I’ve been writing a smooth scroll routine for the ZX Spectrum over the last few days, based upon my recollection of conversations I’d had with Mike Follin at Software Creations whilst he was developing LED Storm and Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. The code is written purely in Z80 assembler and demonstrates the following techniques: Using the stack as a quick way to read and write blocks of data Using the vertical blank interrupt to run a …
Here’s an interesting project I came across last week through a contact on LinkedIn – a C Compiler for the Z80 processor. The Z88 DK project was originally conceived for the Cambridge Z88, but now supports a variety of Z80 based platforms including the ZX Spectrum. There are the generic libraries you’d expect from a C compiler including stlib, maths, malloc and string, as well as support for sprites, sound, interrupts and 3D rotation. In …
One of the things I do on a regular basis is mentor at our local CoderDojo. For the last couple of years I’ve been teaching kids how to program games in Scratch. Between you and me, Scratch can be made to do some wonderful things, and it’s a great platform for learning games development on, but if you do anything more complicated than move a player sprite around the screen, then it can get quickly …
