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For the next two weeks you can see some of my new work at Kudos Gallery, as an auxiliary to the COFA Annual 2009. It’s a group show, exhibiting the work created by participants in the Porosity Studio this semester. My work is a piece about Shanghai, a computer program written for the in Z80 assembly for the ZX Spectrum 48k. Essentially it is an image slide show, with some simple transitions. The challenging parts were the conversion of the images to something that looks half-decent through the Spectrum’s limited colour palette, and compressing the image data to fit in the ~32k of usable RAM.

I was chuffed to actually install my Speccy in a gallery setting. It really is a beautiful machine, and one which is relatively unknown in Australia (in contrast to its contemporary, the Commodore 64). It’s concerning that a power interruption might cause the program to be lost from memory, and force me to come back in to re-load it from “tape” (ie, a DOS program that emulates a tape), but I think this volatility is part of the charm of the project.

If you’re interested, head down to Napier St in Paddington and check it out. Once the show has closed I will post some documentation and a TAP image of the program so that you may run it in an emulator, or on a real Speccy if you are lucky enough to own one. =)

A few weeks ago I flew down to Melbourne to participate in Syntax Party 2009, Australia’s largest demoparty. I brought my ZX Spectrum down, and – on the day – hacked together a little demo in Z80 assembly just in time for the competition. It was a simple cellular-automata-style fire effect in a little over 128 bytes, and placed 6th in the Old-School Competition against some truly excellent entries. In fact, there were 10 old-school prods, and only 2 new-school demos. Clearly the retro scene is alive an well in Australia. =)

(Click the screenshot to download the source and TAP image.)

Amusing antics ensued when it was discovered my MacBook can’t output an audio signal loud enough for the Spectrum to demodulate. Firstly, to prove that the demo worked, darkmoon and I painstakingly typed each of the 139 bytes into the machine as decimal DATA lines in a BASIC program. (Incidentally, the BASIC environment on the Spectrum is quite excellent, if slow.) alhazan took a video of us getting it running; it was quite an emotional moment.

When it was time to get it shown on the big screen, one of the party organisers (an4ki rob) was kind enough to lend me his little Behringer mixer so that I could boost the audio signal from my MacBook to successfully load the prod via tape emulation. After some tweaking of levels, it worked splendidly. But then, when it came time to show the product during the competition, disaster struck:

Huge thanks to the organisers and participants of Syntax. It was a great day! For next year I hope to produce a new-school demo with some friends, and a proper Spectrum demo (full-length, with music) of my own.