#ZX Spectrum

Join me on a journey as I attempt to write a game for my Agon Light using nothing but raw C programming. In this first episode I figure out what kind of game to make, look at some shareware games of the past and get a basic game engine working, using nothing but C code – no external game engines or modern development tools.

Just how did 8 bit computers like the ZX Spectrum or BBC Micro manage to cram an entire programming language into their tiny systems, and still have space for the user’s programs?

How clever engineers made a cheap computer powerful

Let’s explore how 8bit computers worked, looking at their memory, interrupts and DMA.

How to set up Z88DK to develop C programs for the ZX Spectrum Next in about 20 minutes

An overview of the Spectrum Next’s hardware sprites

An overview of the Spectrum Next’s Layer 2 bitmap display

How to get started programming the ZX Spectrum Next

Drawing sprites on the Spectrum Next, using C. Or – how to learn the dark art of figuring out things you don’t understand. <!-more–>

Learning to program is an endurance game full of random side quests, dead ends and frustration. Rather than learning “how to do X”, which is specific, it’s much more useful learning “how to figure out how to do anything at all”.

Go look on StackOverflow at all the questions that come down to “I don’t understand what I’m trying to do in the first place, can you write my code for me?”. Here’s how to not be one of those people.

What better way to wait out the apocalypse than trying to learn a new system. Read how I dug out my ZX Spectrum Next and set about writing C code on it…