Up Is Down in Faller, May’s ZX81 Program
Walls and creatures always make for a nice game and Faller, our program of the month, has both. It takes a bit of imagination, but watch the icky spider climb up the wall towards you. Their goal, of course, is to knock you off and claim the wall for themselves…
Posted May 21, 2016
6 min read
ZX81 Website Makeover and Twitter Experiments
If you haven’t visited in a while, you may notice that my ZX81 retro computer site is looking a bit different. I’d been using newer, responsive themes, for almost a year now. Yet I was being selfish. The general population wasn't allowed to partake my fun…
Posted Apr 30, 2016
3 min read
Laser Blast is April’s ZX81 Program of the Month
April is close to wrapping up and I was able to find time this weekend to type in another ZX81 game. Laser Blast, this month’s program, has you saving the world. Kind of cliché I know, but hey this was 1984. George Orwell’s novel didn’t come true, but at least we could blast alien’s with lasers…
Posted Apr 27, 2016
9 min read
Computact is March’s ZX81 Program
Ah, spring time. As winter melts away, the weather goes haywire and it’s time to enjoy the bouts of sunshine, rain and the occasional thunderstorm of hail. Perhaps it’s fitting that in the middle of this meteorological mayhem that Computact came back to life…
Posted Mar 22, 2016
7 min read
February’s Program: Telaport
Digging through my listings, I struggled deciding what to offer for February. The first one I found was an adventure text game. Too close to last month's program, I decided against it for now…
Posted Feb 27, 2016
5 min read
January’s Program: Star Probe
Wow, 2016 and I'm still digging programs out of my stack of print outs. Kicking off the new year, I'm grabbing a story based program. I wrote Star Probe, our program of the month, in the style of a Chose Your Own Adventure book—and yes, I actually owned most of them…
Posted Jan 26, 2016
5 min read
December’s Program: Monkey Maze
Time to close out the year with another classic remaking. Back in 1983, I decided to try my hand at recreating Nintendo’s fan favorite: Donkey Kong. My version, cryptically called Monkey Maze, is December’s Program of the Month…
Posted Dec 29, 2015
3 min read
November’s Program: Dragon’s Lair
One of my favorite video games as a kid was a rather unlikely one. It wasn’t the coolest graphics or excellent control. It was about story and animation. It was, of course, Dragon’s Lair. The odd laser disc game by famed animator Don Bluth…
Posted Nov 29, 2015
2 min read
October's Program: The Haunting
It is Halloween and October’s Program of the Month is right on time. When I pulled the listing for The Haunting from my stack I knew it would be perfect. Although short, I knew I’d be challenged as this program of the month requires something I hadn’t needed before. That something was sound.
Fortun…
Posted Oct 31, 2015
4 min read
September's Program: Input Two
To my surprise, I was thumbing through my old printouts and discover that I actually wrote an Input Two program. I covered Input One as March’s Program of the Month. For September, however, it is Input Two’s opportunity to shine.
Input Two is a very different program though…
Posted Sep 20, 2015
2 min read
Encoding Update
Well, encoding issue is fixed. Sort of. After digging around I found that the routines in my CMS are forcing the use of ISO-8859-1 which makes it difficult to easily convert to UTF-8. It isn't impossible, but it isn't what I want to work on right now. I'm saving that exercise for another day.
Inste…
Posted Aug 25, 2015
1 min read
A Lesson in Encoding
I’m currently working on a responsive HTML5 template for my website. As much as I like the old one, it is starting to get a bit long in the tooth. Five years of life is a pretty good run, but it is time to get with the modern world full of mobile devices and tablets…
Posted Aug 23, 2015
2 min read
August's Program: Canyon Raider
While reading through my old programming notebook last month, I wondered about using them on my website. From my earliest programming days, the notebook has a number of programs that never made it to my stack of printouts. Canyon Raider, August’s program of the month, is one of those programs.
A si…
Posted Aug 22, 2015
3 min read
July's Program: A Story
July’s program is indicative of the BASIC programs you’d find in early programming manuals. Most books start out with pretty basic commands such as PRINT and INPUT. A Story mimics these early programs in a creative way…
Posted Jul 23, 2015
2 min read
June's Program: Fly
Fly is a simple program that, in the end, is both baffling and intriguing. Looking at first like a simple shooter, it acts very differently than one and, if you don’t know the rules, will make you crazy. Once you do know how to play, though, Fly becomes simple and repetitive…
Posted Jun 28, 2015
5 min read
May's Program: WIZERDRY
Okay, you may be wondering why there is a picture of an Apple II on a ZX81 site? I’ll start by saying that it’s been a pretty busy May with lots of travel for both business and vacation. The picture is from the Smithsonian and it actually does relate to May’s program of the month, Wizerdry…
Posted May 31, 2015
2 min read
April's Program: RMS
Are there any D&D folks in the audience? Come on, you know who you are. Past or present doesn’t matter, just if you know what I’m talking about. Why, you ask? Because RMS, April’s program of the month, will use your ZX81 to build monsters…
Posted Apr 29, 2015
4 min read
March's Program: Input One
Input One, March’s program of the month, is a great example of the kind of simple and brute force programming of the 1980s. This was a time when computers had little memory and their users had to use simple BASIC programming to get things done…
Posted Mar 29, 2015
3 min read
February's Program: Math Bash
At the one level, you can sum up most programs into three big groups: business, gaming, or educational. Most of my programs fit into one of these base categories. The standouts are generally the animation or demo programs that really have no distinct genre…
Posted Feb 22, 2015
5 min read
January's Program: Comp. Talk
Mixing things up a bit, I thought I’d start off the new year without a game program. Instead, January’s program is Computer Talk, or Comp. Talk for short. Comp. Talk is one of several educational programs I wrote for reasons I’m not entirely sure of…
Posted Jan 24, 2015
2 min read