Continuing with my foray into Turbo Pascal 3.01A on the RC2014, here's a reasonable implementation of John Conway's 'Life' algorithm. When I was a Computer Science undergraduate in the early 1980s, I heard John Conway talk about his mathematical research at a guest lecture in the Warwick Arts Centre -…
I recently aquired a copy of Celestial BASIC by Eric Burgess. Published in 1982, it promises to offer 'Astronomy on your computer'. It contains 23 BASIC program listings originaly written for an Exidy Sorcerer but published in the Apple II BASIC dialect - 'to make them available to a wider…
As told to Royal and Sunalliance customers sometime in the late 1990s. That very little went wrong over the Millennium wasn't because it didn't have real potential to mess things up at an unprecedented scale, but due to people like me who did loads of work starting in the early…
First things first - how far did I get against my original aims? So I'm going to award myself a B minus for progress. Could have done better. A little more about Version 6. The final few days of the challenge were all about finding ways of taking 16K of…
4th October 2022 I think I've finished typing! (The printout is around 14 A4 pages). I need to play the game over the next couple of days to iron the bugs out. The ones I've found so far have been largely concerned with calculating screen positions (the original game assumes…
My aim: A re-implementation from scratch of "The Valley", as published in Computing Today magazine, April 1982. I originally started working on this during August, but the project has fallen by the wayside since. The RetroChallenge seems an ideal opportunity to start this project again. No cheating – everything will…
Software rules the world. Without software computers are just pieces of plastic, sand, and rusting metal. So as well as writing some original software for the UK101 I've also experimented with using some contemporary software. So far, everything I've tried has worked as expected. This is little to do with…
One issue with using this UK101 FPGA emulator with a (relatively) modern PS/2 keyboard is that the keyboard layout is subtely different to the original machine. I overcame this initially by making some sticky labels to put over the keys. But it seemed a more practical long term solution to…