@psychotimmy@mastodon.online
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psychotimmy

@psychotimmy@mastodon.online

Business Value Practitioner on a gap year. Liberal Democrat. Caterham 7 Owner. RetroComputing. In remission from Mantle Cell Lymphoma.

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vga256, to retrocomputing
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as promised, i'm archiving this 42 year old D&D campaign building software on cassette

warning: loud/annoying modulation sounds 😆

#tandy #trs80 #cassette #retroComputing

A cassette titled "Fantasy Gamer" by Prickly-Pear Software is inserted into a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer Cassette Recorder. The owner hits play, and it begins playing back modulation sounds recorded on the tape.

psychotimmy,
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@vga256 Not sure if it was the same for the TRS80, but Sharp's MZ80K and MZ700 always recorded two copies of a program to tape when you saved it, just like this.

psychotimmy, to random
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An intriguing piece of research in Alex Haslam's book "Psychology in Organizations" covers the impact of random leader selection.

This (*) concludes that if a group wants to achieve a specific goal, they're better off choosing a leader at random (if the group has a salient social identity).

Paradoxically, leaders & followers often think random selection is unsatisfactory, ineffective & illegitimate ... even when there is clear evidence that random selection results in better outcomes.

(1/2)

psychotimmy,
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So here's the controversial bit, and it goes far beyond what the study suggests of course!

Perhaps the UK and US should abandon this year's elections and instead choose people randomly from within their country to lead.

(*) Haslam, S.A., McGarty, C., Brown, P.M., Eggins, R.A., Morrison, B.E., & Reynolds, K.J. (1998) 'Inspecting the emperor's clothes: evidence that randomly selected leaders can enhance group performance', Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice, 2, 168-84.

(2/2)

18+ peter, to UKpolitics
@peter@area51.social avatar

Well, another Tory MP defects to Labour. Wasn't expecting one from Kent to do so though, as, other than Canterbury it's sadly a Tory region here in Kent

psychotimmy,
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@peter Tunbridge Wells just got a lib dem council though!

psychotimmy, to Eurovision
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Croatia about 500x better than anything else so far #eurovision, but enjoyed Ukraine too. Serbia and Ireland at the bottom of the pile for me - both trying too hard. UK is meh - comfortable bottom half finish in Saturday's final I think.

psychotimmy,
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Iceland feels like 70s disco to me. Not bad, not great either though. #eurovision

psychotimmy, to climate
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There's enough bad stuff that the Tories are doing to this country without inventing nonsense that the flood risk maps are state secrets. You can check your risk here: https://www.gov.uk/check-long-term-flood-risk #subtoot #climatechange

psychotimmy, to retrocomputing
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So my Easter / project is getting The Valley to run under CP/M using VTxxx terminal emulation.

I'm basing it on the second (full-fat) version I wrote for the UK101 in 2022 - https://z80.timholyoake.uk/retrochallenge-2022-10/

Biggest obstacle is replacing all of the display POKES/PEEKS with suitable VTxxx escape codes and keeping track of where the player is.

I'm starting off in Microsoft BASIC, but it would be nicer to have something in Turbo Pascal eventually. Maybe!

psychotimmy,
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Making reasonable progress with this.

Amazed at how many subtle incompatibilities there are between the (pirated??) Microsoft 8K BASIC the UK101 ran and the Microsoft BASIC-80 CP/M version - eg PRINTD$ without a space between the T and the D$ is not OK in BASIC-80!

Think I've got most of these fixed now ...

psychotimmy,
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You can't see anything in the playing area yet, but movement and combat are working properly.

psychotimmy,
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OK - I can now update the playing area successfully, but it's too slow to play if the whole playing area is updated every time a move is made. Time to improve the movement algorithm - should be straightforward enough I think.

psychotimmy,
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Note to self: you'd make faster progress if you don't stop to refactor the code every 10 minutes!

But I do have the swamp and wood scenes working correctly now. I need to work on the castles next and I've noticed glitches on scene exit and status area formatting.

And yet more refactoring is required, as well as speeding up the entry to new scenes ... this is taking longer to port than I'd estimated - nothing changes !! 😂

psychotimmy,
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Castle scenes are now working.

There's a glitch in special finds to fix, plus yet more refactoring and speeding up scene changes required ... but the game is now playable on an or .

Also on the to-do list - looking at moving beyond 7 bit ASCII codes for display when running on the PicoTerm VT emulator!

I've now reached the exalted rating of 'Peasant'

psychotimmy,
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Almost happy enough to let this version of The Valley out as a v1.

Extended data on your monster combat record is now available, as is the ability to save and retrieve current game state to/from disk.

A bit more tweaking and testing left to do. I'm then going to have a look at PicoTerm and its extended character set.

psychotimmy,
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OK - I've let v1 of "The Valley" escape into the wild if anyone fancies playing a 42 year old adventure game!

Details here: https://z80.timholyoake.uk/the-valley-at-42/

If the weather stays this bad where I am, there may be a version 2 for a PicoTerm extended character set in a few days from now ...

psychotimmy,
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Working on a PicoTerm / PetSCII version of The Valley while running around like a fool trying to stop things in the garden blowing away.

It's not quite ready to escape into the community at the moment though!

psychotimmy,
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A first PetSCII version is now ready! It also supports PicoTerm running CP437.

Details and download link: https://z80.timholyoake.uk/the-valley-at-42/

The swamp scene in Amber using PicoTerm's CP437 option
The Valley in green screen, with PicoTerm's PetSCII option.

psychotimmy, to retrocomputing
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How it started ... how it's going

Two years later and my constantly upgraded RC2014 runs CP/M and has a green screen terminal emulator. The only component left from the original is the Z80 board ... and that's about to be upgraded too!

psychotimmy,
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@mmu_man Now there's an idea!!

psychotimmy, to retrocomputing
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So close! Just one failing test on the zexdoc instruction exerciser left to track down (and another couple on zexall that I don't think I need to bother too much with at the moment).

The saga so far: https://z80.timholyoake.uk/the-square-root-of-32-is-not-4-02/

psychotimmy,
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@Extelec The undocumented opcodes are all there and working as far as I can tell - it's just the behaviour of the undocumented flags that is wrong for a couple of opcodes, which shouldn't have any real world impact on the RC2040 (It's a different matter with a ZX spectrum emulator I believe!!). I shall put my changes into the fork of libz80 I've created in the next day or two (which at the moment is just a copy of the latest libz80 library plus a partial fix for 8 bit arithmetic).

psychotimmy,
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@Extelec No - this one: https://github.com/ggambetta/libz80 - I couldn't see any differences between what you have and what's in the emulator kit, but I can check again tomorrow.

psychotimmy,
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@Extelec Cool - I'll let you know when I'm "done"! Looks as if there have been some recent-ish updates to the original libz80 - hence my comment about a breaking change they've introduced in respect of pointers sizes to allow 64bit architectures to work.

psychotimmy,
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@Extelec @etchedpixels I've checked today - they are identical.

psychotimmy,
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@Extelec @etchedpixels

I haven't managed to find the cause of the final zexdoc failure, but it doesn't seem to cause any havoc on the RC2040 as far as I can work out ...

I'm not going to be around much for 2 or 3 weeks, so I've cut a new release of the libz80 library here with my fixes in it (so far). Hope it's of use to you.

https://github.com/psychotimmy/libz80

I've also updated the war and peace blog post connected to it!

https://z80.timholyoake.uk/the-square-root-of-32-is-not-4-02/

Have fun!

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