Old Man By the Sea

  Gears of War 5: ZX Spectrum Version Ok, not really! Another possible #WCCChallenge  topic for this week was Gears. Seen as I'm on some sort of nostalgia trip today, I thought I'd rehash a very old routine that demonstrates a buffer technique in ZX assembly. I used a Gears 5 wallpaper from some random wallpaper site, so I'm assuming it's fan art, converted it to a ZX Spectrum .scr file and then did some Z80 tomfoolery! Simply put, you load the screen into a memory location and then use 12 bytes of code to move each byte of the screen data onto the ZX Spectrum's display. The 12 byte routine goes like this: LD HL, 32768 ;(Source) LD DE, 16384 ;(Destination) LD BC, 6912 ;(Length) LDIR ; Load, Increment Repeat (basically a loop until you move all 6192 bytes) RET ; return (go back to the BASIC routine) Converted to BASIC: 10 CLEAR 32767: BORDER 0: PAPER 0: INK 7: CLS 20 FOR n = 65000 TO 65011 30 READ a: POKE n,...

Radioactivity Every week I try to enter #WCCChallenge , which is held every Sunday by SableRaph . This week the topic chosen is Radioactivity .  The idea is to come up with some creative coding loveliness based on the chosen  topic . I entered ZX Spectrum as a hopeful topic but it wasn't picked. But...I thought why not Zoidberg do both?  I had an idea last night to load up FUSE  and see what I could do with it on the topic (it was in a slim lead against Gears at the time. Click to see my possible entry to that subject ). It's been around 35 years since I last tried any Spectrum coding. I wasn't going to touch assembly though (see this post for my last foray into that!) so I used ZX BASIC to make a Danger Radioactive sign. The original takes almost two minutes to render so I sped up the video. Below is the code, written in Boriel ZX BASIC style (no line numbers needed). To convert to a workable .tap file you should use zmakebas with the following command: zmakebas f...

  The Traveler by Joseph Eckert I do like a time travel story. This science fiction debut by Joseph Eckert scratched the time travel itch for me. I couldn't put it down in places. The story is quite a simple one. Scott Treder, a seemingly normal fellow, finds himself thrown out of his car and hits the ground. Picking himself up, he looks around and his car is nowhere to be seen, even though only mere seconds before he had been in the driving seat. Sorting himself out, he goes home to discover his wife frantic. The car, a little bit dented, is in the drive and he, apparently, has been missing for the last 24 hours. Thinking it must be a bit of amnesia caused by the accident, he gets himself looked over by the doctor but all is well. The next morning he arrives at work earlier than normal to make up for missing the day, sits down at his desk. The clock strike 7:57am and he finds himself on the floor of his cubicle, surrounded by colleagues who wonder where he's been for the past ...

They Will Kill You They Will Kill You is, quite bluntly, the daftest film I've seen so far this year...and I mean that in a good way. The movie is John Wick vs The Evil Dead ON ACID. The plot, what little plot there is, centres around Zazie Beetz' character, Asia, tricking her way into a hotel, that has a history of hired help disappearing in strange circumstances, to rescue her sister who she discovers is working there. Asia has been in prison for the last ten years and has picked up some kick ass fighting moves, which come in handy when the rich clientele try to murder her. Asia fights back, chopping off heads and blowing off limbs with shotguns, blood and guts flying around like an 80s gore fest, only to be shocked by the bodies all reanimating and chasing after her again. The cast is made up of some well known faces - Patricia Arquette, Heather Graham, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton - all seemingly having the time of their lives slipping and sliding in gore and guts.   There...