r/thisweekinretro

The device, which does bare-metal emulation of the ZX Spectrum 8 bit home micro, has been updated with new firmware.

A major change is the ZX Touch FX system which can apply multiple effects to the screen in real time, completely changing the way a game looks, without any ROM mods.

It works by detecting markers on the screen which can be used to identify on which scene, level, menu or screen the player is. Up to 10 effects can then be applied, which are rendered within a single screen frame.

Effects can be color changes, adding strokes / outlines, adding background images, adding shaders and selectively changing transparency.

Up to 50 markers can be placed per game and can be stored in a single file that can include the game ROM.

GIF image generated by me.

Source: https://zx-touch.com/zx-touch-fx-system/ )

Today’s episode!

That's right, it's another instalment of "Somehow, obscure Zork media returned"!

This time we're stepping out of the digital realm and into the world of official Zork (and Zork adjacent) prose. Presented here are four novels:

• The Lost City of Zork by Robin W Bailey
• The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger
• Enchanter by Robin W Bailey
• Wishbringer by Craig Shaw Gardner

Thanks to the work of dedicated fans, these books have been available as scanned pages for many years in places like The Internet Archive. But with advances in OCR tools, it was now possible for me to convert these pages back into editable text with no compromise to accuracy.

With the hard part out of the way, all that was left was to tidy up the formatting and repackage them in the most widely-supported e-book format, EPUB, for folks to enjoy.

Download the Zork Books here.

Download the Zork-Adjacent Books Here.

The caveat here is that while I've been as careful as possible, I've not actually read these books through in search of errors. The conversion process is shockingly accurate, so if there's any issues they're most likely my fault - if you spot anything, please let me know! I'll be glad to make updates and replace the files with improved versions.

The Sega Master System and SG-1000 are both 8-bit systems, and both run on a Z80 CPU, yet have wildly different graphical limitations. How can this be? Today we will find out! Interesting note, the Colecvision and first lineup of MSX computers also share incredibly similar hardware to the SG-1000, so anything mentioned here about the SG-1000, also applies to those systems as well (for 99% of all cases anyway).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKcBUURAOrY

This is a USB pinball controller built to play Amiga classics pinball. It uses standard arcade buttons and emulates a keyboard (works on PC and mac) so you can use it on emulators or even on modern titles like Pinball FX. The enclosure is 3D printed. I am still refining the build and would appreciate input from people who make custom arcade hardware.

I was watching this episode of Race Across The World earlier today, and I spotted the Elite logo on top of this Mongolian restaurant. Random! I wonder why and how they decided on putting that up there! 😄

Bringing your 40 year old GT65 to 2026. I built this adapter to connect a monochrome Amstrad GT65 to a modern computer. It uses a USB capture card to pretend to be a 640x480 display before downscaling and dithering the captured frames on a Raspberry Pi. The RPi then sends the data over SPI to an FPGA which handles the frame buffers and the timings for the CRT. The FPGA then interfaces via a custom PCB which includes a level shifter and LVDS decoders. The CRT itself has 1 bit per pixel at a resolution of 296x256. The refresh rate is 50Hz.

Github: https://github.com/SRB2149/SR-CRT