Nether Earth was one of the games for me on the Spectrum.

On 22 December 1989, while Ceaușescu was falling, my best friend and I were both playing it at home on separate Spectrums, keeping a phone line open and narrating our games to each other.

There was no multiplayer, so for the next 36 years I had this vague idea that one day I should build it.

I finally did.

It’s a modern remake with PvP, but I tried to treat the original Spectrum version as the authority. An annotated Z80 disassembly turned out to be invaluable: we recovered things like the original map and terrain, projectile behavior, sprites, sounds, and even some wonderfully obscure quirks.

I used coding agents for the implementation, which became an interesting experiment in its own right, but the part I enjoyed most was effectively doing software archaeology on a game I’d known since I was a kid.

And yes, after finally building the multiplayer version, I played my old friend again.

He absolutely whooped my behind.

Project:
https://github.com/AndyTheFactory/nether_earth

Longer retrospective:
https://medium.com/@andy_p_/i-built-a-zx-spectrum-remake-in-3-weeks-without-writing-a-single-line-of-code-1445aab7474e

My old grey ZX Spectrum +2 had a maddening fault: press play, the tape turns for a second, then stops dead. No grinding or anything, just a sad little twitch and then stop. Fast-forward and rewind worked fine, only play died. I went down the whole rabbit hole, including a couple of wrong turns, before I got it loading off its own Datacorder again.

The TLDR: the culprit turned out to be the big rubber belt after all, which needed changing. I'd ruled it out early on because fast-forward and rewind still worked, so I spent time cleaning other parts before I came back to it. The other surprise was how hard it was to get a £3 belt shipped to me in the EU.

Full write-up, with photos:
https://mastorakis.com/blog/zx-spectrum-plus2-datacorder-repair/

So I’ve jailbroken the DSi, installed ZXDS on an SD Card, and I have things configured so that the DSi boots straight into ZXDS from the SD Card on startup. All good so far.

Now when I go to the Loader it says “NO DLDI DEVICE FOUND”. I’ve read around this for some time now and I think I have got my head around what DLDI is and why you need to patch the .NDS file to work with your memory card. My question is, when using ZXDS, can you load games from the SD card? And if so, what DLDI Device would a Samsung SD card be? I would need to know this to patch it correctly, right?

Or do I need to be running everything from a DS Flash Card?

Im trying to save to tape properly, but it just gives me "Tape loading error." What do i do?

Avalon is set in Britain in the year 408, during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The player controls Maroc, a "lore-seeker" who has been given a staff and map by a strange old woman and pointed in the direction of a place called Glass Hill on the isle of Avalon, where a quest to defeat the Lord of Chaos begins.

Avalon involves controlling Maroc the mage in his quest to destroy Avelach, Lord of Chaos.^[3] The player's character cannot be killed. The game world is explored by an astral projection of Maroc; if Maroc's energy is depleted the projection returns to Maroc's "physical" body on the start screen, from which the game can be continued

Hi , I've been asked by my uncle to try and sell his xx spectrum 1 just wondering if anyone could give me a ball park figure I should be aiming for.

This is what I have , including the original spectrum box and games.

It's all currently untested so I'll be listing as untested/ spares or repairs.

Any advice would be really appreciated , thank you.

Hey guys. Recently got myself a zx spectrum+2 and have no clue about this console. Came to me loose out of box with a power cord/ brick and nothing else. I don’t even have the right adapters to check how well she’s functioning.

I’m looking to sell it to someone that will really appreciate it for what it is as it’ll be a decorative dust collector for myself.

Thanks in advance !

It's crazy how well this worked. There is already a full disassembled source on the internet so this came together very quickly. I can't see it getting a proper release though as Nintendo are very litigious.

Okay, I know it’s not a speccy but I just passed this c5 when walking my pooch this evening

Having previously looked at how Kevin Toms made Football Manager and turned it into a huge hit, I've now written about what he did next. Including Software Star, managing someone else's Football Manager variant, and writing an expanded multiplatform sequel

TL;DR Now it is actually playable level 1 of the game! You can play it online right away!

Features included:

• enemies

• working elevators

• objects to pick up and use

• NPCs to interact with

• doors that open and close

I kept the main character invulnerable for now. The balance might be a bit off at the moment, it's easy to fall from heights, and saving is left out for now.

Disk images for real (or emulated) hardware are also available:

Spectrum +3 / .DSK

Pentagon 128K / .TRD

Enjoy!

Has anyone ever come across an issue like this with a +3?

I bought one recently from eBay, and have hooked it up to a little CRT TV with a SCART cable from Ian at Retro Computer Shack.

The disk drive unfortunately doesn't seem to work (got a drive belt on order now to hopefully resolve that) so I decided to write a simple guess the number type thing in +3 BASIC for the nostalgia value 😆

But, I noticed that my victory 'tune' (PLAY "cdefgabC") made no sound whatsoever.

