The chip inside your Spectrum also ran Pac-Man, half the arcades of the 1980s, the Sega Genesis's sound, and — through a direct descendant — is still inside graphing calculators being sold today. A plain-English guide to the Z80's 48-year career.
A second, independently-built take on the same premise: a bargain hunter, a security guard called Big Dave, and a legendary discount tin sealed away in Aisle 13. Same isometric-engine idea as the original, a different story, and its own fresh set of bugs a screenshot caught that the test suite alone never would have.
I set Claude Code loose on a ZX Spectrum game with $100 of credits and the new Fable model, expecting a doddle. Here's why 48K of 1982 hardware humbled it in ways a modern REST API never could.
Every Spectrum program you've ever typed says OUT 254 or IN 254. The ULA doesn't actually check for 254 — it barely checks anything at all. A tiny program proves it, live, on screen.
Is it possible to build an isometric engine of the same real technique as Knight Lore and Head Over Heels on a 48K Spectrum, not a simplified imitation? Yes. Height-aware projection, painter's-algorithm depth sorting, and genuine masked sprite compositing, proven with a before/after screenshot of exactly the bug masking exists to fix.
A genuine isometric engine for the 48K Spectrum: three connected rooms, a patrolling security guard, a countdown clock, and one very important Christmas Eve toy. In the spirit of Knight Lore and The Great Escape, built and tested from scratch — including four real bugs a screenshot caught and a logic test never could.
A six-scene, non-interactive title-sequence demo — tunnel, skyline, overpass, smokestacks, suburb, home — with an original chiptune, done as an affectionate homage to a certain HBO drama's opening titles. No scrolling, no likenesses, no real theme song: just mood, silhouettes, and hard cuts.
A complete, original single-screen arcade game in 2.6KB of hand-assembled Z80: dodge six lanes of traffic on a bike, delivering food before your phone battery dies. Built and tested the way modern software is, not the way 1983 software was.
A complete little machine-code program: steer a goggle-wearing yellow fellow around the screen with QAOP. Every sprite technique a beginner needs, in 321 bytes.
A single SCREEN$ file that displays a picture when loaded to the screen — and runs as Z80 machine code when loaded anywhere else. The code is literally visible as colours.