etc for a long time. Eventually a friend of my dad’s introduced me to Firelord and it blew me away. Dynamic (sort of) loader, loading screen, graphics, wow.
@squidgybuffalo.bsky.social I’m up to the final bit of Dragon Age Veilguard, just finishing a few side quests before the PONR. I saw you’d posted a review earlier but I’ll save that until I’ve finished it for myself!
@squidgybuffalo.bsky.social Ah okay, thanks. Yeah I just wasn’t really getting into it! I also finally got around to playing the Exhumed remaster and that was great. (I really enjoyed the Saturn one back in the day). So that my only completed game in 2025 so far!
@squidgybuffalo.bsky.social I was wondering your thoughts on this one! Never played the series before, fired it up on Game Pass; it made a really bad first impression. Too hard, fiddly, old skool camera and impossible-to-follow action. Is it all about blocking and waiting to strike? I couldn’t tell what it wanted me to do.