Sinclair zx spectrum graphics funny how to#

It doesn’t matter if it’s a little messy or inefficient, because the important part is to get the gameplay right. Once you’ve written a routine that works and doesn’t cause problems elsewhere, move on to the next routine. A Spectrum game is a substantial undertaking, and you won’t get around to finishing it if you are too obsessed with writing the very best scoring or keyboard reading algorithms. Purists will hate this document, but writing a game isn’t about writing “perfect” Z80 code – as if there were such a thing. After all, if you can write a decent machine code game for a 1980s computer there probably isn’t much you couldn’t write. Others are only now discovering the machine for the first time, and some are even taking up the challenge of writing games for this simple little computer. In the United Kingdom and a few other countries it was the most popular games machine of the 1980s, and through the joys of emulation many people are enjoying a nostalgic trip back in time with the games of their childhoods. The ZX Spectrum was launched in April 1982, and by today’s standards is a primitive machine. In its present state it is clearly years from completion, but in publishing the few basic chapters that exist to date I hope it will be of help to other programmers. This document, I hope, will grow to fill this void in due course.

Sinclair zx spectrum graphics funny how to#

Judging by the number of emails I have received asking how to read the keyboard, calculate screen addresses or emit white noise from the beeper it has become clear that there really isn’t much in the way of resources for the new Spectrum programmer. So you’ve read the Z80 documentation, you know how the instructions affect the registers and now you want to put this knowledge to use. Note: This article was originally written by Jonathan Cauldwell and is reproduced here with permission.