retrocomputing ephemera

Advent of Code 2020 in Fortran 77 (mostly)

Posted on 16 February 202617 February 2026 by Tim

It’s rained nearly every day since the start of 2026 in Devon. On January 27th the River Otter reached it’s highest recorded level. The picture below was taken from the

Building a Pico RomWBW

Posted on 7 January 2026 by Tim

At the end of September I attended the first RC2014 assembly at The National Museum of Computing. I’d gone with strict instructions not to buy any more computers, but I

The front cover of the book 'Algorithms' by Robert Sedgewick, published in 1983.

Advent of Code 2025 in Fortran 77 (mostly)

Posted on 24 December 2025 by Tim

This year’s Advent of Code was reduced to 12 days of puzzles. Thankfully, as I managed to complete the last puzzle I had outstanding (Day 10, part 2) a couple

Benchmarking the Pico MZ-700 vs the real hardware.

Pico MZ-700 – First release

Posted on 30 November 202530 November 2025 by Tim

When I first started thinking about writing an emulator for the Sharp MZ-80K in September 2024, I decided that I was only going to attempt that model and no more.

Pico MZ-700 progress

Posted on 20 November 202520 November 2025 by Tim

I’m making decent progress with adding MZ-700 emulation to the Pico MZ. As far as I can tell I have functionally correct code and I haven’t broken the MZ-80K and

Sharp MZ-700 boot screen on the Pico MZ emulator

A Pico MZ-700 ?

Posted on 21 October 202521 October 2025 by Tim

Autumn is here, so it means that the Caterham is SORNed until the spring, giving me time to tinker with some retrocomputing projects. The first project I’m attempting is to

A fragment of FORTRAN SOURCE code that is then compiled with Knight's WEE FORTRAN on the Pico MZ-80K

Fang, Claw and Knight’s WEE FORTRAN

Posted on 18 July 202526 July 2025 by Tim

I was recently sent a copy of Knight’s WEE FORTRAN by Sharpworks who had rescued it from a tape belonging to HereBeDragons. There are a couple of references to it

Monster Chase, Part 2

Posted on 7 July 202512 August 2025 by Tim

I’ve been working through a number of ideas to produce a Monster Chase / Robots hybrid for Sharp MZ series computers. I’ve been using my Pico MZ-80K/A emulator in K

A Summer Project: Monster Chase, Part 1

Posted on 4 June 20258 June 2025 by Tim

Monster Chase is a 48 line BASIC program from “Stimulating Simulations”, published in 1977. The book is 64 pages and is available from the Internet Archive. This program (the second

Happy Easter!

Posted on 19 April 202520 April 2025 by Tim

I’m writing this the day before Easter Sunday 2025. In AD 325 at the Council of Nicaea, Easter Sunday was decided to be the first Sunday following the first full

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retrocomputing ephemera