Recently Kevin Edwards got hold of some 3″ disks containing source code to various old commercial games. He imaged them with the Kryoflux flux-level imager (Greaseweazle and FluxEngine are also good options). These tools produce highly accurate images of magnetic media that rips through copy protection and format concerns even allowing you to write the image back to disk with that in tact. This level of detail emits large files — 11.7MB for a single-sided Spectrum disk that normally holds 173KB is quite typical. 4KB data tracks happily turn into 215KB flux.

Powerful as these tools are they don’t give you access to the files contained within that disk although some can write emulator-compatible images like DSK. As somewhat versed in 3″ media and DSK files through my archive experience and my open source Disk Image Manager tool he asked if I could take a look into achieving that.

I’ve recently been working on a full HTML5 conversion of the Sinclair Spectrum +3 manual with full canvas-drawn screenshots and diagrams for smooth scaling/high res displays as well as some close font matching and layout as well as cross-reference links all over the place.

My ZX Spectrum +3 Manual conversion is now available!

A series of posts on system fonts:

It’s been a while since I visited the bitmap fonts of old computers (see the bottom of the post for links), there are still some to evaluate!

A series of posts on system fonts:

I’ve been wanting to do a follow-up to the popular system fonts posts for some time and recent HackerNews and ArsTechnica traffic reminded me that I’m not the only one nostalgic for chunky pixel fonts of old.

A series of posts on system fonts:

My love of typography originated in the 80’s with the golden years of 8-bit home computing and their 8×8 pixel monospaced fonts on low-resolution displays.

From an earliest memory of a cream colored box emblazoned with letters, mostly black — some red, came an owl proclaiming allegiance to the BBC.

This small box sat silently, patiently even, in our classroom for the best part of a year. On the few occasions our teacher was brave enough to flip the switch the machine would chirp into life with it’s two-tone beep and would state on capital white letters on a black background that it was BASIC. At this point the teacher would key-in the mythical incantation of CHAIN ""CHAIN "" — handily jotted on a nearby note — and feed the beast a cassette tape.

Ken Egozi tagged me with the latest meme and this time it’s at least relevant :)

Some time between 10 and 12 when my father bought home a ZX Spectrum and I ended up delving into the excellent programming manual when I finally ran out of games to play. At the same time my school opened up the computer room at lunchtimes…

I remember gazing at the screen of Acornsoft’s Elite in my childhood wondering what the code behind those 3D images looked like.

How did they rotate like that? How did it know which lines to hide? And more importantly where I can get a good price for this cargo hold of radio-actives and platinum?