[TheRealSteel]

That's so cool!! I'm kind of sad I mostly missed that era of computing. Always thought the ZX Spectrum was a cool system. It's neat that writing your own software was accessible and practical all the way back then. I'll probably buy one when I have the money and room to collect that sort of thing.

There's something that seems very satisfying about loading software from tape, too.

That's what I love about coding. All you need is a computer and an idea and nobody can stop you creating it.

[jerkstate]

You haven’t missed it! It’s still there! My kids are learning Scratch - but they are also learning C on the Vic-20 (6502 cpu), which is simple enough that the disassembly is easy to understand. The compiler and IDE are cc65 and VSCode - the commodore keyboard is very bad and it’s a lot easier to run the debugger/monitor on an emulator.

[pkphilip]

Ah! the memories! They are not as rosy as they seem now though.. the tapes were very finicky and you could get data errors very easily - sometimes almost at the very end of the loading of the programs.

But yes, I did enjoy those days.

[pjmlp]

You can get back to it, :)

https://retrogames.biz/products/thespectrum/

[tromp]

Unfortunately, it's not sold in the Netherlands :-(

[pjmlp]

I thought it was everywhere in Europe, I can guarantee that at least in Portugal, Spain and Germany I have seen them at plenty of electronic stores during Christmas.

[rvdginste]

> There's something that seems very satisfying about loading software from tape, too.

Uhhh.. as someone who used to load software from tape on a CPC 464 ages ago, I can tell you that it was painfully slow. Nothing satisfying about it for me...

[ralferoo]

You might like my Amstrad CPC demo from 10 years ago called Breaking Baud.

It was a custom turbo loader for the CPC that had a co-operative multi-tasking thing going on, so it had a loader, music player, realtime data decompressor and some spare time left to do some other things.

I had plans to make the demo even better, but actually what got produced was quite pure because everything, literally EVERYTHING, is loaded directly into RAM and then decompressed in place (that's what the random white flashes are you might see at times - it's usually where a RLE marker was placed in RAM and shown by the display hardware before the background task to expand/copy the RLE section was executed).

As such, every step of the animations loaded could actually a full screen independent of the last, it's just most of the time it compresses super easily as the delta from what's already in the memory at that point is very small.

The live capture of the demo as it was presented live for the first time is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D62jpqZ6TG4 Someone else running it on real hardware (but sadly turned down the tape volume after a minute or so): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7HEK1B2oIc

This is a very early prototype that actually shows the speed of loading completely unrelated images, just relying on compression - some of the screens load 16KB in around 10 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfGcvWOaFFw (BUT BE WARNED IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO FLICKER)

[ralferoo]

I linked below in another comment a version of the last video captured on an emulator, so no flicker. Also, I set the correct palette for each picture, so it's a bit nicer to look at anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxX4fu6dAzo