Robert Morrison

@onlyretrofans.com Nice one! I normally run it under Wine but it’s a bit janky.

@sloanysoft.itch.io Happy birthday Davey! I don’t have a free McGuffin for you but I’m happy to share this IFTTT recipe. (I’ve had it running since about 2014!)

@squidgybuffalo.bsky.social Nice one, thanks. I can tell you enjoyed it! (Hyupp hyupp hyupp!) Maybe I’ll give it another go. I’m curious to check out the new Platinum one either way.

@fuzzweed.co.uk Haha, so do the other six.

@fuzzweed.co.uk 7 out of 10 despots agree: if your tachyon death cannon isn’t also banging out SID choons, you’re doing it wrong.

@fuzzweed.co.uk Ahahah!

@fuzzweed.co.uk Haha, I misread that as “laser” and though oh no what’s he building now 😆

@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 It’s a cool feature! I’m 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 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.