When I bought my Sinclair kit in 1982, a friend of mine who was studying computer science, (and just happens to be a friggin' genius), came down with the unusual Adult Onset Juvenile Diabetes. To make his hospital stay more interesting, I smuggled him my ZX81. He began work on DEFLECTION--a two-player action strategy game written with the Gladstone Assembler. When he was well enough to resume his studies, he returned the computer, leaving the game unfinished.
I've always felt guilty about taking the computer back and not giving him the chance to finish the game program. So with Timex-Sinclairs now available on eBay, Kijiji, and the like for decent prices, I decided after all this time to build him one with the 32K memory mod, and give it to him.
That got him interested in the machine again, but rather than develop on the old hardware, he recovered, pressed, and ironed the original code using modern emulator tools, cleaned up all the outstanding bugs, and make some enhancements to get it ready for prime time. The result is presented below.
Too bad the 1982 Sinclair software market has gone away.
He has asked me to mention that this was his first assembler work, and after he'd done much more Z80 assembler on another platform, would have taken different approaches to his original program. Heck, who among us would not tweak any program we wrote 30 years ago?
Thanks Dave. I've finally moved this program from my "Development" tape to my "Games" tape, both of which amazingly still work after all this time.
And DEFLECTION rocks!
Enjoy.
Standby alert 