In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many decades later, I’ve finally managed it! I’m now the proud author of a hand-rolled retro demoscene intro that runs on a stock 128Kb Spectrum.
An author created a retro demoscene intro for the ZX Spectrum, featuring 80s-style elements and sharing the technical process.
The intro includes smooth scrolltext, AY sound, and parallax starfield.
It took over a year to develop, with a slow code production rate.
The project involved learning Z80 assembly and retro programming techniques.
Summarised automatically by AI from the original article by Hacker News. AI can make mistakes, so check the original for details.
A look at the tools, techniques and challenges of creating a retro-style 'crack intro'
In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many decades later, I’ve finally managed it! I’m now the proud author of a hand-rolled retro demoscene intro that runs on a stock 128Kb Spectrum. It features all those late 80s tropes: A smooth scrolltext (with ‘leet custom fonts!), a three-channel AY soundtrack, bouncing VU meters and the essential parallax starfield. It’s currently 10287 bytes of code, or 19552 bytes as a complete tape image - which, given I’ve been working on this since December 13th last year, means my average rate of code-production is a paltry ~ 455 bytes per week!
Read the full story on Hacker NewsThat's the opening of the story. The full piece is published by Hacker News.
What variant of Codex are you using? CLI — 0.157.0, installed via npm install -g @openai/codex, Linux (WSL2) What feature would you like to see? Please make daemon_auto_start…
AI summary The article discusses the decline of mass-market paperbacks and questions if corporate consolidation in publishing has harmed reader demand.
AI summary Russia's data centers faced outages after Ukrainian drone strikes targeted Yandex's facilities, revealing unpreparedness for a data center war.
