Tabular Is My Simple and Easy ZX81 Word Processor
To date, most of my programs have been games and animations. It may come as a surprise that I also wrote a word processing program. Using a custom printer command, I designed a font that would allow you to use lowercase letters. Let’s explore September’s program of the month to see how that worked…
Posted Sep 25, 2017 by Steven
6 min read
Quickly Avoid the Spiders in the ZX81 Game Tarantula
Tarantula, August’s program of the month, was part of a pair of games that made me think I was a game developer. At the age of fourteen, I didn’t let problems like the lack of a distribution channel tarnish my dreams…
Posted Aug 30, 2017 by Steven
6 min read
Bet and Win in Stud, a Simple ZX81 Poker Game
For March’s program of the month, I offer up Stud. Written in 1984, it was my first computer card game. Calling it a card game is disingenuous as Stud is a simple high/low betting game. There are no rules or even a deck of cards. Yet simple can be fun in this random poker game.
An infinite deck of …
Posted Mar 24, 2017 by Steven
3 min read
Pictures Are Pretty, How to Make a ZX81 Draw
Sometimes one function can do a lot. For February’s program, picture uses a line drawing routine to draw a pretty picture. Okay, pretty is in the eye of the beholder. But, nonetheless, it is a picture. The fun, though, is in watching it draw.
A computer and a boat, together are art…
Posted Feb 25, 2017 by Steven
4 min read
Trail Blazer is my ZX81 Tribute to Tron’s Light Cycles
One of the coolest movies when I was a young teenager was Disney’s Tron. What geeky kid didn’t want to watch a movie about computers and video games? Sprinkle in some computer animation and how could I not fall in love.
Needless to say, Tron was the inspiration for more than a few of my programs…
Posted Sep 18, 2016 by Steven
6 min read
3D Image is July’s ZX81 Program
Not everything I wrote on the ZX81 was a game, although I did write a lot of those. In fact, some of my first computer programs did nothing more than print pictures. 3D Image, a badly named program, is one of my experiments in animation on the ZX81…
Posted Jul 20, 2016 by Steven
4 min read
Vargen Crown is June’s ZX81 Program
“Jealous of Vargen’s accomplishments, a rival kingdom has attacked and kidnapped your king. As head Knight, you mount a quest to return the King, hidden somewhere in the forest by his captors. But hurry! The King's ransom has a time limit…
Posted Jun 27, 2016 by Steven
9 min read
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 by Steven
6 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 by Steven
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 by Steven
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 by Steven
5 min read
January's Program: Fireball
January’s program of the month, Fireball, marks a first for me. Although I’ve used a few different methods to type in my programs, I’ve always gone back to a Windows so I could use EightyOne to generate the program files and images…
Posted Jan 05, 2014 by Steven
5 min read
April's Program: Star Dodge
Late and last-minute, I present April’s program of the month Star Dodge. A decidedly simple game that requires you to dodge stars randomly placed on the screen. Can you get your Tie Fighter shaped ship, an inverse H, past the increasingly more dense stars? Give it a try to see.
Star Dodge doesn’t r…
Posted Apr 30, 2013 by Steven
2 min read
March's Program: Radier V
In 1984, I moved that Summer from Italy back to the US. As I was Flipping through my old printouts, I ran across one that I had marked as the last program I completed In Italy. How cool is that? Seeing this I just had to make Raider V my program of the month for March.
I was a big fan of mechanized…
Posted Mar 15, 2013 by Steven
3 min read
February's Program: Enlarger
The old saying “time flies when you’re having fun” is so true of late. This year started with a bang and I feel like I’ve been running ever since. It isn’t that I haven’t wanted to work on my old ZX81 programs, but they often take a back burner to other past times…
Posted Feb 24, 2013 by Steven
3 min read