ZX Spectrum (was Re: Commodores )

Yeah, I remember that. The pictures I made were saved in such a way (by BASIC) so that as they loaded they would draw onscreen straight away! A handfull of professionally-made games found a way so that they were drawn in such a way that they only flicked into view at the last minute - presumably by setting all ink & pen colours to zero, until all the image data was loaded. Just incase I do get around to playing with the Speccy again, do you recall where the screen memory starts? All my graphical operations were done using plot, circle and draw commands. I did manage to poke graphics into the character set to replace them, but whenever I went back to BASIC I couldn't read the program listing!!! I did find a way to reset that, but I don't recall of-hand what I did. Did anyone make much use of the virtual disk (drive M: IIRC) on it? I was too young to realise the potential with it and had all my data in long lines of: DATA BIN 00000000 DATA BIN 00111100 DATA BIN 00100100 DATA BIN 00100100 DATA BIN 00111100 etc. as I didn't know how to convert binary to decimal (or even hex.) back then. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk Gordon JC Pearce <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote: The ZX Spectrum had a fairly bonkers layout, with three blocks of 2048 bytes, comprising eight rows of eight rows of 32 bytes. So - the first 32 bytes were the top row of the display, the next 32 were eight pixels down, the next 32 were 8 pixels below that, until you got 2048 bytes in. Then you started again on the second row of the display, and so on. Once the top third was done, you moved onto the middle third, then the bottom third. After you'd got all the pixels done, you had 768 bytes of attribute memory, to set foreground and background colour, bright and flash. Writing single-pixel vertical scrolling code was a pig. Gordon