ZX Networking:
With the ESP8266 becoming popular a WIFI network card would actually be cheaper that using the Wiznet. I was looking at the ZeddyNet and it looks like they use a cpld to capture 8 bit data and convert it to serial for the Wiznet. The ESP8266 also accepts serial. I was also thinking of using a microcontroller to convert data to serial. The Arduino Mega has enough I/O to decode I/O ports and receive data but with a 16MHz clock it may be too slow to decode ports and convert. The PIC18F4550 may be the best candidate since it has a 48MHz clock and enough I/O. The Mega is much easier to program though requiring no additional programming hardware. With either microcontroller I can use serial to USB so interfacing to a PC is easy. Also there are cheap serial to bluetooth modules that could be used as well.
For the software side of things if USB or Bluetooth is used a ZX81 X-Modem program could possibly transfer files and I wonder if the ZX81 could be set up as an FTP client for WIFI.
Archiving:
I was looking at Wilf Rigters' website and was thinking of how great a resource that is. It would be a shame if one day it would disappear. Also his ASCII schematics have become almost impossible to read. I was thing of redoing those articles into PDF format with clear schematics. I was also thinking there are others (many in this forum) that may be included so the end result would be a document that would be a valuable asset for any ZX81 developer.
Adventure Game:
I tried back in the late 80's to make a Ultima style game on the ZX81. I got a wrap around scrolling map of the game world working but then ran out of memory. Now with 30 years of programming in my career, the ZXBlaster and fast load and save to USB drives I may try again. I want to develop an efficient gaming engine and with memory paging jump to pages containing world, village, castle and dungeon environments and saving persistent data onto a USB drive.
Alas like many resolutions I wonder how many of these ideas I will follow through on.
