Opening graphics and title music - an obvious choice for those of us in the Apollo generation. August's coding project was an implementation of a Moonlander game in S-BASIC for the Sharp MZ-700. It was inspired by a version created by @electron_greg for the Commodore PET and 64 - which…
Hot on the heels of the 100 door problem, here is a monte carlo simulation for the drinking game problem as described by Mr Barton Maths and others. You have 6 empty glasses numbered 1 to 6. You roll a standard die. If the number for the glass is empty,…
Retro Computing twitter is a much more tolerant place than covid or politics twitter. By way of an example I had a lovely exchange with fellow retro enthusiast Michael Doornbos yesterday about an article he published on his blog concerning the 100 door problem. The problem is described as follows:…
Yes, really! The sharpmz.net site has a number of programs preserved for download. One of them is the BBG RealFortran compiler, v1, written by Bialke, Berendsen and Gliszczynski. I converted the .mzf file to a .wav, recorded it to a cassette tape and loaded it onto my machine. However as…
I've finally got a version of my MZ-700 game - Gnu Blat 2000 - working. While it's playable, it's not really finished, but as we're now a few days past the end of April I thought I'd document and release what I have. The concept is simple - you drive…
I'm writing a new MZ-700 game as a way of raising funds for Lymphoma Action during April 2021. I know its not quite April yet, but I've been laying a few foundations today. The S-BASIC and monitor routines provided with the MZ-700 are just different enough to the MZ-80K for…
A new addition to my collection of Z80-based machines arrived this week. It's a Sharp MZ-700 series machine - the 721, as it has an integral tape drive. As far as I know there were 3 models in the range - the 711, 721 and 731. The 731 had a…
One of the joys of shielding from the Covid-19 pandemic is that it's given me time to dust off and repair my Sharp MZ-80K. After 40 or so years in the wild, the tantalum bead capacitors in the power supply failed, but were simple enough to replace. Hopefully it will…