Topic: Technical Stuff

The ZX Spectrum ULA book is progressing very well www.zxdesign.info/book/. Work has begun on marketing, establishing an account with the printers, getting an ISBN etc.

Choosing a target price for the book is proving difficult. If you think that you would buy the book, register your interest at the above zxdesign link and help set the price you would like to pay by completing the price poll at the World Of Spectrum forums. There is also a general discussion on its pricing here.

Hehe. I forced Atarians (well, actually kindly suggested, like only I can do, hahaha) to try play our Spectrum BEEPER songs on their hardware. It should have worked because they also have 1-bit transducer (ours is ULA, theirs is GTIA - generating 'click' for keyboard).
And You know what? They did it!! ;) I mean - worx are in progress but engine from The Music Studio works already.
Here is like our music sounds from Atari XL/XE:
MISTER BEEP: http://www.ghnet.com.pl/~pin/atari_beep/bee2a.mp3
FACTOR6: http://www.ghnet.pl/~pin/atari_beep/beeporgy.mp3
Enjoy. ;)

Over at OpenSourceZX, a place you can go to get a bundle of ZX source code, there was another update about a week ago (my life is hectic at the moment, so forgive me the news delays lately). I won't list all of the newness, but some highlights are some democode by Milytia, some system source, and ooh, other things.

A mention here of the Spectranet webpage, simply because I checked it out the other day as I wanted to know how it was going, and among other things the tutorials were updated recently. Looking forward to this interface being available for public consumption? Of course we are.

A recent update at Z80.info includes some new documentation on the Z80 Interrupt Mode 2, and specifically what happens to bit 0 when looking up the interrupt in the vector table. "Common knowledge" states that bit 0 gets set to zero (meaning the jump address on interrupt is always even), but some investigation by JG Harston suggests this isn't necessarily the case.

I'm still trudging through my backlog of emails that built up while I was on a slooow connection, and I spotted one from Richard Tarjan who has (possibly) updated his ZX Graphics Modes document. I say possibly as I'm not sure when I got the email, and I confess to not checking out the original document either. I'm bad. So bad. Either way it's a good and interesting read, tho' after a quick skim through I'm interested to see a Spectrum +3 with the "Double-Bright" mode.

I've got an email from Richard Gabor Tarjan, he of the ZX Spectrum Games After 1993, who asked me to spread his new article about tweaked Spectrum gfx modes. It's a good try to describe all the multicolor-like modes, although the English translation is not yet fine. Go read here.

I'm very keen to keep an eye on Winstons Spectranet Ethernet device for the ZX Spectrum... it shows a lot of promise, and now I see that he's started work on some Tutorials - the first of which gives a high-level view of what the device actually is, including some brief description of TCP and UDP. These may be handy for people who've not done any network coding before. The next tutorial should be about writing a simple TCP server, which will no doubt lead to the standard "This page is being served by a <generic-8bit-machine>" appearing on the internet. But in this case it'd be a good thing, as generic-8bit-machine would be a ZX. Which rocks.

If you head over to Velesoft's site you will find five new articles all relating to "modern" methods of loading software onto your ZX. Well... some are methods of getting software onto your ZX from modern equipment, which isn't quite the same thing. For example his reviews of three cassette adapters [1,2,3]. That last one is most interesting as it's bluetooth, as Velesoft has managed to get software successfully loading via his Mobile Phone, which is rather nifty - tho' the .tap/.tzx needed to be converted to a .wav first (/me recalls Gasmans iPod-mod that played .tap files). There are also a couple articles about IDE adapters for use on your DivIDE/MBIDE/other, one of the devices including the power-mod, which is handy: [1,2].

If like me you're eagerly awaiting the SpectraNet Ethernet Interface, then you may like to while away your time by perusing some recent updates that Winston has made to the documentation, specifically regarding the API and stuff. The API looks like it's coming together quite nicely, and as we've already seen some working code (a simple IRC client) it shouldn't be long before we'll all be browsing for monochrome pr0n. Hoorah!