ZX Spectrum Graphics Magic: The Basics Every Spectrum Fan Should Know

Re:ZX Spectrum Graphics Magic: The Basics Every Spectrum Fan... by ggambetta on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @03:46AM (#44296641)

In retrospect, it was the limitations that made it so fun. The system was so simple that it was entirely knowable by a single brain, which has become enormously more challenging nowadays.

I recently ported my teaching raytracer to the Spectrum [0], not even using assembler, but the horribly slow native BASIC. It was a ton of fun! It's super slow especially when run on the original hardware, but even then I can't remember something like this from back in the day (and I'd bet something like Microhobby would have listed this as some kind of curiosity); makes me think the Spectrum's limitations weren't even fully explored. Raytracing people were probably working on beefier machines and more serious projects.

[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytracer.html

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Re:ZX Spectrum Graphics Magic: The Basics Every Spectrum Fan... by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @08:26AM (#44298300)

I was never into the Spectrum or any vintage computer like that, but the pico-8 fits that same gap of having an (artificially) limited system, so your code is ugly and uses two-letter variable names because you can only fit 40 characters on screen and the graphics are pixelart. But you can make something and since there's simply not the space for it, bikeshedding is discouraged.

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Re:ZX Spectrum Graphics Magic: The Basics Every Spectrum Fan... by utopcell on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @08:33PM (#44305504)

+1 to this: pico-8 is great. it is so low-res that it is relatively cheap to use it with led panels (e.g. [1]).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTc3VmBBwMw

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