… from an experimental / example program. Click to read the full text:

(With this much text, it runs with approximately 15 fps on my Athlon64/3000+, GeForce 6800 machine.)

These days, I’m preparing my »Linux distributions for beginners« talk I’m going to give at CLT 2007. This means that I download a bunch of distro DVDs, burn them and install Linux from them to see how they behave. Having made some bad experiences with broken HTTP downloads last year, I’m now using BitTorrent exclusively, because it’s extensively checksummed and every broken fragment is downloaded again until it is OK.

It just so happened that I switched to µTorrent a few weeks ago. Before that, I used Azureus, which is written in Java, takes ages to load, eats up quite some resources and crashes at least twice a week. (Yes, you read this correctly: Although it’s written in Java, it crashes. Hard. With a General Protection Fault, in a different module each time. Don’t ask me.) µTorrent solved these problems all at once. Granted, the UI is even more cryptic than Azureus’, but that’s a fair price for stability.
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Yesterday and today, I finally did something I was planning to do for a long time: Writing some code for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the computer I »used« in my childhood. I was too young to write assembly code back then (but I did write a good share of BASIC), but since I’m becoming more and more interested in old-school computing due to my demoscene experiences, turning back to the beloved machine was the logical thing to do. The 256-byte effect I wrote is nothing special – it’s just four scrolling coloured stripes: The Spectrum logo. But although the effect is simple, I’m quite proud of it. After all, it’s the very first Z80 assembly code I ever wrote!

• Download the tape file and the source code: stripes.zip (2.9k)
• If you don’t have a 48K ZX Spectrum, get an emulator! I recommend ZXSpin or EmuZWin for Windows, RealSpectrum for DOS and FUSE for Unix.