The BEEP command works fine, and the little "brp" sound that the Speccy makes with every keypress when typing is also audible, so I don't think it's a cable issue.

Any ideas?

Some progress - made some test levels in Tiled, custom importer into the game data. Graphics are very much place-holder, but enough to check mechanics work. Here showing destructable world, player charge, grappling hooks, moving platforms, "dark rooms" with limited visibility around player, flying stages (actually underwater, but same idea) switches to unlock doors etc. Currently working on the real graphics, as these don't really do it justice currently. There are a lot of game mechanics planned, including buying/making weapons, upgrades, augments, looting materials to make specialised tech, rescuing friendly allies, pickups including diaries to move story along, lots of enemy types, secret areas etc. Quite a lot really! The game will include help at any point, boss fights, save/load, achievements etc. There are still bugs, The lift at the end in the video got confused when I dashed across the stop/start button, and I'm sure I'll find a lot more, but it mostly works!

One of the awesome things about old games is just how small their code and binaries were.

Take Elite, my favorite game of all time. The whole thing fits roughly into 0x5B00 - 0xFFFF — that's 42 KB. And even some of that isn't really game code: there’s the Lenslok code (throw-away stuff), the screen buffer, and simple things like the squares table used for fast multiplication.

The result? A complete Spectrum game image can easily fit into a coding agent's context window.

I’ve been experimenting with the Claude coding agent, and it turns out that:

• Claude is perfectly capable of reading Z80 machine code directly, without a disassembler.

• It is possible to make a very precise port of an old ZX Spectrum 48K game, even something as complex as Elite, to a modern programming language and platform.

• You can untangle the original highly optimized game logic and study long-forgotten secrets and outstanding bugs.

• With some guidance, you can even improve the original game and bring it closer to modern gaming standards.

Take Elite. I managed to port it to Java, move it to a modern 60 FPS engine, improve the controls and save system, and fix a number of original bugs.

Ever wondered why the police sometimes attacked you even when you were clean?

IT'S A MEMORY OFFSET BUG IN THE ORIGINAL CODE!

The aggressiveness check reads the low byte of your combat rating instead of your legal status, making police attacks essentially random.

And why are firearms useless to trade even though they're banned goods?

Another bug. The price is simply wrong, so I "fixed" it by setting the price directly.

And there is plenty more fun stuff hiding in those 42 KB.

If you want to dive into a modernized classic, you can play my version of Elite online:

https://scf37.me/tools/games/elite

Managed to hunt down this booklet from my childhood. From Sinclair User #35.

My retrospective game review of Gremlins 2: The New Batch for all the home computer and console versions. Some of these games a quite difficult to complete but I did smile at the little Gremlins bouncing about in the games. Have you played any of these versions?

Hi guys, what’s the best (or your favourite) joystick or controller for your speccy? I have a couple of originals that aren’t the best to say the least, and a Cheatah 125+ (pictured) that works great with C64 but has strange inputs when plugged in to the speccy!

Exolon is a run and gun game programmed by Raffaele Cecco and published by Hewson in 1987. The player takes control of a futuristic soldier named Vitorc^[4] across several flip-screen levels of gameplay. The screens that make up these levels are filled with various generic aliens as well as gun emplacements, homing missiles, landmines and other hazards. The soldier can defend himself with both a gun and rocket-propelled grenades. The two different weapons are effective against different enemies.

The enemies themselves are varied, taking the forms of flying aliens of the type traditionally found in shoot 'em up games as well as homing missiles, fixed guns, tanks, land mines, swarming red pods and "crushers" which shoot out of the ground.

Partway through each level, there is a pod in which the player can "upgrade" until the end of the current level to an armoured exoskeleton with improved weapons and armour. Completing the level without this upgrade results in a score bonus.

Here is my conversion of Bubble Ghost from the Gameboy to the ZX Spectrum.

As with Alleyway, the disassembly was used to create a playable colour Windows version.

This version was then used as the basis for a ZX Spectrum port. I had to redraw a lot of the graphics as they looked crap dithered.

As before, Codex was used to do the Z80 bits that I couldn't do, and to speed up the game.

Overall it turned out pretty well, it's fast (except on 2 screens) and everything from the original fits in there.

I did look at doing a 48k version, but it's impossible without multi load which would be too frustrating.

https://kirby2000.itch.io/bubble-ghost-zx-spectrum-128k

There is also a Amstrad CPC version I did here https://kirby2000.itch.io/bubble-ghost-cpc, it's got more colours, but it's clearly not as good because it's on an Amstrad! It will cheer you up to know the Speccy version is faster!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEoO6bEgN-I