vitaliyf

I visited a couple years ago - it was lovely to finally touch an authentic Spectrum, 3 decades after spending my early life hacking around on various clones. Was well worth the 30 minute ride from Coimbra.

Ahh, the Spectrum screen pixel math, oh the memories.

Once upon a time a much younger myself obtained a dot-matrix printer that I managed to wire up to my computer. Sadly, it was meant to only print text, and having a fancy typewriter definitely wasn't very much fun to me. Somehow, I figured out that the printer actually supported defining custom fonts! After some reverse-engineering of the format I ended up with a program to slice the screen into rectangles matching printer's letter sizes (which were not 8x8 pixels, to make it extra fun) and sending them as custom font definition for each symbol of the alphabet, then printing "ABCD..."

Getting a paper printout of loading screens or in-game screenshot art was mind-blowing.