Losing my Sinclair ZX81/Timex 1000 virginity
By Michael Doornbos
- 2 minutes read - 258 wordsVideo
Okay, so my VCR doesn’t like it, but that kinda looks like a video signal to me.
Testing it out
Thoughts on the keyboard
This keyboard is notoriously bad. Worse than my Atari 400, and that’s saying something (TK Atari 400 photo).
BUT
This was designed to be CRAZY cheap. As in “I can’t afford a computer, but I can afford this” cheap. So given the cheap hardware keyboard, the token input system makes some sense. The idea was less typing, and once you figure out where stuff is, it’s not too bad. Okay, it IS bad, but it does work. Plus it does a lot of error checking for you as you go, which is nice.
RAM Check
10 LET A=PEEK (16389)+256*PEEK (16390)
20 PRINT A;" BYTES FREE"
Terrible benchmarks
10 FOR I=1TO10
20 S=0
30 FOR J=1TO1000
40 S=S+J
50 NEXT
60 PRINT".";
70 NEXT I
80 PRINT S
10 PRINT on the ZX81
I’ve been on a silly quest to do 10PRINT on as many things as I can. They end up on X, here, or sometimes both.
I hadn’t considered it before because I just figured I couldn’t print the "/" and "\" characters on the ZX81.
I was wrong. It’s pretty easy. After a few minutes in the manual, I figured it out.
10 PRINT CHR$ (RND * 2 + 1);: GOTO 10
Okay, now for some pain, let’s do 100 Doors, which we’ve done TK and TK.
On this keyboard, this is gonna be painful, pray for me ;-)
https://www.reids4fun.com/553/how-to-create-an-infinite-maze-on-the-zx81