ZX81 Programming Fun
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- Опубліковано 3 чер 2022
- I have to admit this was more fun than it looked. It wasn't a walk in the park... but it wasn't painful either. Somewhere between Type 1 and Type 2 fun... Type 1.5 fun?
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The Sinclair machines were such a contrast with Acorn's machines. The ZX81 and Spectrum are so very different from the Acorn BBC Model B and its descendants, not least because they had a fast, ergonomic dialect of BASIC with a built-in assembler.
The ZX81 has a special place for me... well... because its just so "special". I appreciate it for what all it did with so little.
still works today ! (check out the mess emulater) brother of the mame...
When this is all you had, then the ability to program really was something. I remember spending my entire summer school holidays back in 1981 learning to program in BASIC and write many games/programs for it. In retrospect, and with more powerful machines that followed, of course it's exceedingly bare bones in comparison, but back when it was either this or nothing, then you really did invest time and effort into doing all kinds of things, allowing a good chunk of your imagination fill in the gaps where the machine was wanting.
I couldn't agree more. I do miss the ability to boot the machine up and "get right too it" - it seems like programming a modern computer requires many layers and work to get to the IDE. Maybe I'm just an old fart here.
That took me back to 1981 ... have a subscribe.
Awesome! Thanks for the sub! I need every one I can get my hands on!
Everything on the ZX81 is an adventure :) Nice video!
Thanks for watching!
Continuing my bad habit of commenting on old videos.
In case anyone was wondering why RAMTOP was 17408, 16K of ROM = 16384. 1k of RAM is 1024. 16384+1024 = 17408.
With the 16K RAM pack installed the internal RAM is disabled so RAMTOP is 16384+16384 = 32768.
The reason you keep missing keystrokes is because the ZX81 uses the CPU to drive the screen so it's only available to work on other things, including scanning the keyboard, during the vertical refresh. It's easy to type faster than the computer can register your keystrokes. You'll learn to compensate with continued experience.
Near the end of it's production Timex was able to sell the American version, the Timex Sinclair 1000 with 2K RAM, for $50.00 and still make a profit.
Hey Tim! Thanks for stopping by!
Also, there's a reason why the ROM has to be at the bottom of memory: the Z80 expected jump vectors at the base of memory. The 6502 did the opposite and put its vectors at the end, owing to the need to put the zero page and stack page at the start of RAM.
BASIC simplifies everything.
Assembly programming for the ZX81 is just as much of a shitshow as everyone says programming for the Atari 2600 is, very hard and not fun at all.
Thank God, that ZX Spectrum is much easier.
BASIC was pretty golden for its day! I really like transitioning to QuickBASIC with no GOSUB and a no Line Numbers.
@@livingforalivingRV I agree, it's a really powerful programming language, just very slow, so most game were either written entirely in machine code, or used BASIC only for simple stuff like menus.
I miss that computers used to come starting you at a command prompt/programming language and you built up from there. I feel like we were more a part of computers in our early days than today.