Recently, I managed to recover some of my earliest work from the ZX Spectrum era from an old audio cassette.<p>It is a mini-game, that I created as a teen, called "Atomix," written in BASIC with a mix of Z80 assembly — some of which I coded myself, while other parts were disassembled from existing games. I put the game in an modern emulator and recorded a screencast. See the video in my linkedin post:<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7288665168450912256/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7288665...</a>
That's so cool!! I'm kind of sad I mostly missed that era of computing. Always thought the ZX Spectrum was a cool system. It's neat that writing your own software was accessible and practical all the way back then. I'll probably buy one when I have the money and room to collect that sort of thing.<p>There's something that seems very satisfying about loading software from tape, too.<p>That's what I love about coding. All you need is a computer and an idea and nobody can stop you creating it.
I still believe those early 8 bit computers were great to introduce young people to coding. These days we have many options but also lots of distractions. At one point I tried to replicate that coding experience in a browser by implementing codeguppy.com -- I think I had partial success... What do you think?
Well done. Speaks volumes (sorry) to the robustness of the encoding model.<p>This was Kansas City Standard? 300bps. The zx format is I believe much the same.<p>My audio tapes from this period are badly affected by heat, and stretching (I made a geared tape rewinder out of meccano which worked but was not kind to tape)
Very cool!<p>I recently stumbled across a cassette of the first “commercial” software I ever wrote, a simple database with an inventory tracking module for a local food co-op.<p>I was 14 at the time, and the software was written for the zx80/81. Around that time I also sold a simple universal list database with no rows or keys, searchable with a super simple regex type syntax. That was for use with a battery-backed RAM expansion pack, and offloaded to cassette as backup.
Well done. Not an easy feat I know from experience. I did the same for some basis/assembly programs for the Acorn Atom. Recovered those from tape.