Many, many years ago, my experience with computers began on my beloved ZX Spectum. After all this time, I have felt a growing sense of nostalgia for those years when computing was in its infancy, standards were virtually non-existent, and everything was pervaded with the enthusiasm of discovery. For this reason, years later, I became interested in those technologies again and enjoyed using the power of modern PCs to create advanced things for that world! :)

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z88dk

z88dk is a C cross-compiler; more precisely, it's an advanced set of tools allowing the production of complex programs for Z80 based computers in either C or assembly language. It can be compiled & installed without any particular effort on Linux/Unix, while on Windows I suggest you to download the zip file form the Nightly snapshots and run z88dk_prompt.bat (in the past I made a setup executable but nowadays it's not needed anymore).

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SpEdito

This program is a simple sprite editor (SpEdito = sprite editor) for the z88dk compiler. Sprites can be saved to files and than re-loaded; SpEdito can finally generate C code for the sprites, allowing you to use them inside the z88dk monochromatic game library (maybe the support for the Sprite Library SP1 will be added in future via external module). This old example (4 KiB) is a very simple ZX Spectrum application that uses a sprite generated with SpEdito (the z88dk monochromatic game library works with a lot of computers; the ZX Spectrum is just one of them).

Screenshots:

 

Downloads:
SpEdito 1.0 - binary, source code plus two external modules: Small Preview and ASM Generator

• for Windows x86 32-bit (244 KiB)
• for Linux x86 32-bit (342 KiB)

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A.I. Tic Tac Toe for ZX Spectrum

This is a tic tac toe game against the computer: the program shows you the Speccy learning from its own mistakes (when it looses a match, it saves its moves and tries not to repeat them, to avoid loosing again). At the beginning of the game, the only thing the computer knows is that it has to move where there are 2 other equal Xs or Os in the same row. Obviously this is not enough to play well; ...game by game it will learn not to loose at all.

Screenshots:

Downloads:
A.I. Tic Tac Toe compiled for ZX Spectrum + Windows x86 32-bit console executable + source code

• A.I. Tic Tac Toe - v. 1.0 (53 KiB)