Mastodawn

With Zen80 guaranteed to run on Linux, the next logical step was to try out ZenZX and play some ZX Spectrum stuff. After a little fiddling with GL and Alsa libraries, it compiled right away and ran. Quite smoothly to my surprise!

#zen80 #zenzx #ZXSpectrum #spectrum #speccy #retrocomputing

@haitchfive Oct 14

Debugging my macros. The good thing is that after you have some well designed macros, most of the simple text user interface things behave almost like BASIC, or terminal printing in Pascal.

Also a good chance to dog food myself using the barely improved editor, and trying to make the zenas assembler work and assemble my non-trivial Z80-based text editor. Dog food is good food!
The only problem I found today was a regression in the vim-like command to jump to a line number. One other thing I noticed is that horizontal scroll doesn't work reliably when you have very long lines that extend beyond the right margin.

That being said, It's a little miracle I have never seen it crash, not a single time, during actual development work.
The best of news is that there are not many news on that front!

#bim #tbim #zenas #z80 #zen80 #zenzx #retrocomputing #ZXSpectrum #speccy #Spectrum

@haitchfive Oct 11

tbim, bim, zenas, zen80

Yes, of course all of these things can be done mixing and matching disparate tools in some other ways, but as a matter of access and code legibility you will be able to directly examine every single bit of the toolset and toolchain.

Every single bit traceable, nowhere left for bits to hide. That's something you can't do unless you're a highly sophisticated specialist today.

#bim #tbim #zenas #zen80 #zenzx #retrocomputing #golang #foss

@haitchfive Oct 11

zenas, zen80, bim and assorted tools

Things starting to fall into place like Tetris bricks!

I still can't glue the ZenZX emulator to the text mode editor, but when I decouple the text mode renderer from the editor logic (sometime next year), I should be able to render the editor and other tools using Deluxe UI in a GL-accelerated window, and I should be able to embed ZenZX in a bim pane.

But essentially everything you see in this screenshot, from tiling manager, to editor, to assembler, to emulator, is one single coherent and consistent codebase (with the sole exception of the Spectrum ROM!)

Lots of work ahead in 2026!

Longer term project beyond 2026 will be to get the language ual off the ground and port all these things to ual.

#bim #tbim #zenzx #zen80 #zenas #foss #golang #retrocomputing #z80

@haitchfive Oct 10

bim editor

I've just barely improved the barely improved editor to support Z80 assembler syntax. The automatic detector of assembly dialect doesn't always work right though, that's a task pending in the backlog.

Up next: running zen80 inside the editor.

#z80 #golang #foss #retrocomputing #bim #zen80 #zenzx

@haitchfive Oct 6

I found another bug in ZenZX's 128k mode with snapshot saving. Wonderful Dizzy loads, runs, plays great. Then I save a snapshot. Snapshot is saved correctly. Reset. Then load that snapshot, the snapshot loads and resumes execution exactly where it left, no crashes, everything works except for keyboard input. Which seems to be something possibly related to interrupt handling, it's possible that I am somehow leaving interrupts disabled after resuming the snapshot. Time to debug some more.

#ZXSpectrum #Spectrum #Speccy #zenzx #emulator

@haitchfive Oct 6

So Wonderful Dizzy (a game for the ZX Spectrum 128k models) is running quite well in 128k mode on ZenZX. One caveat is that thae fast tape loading feature didn't work this time, more debugging is needed. I'm also going to have to compare the quality of music playback taking other emulators as parameters of reference. All in all, a more successful test than I anticipated.

#ZXSpectrum #Speccy #Spectrum #spectrum128 #Spectrum128k #ZXSpectrum128 #ZXSpectrum128k
#zenzx #emulator #golang #foss #zen80 #z80 #retrocomputing #retrogaming