Sometimes a small ZX81 program can still feel like a magic trick. My latest program, MONO LISA, builds a simple picture of the Mona Lisa from a single encoded string using a compact run-length encoding (RLE) style routine. It is definitely slow, but that is part of the charm as you watch the image draw itself across the screen.
This week I received a new ZX81 book I purchased on eBay called "Timex Sinclair 1000 Programs, Games, and Graphics." A little graphic program in the back of the book inspired me to create a game called Lift. Can you catch the items before they fall? Let’s dig in.
When I first converted Wolf, Goat, Cabbage to the ZX81, I wanted to include an intro screen. Sadly, I didn’t get around to it at the time. This month, I finally circled back and it turned into quite the journey.
I was pursuing ideas for a simple role-playing or fighting game. The one I landed on was the concept of a single treasure chest. It fit the retro-computing theme perfectly. Trap or Gold is a simple game that doesn't need fancy graphics, speed, or memory — yet it’s still fun.
I recently got back into retro hardware. My starting point was gaming, as I ordered one of the new Atari 7800s that plays the old cartridges. In my haste to grab a few games, I inadvertently purchased a complete 2600 with controllers. I’ll blame travel and lack of sleep for missing that detail. But it gave me the opportunity to attempt something I’ve never done before: restore the controllers.
Every once in a while, a small, silly idea turns into a surprisingly fun little project. That’s exactly what happened with my latest ZX81 experiment, a reaction-based game inspired by the old nursery rhyme: Duck, Duck, Goose.
Lately I’ve been on a binge — a retro computing hardware binge. It started last year when I went searching for a working Timex Sinclair 1000. The idea was simple. Set it up and run my own programs on real hardware again. What began as a hunt for one machine quickly turned into something bigger.
I’d been thinking about writing a better clock program for the ZX81 for some time but never acted on it. That is, until yesterday when I saw a flip-style digital clock program on the C64. The result is a sort of digital flip clock program for the ZX81 that ended up being quite a fun journey.
I thought I’d try something a bit different this month. I’d been looking at different ways to build maps for years but never really did much with them. After watching a video on binary partitioning, I decided to see if I could build a simple map builder on the ZX81.
This is the result.
I wrote this back in August and I’m finally getting around to publishing it. It was first shared in my BASIC group, but the ZX81 lacks a lot of the functionality needed for it to run well. Undeterred, I hacked at the program to not only display the twisted cylinder, but also add a bit of randomness to the demo.