#Sinclair zx spectrum emulator how to#
#Sinclair zx spectrum emulator code#

You can still find Z80 in some graphics calcuators these days, though its most glorious days are probably over. Both versions were using an 8-bit Zilog Z80 CPU - a CPU you could find in consumer electronics, arcade game machines or even keyboard synthesizers. There were two predecessors to ZX Spectrum before the 1982 release - the ZX80 (1980) and the ZX81 (1981) - both with an incredible 1kB of memory available to a programmer (don't forget that Java didn't exist back then). For me it was like a nostalgia trip to my childhood with detailed explanations of everything I could not possibly comprehend back then. But once you finally run it and see the '(c) 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd'' line for the first time it will eventually start to be a rewarding project :-)īut the biggest outtake you can take from making an emulator from scratch is the amount of information you will learn about the target hardware (and software). It's quite common that after many hours of work you still don't have anything you could reasonably run and test. Writing an emulator is not exactly rocket science, in fact it could be quite a tedious work - especially when implementing ~150 instructions and their binary decoding. why on earth would you want to write an emulator of a 40 year old computer? And to this day programming still plays a major role in my life.

#Sinclair zx spectrum emulator code#

Publishing source code of simple programs in magazines was quite common back in the days and finding (mostly unintentional) bugs in those programs was part of a learning process for many of us :-) At a small age before even realizing it my career direction was pretty much set.

#Sinclair zx spectrum emulator how to#

I didn't know how to save the programs I made so I used pencil and paper as my storage device :-) I also occasionally rewrote a program or two published in a local hobby magazine called ABC. I took a course in BASIC programming in a local school and started to write very simple and very silly programs involving mostly drawing lines and circles. It didn't take me long to realize that just playing video games on it wasn't enough. As a young boy I was fascinated by its technology and possibilities. For a little more than £100 almost everyone could afford a computer back in the days! It wasn't the most performant computer on the market but it sure was the cheapest one.Īnd more importantly - for me personally - the 48K version of ZX Spectrum also happened to be the very first computer in my life. But the actual enclosure wasn't the only thing that was small and impressive, in fact the price tag under which this computer was sold was the true gamechanger. introduced a magnificent piece of technology on a market - a computer built in a cute little package, with a nice and clean design, with an embedded keyboard made of rubber and a couple of ports for attaching peripherals and extension interfaces.

On this very day Sir Clive Marles Sinclair (30 July 1940 – 16 September 2021) and his Cambridge based company Sinclair Research Ltd. On the 23rd April of 1982 - exactly 40 year ago - a great revolution in the area of personal computers happened.

It's more of a short essay documenting my recent journey to the past, trying to pay tribute to.

Longer version follows :-) This is not by any means a detailed description of the ZX Spectrum computer nor a comprehensive history class. I wrote a ZX Spectrum emulator in GO and ran it in Unreal Engine 4: