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Year search: 2008
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16K Spectrum Emulator
Author	Andrew Owen
Filename	16KSpecEm.zip
Year	2008
Position	118
Format	ZX Spectrum 48K
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Description	A first for this year's compo, Andrew elected to provide his submission in plain text format. Does this now mean I should edit the rules page again to specify this mode of entry is also permitted? No need really, I'll just note here that it certainly is. Well, for BASIC programs anyway, since I usually have BASin to hand. For machine code programs - I guess an assembly listing would be fine. I'm not sure if I'd want to be sent 48K of binary digits though! To save some time for you CGC fans, I've also converted the program into a playable sna file, which I had to make anyway for the arcade page. It's also included in the download. The program itself thoughtfully POKEs the UDG sysvar and sets upper 32K to $FF as if disconnected to give a most authentic 16K experience to those 48K owners who feel they may otherwise be missing out. The option to skip the setting of the upper 32K may certainly be appreciated by those who like to do their speccy emulation whilst on the move. Andrew also draws our attention to the built in progress bar and the fact that the character bitmaps are actually copied from the ROM to where they should be in RAM on a 16K machine. The end result is that the lower 16K of RAM is indistinguishable from a true 16K spectrum. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone develops a program (with UDGs even) to showcase the full potential of this environment. Seriously, this entry could theoretically be useful (oops) as I don't think QAOP has a true 16K mode!
Comments	Makes your 48K system appear identical to 16K one such that a 16K snapshot taken from the resultant emulated system is indistinguishable from a real 16K spectrum. Only two slight snags:- (1) the filling of the high 32K with $FF to emulate no attached RAM truly takes ages. (2) you can still POKE the high 32K and PEEK it back again betraying the presence of real RAM there. Still, in practise these things tend not to effect the operation of 16K software at all (and the filling can be bypassed anyway). This one is actually potentially useful since we could use it to run a 16K game with hard-wired UDG addresses in the 48K QOAP emulator - if we really wanted to. Not a game of course, but that doesn't seem to be important to anyone anymore. Anyway, it seemed to fit into a nice gap here in the lower rankings of the compo due to its theoretical usefulness.

Improved Advanced 16K Spectrum Emulator
Author	Andrew Owen, Dr BEEP & James Smith
Filename	ImpAdv16KSpecEm.zip
Year	2008
Position	25
Format	ZX Spectrum 48K
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Description	*Updated 20/09/08* - James Smith and Dr BEEP have further improved Andrew's program, leading to this version finally posted by Dr BEEP. It assembles to a mere 12 bytes - that's an average of 4 bytes each for Andrew, DR BEEP and James Smith. Following on from the above entry, we now have the Power Users version of 16K Spectrum Emulator written in 100% pure assembly language. It's probably about a million times faster than the previous version, so that's a nice speed improvement. You can either download this entry as usual or copy'n'paste from here:- ; Advanced 16K Spectrum Emulator ; Copyright 2008 Andrew Owen, Dr BEEP & James Smith org $nnFD dump $nnFD start equ loop+2 loop jp p,$11cb defb 0,0 ; Initially LD DE,0 then just 2x NOP di ld a,c ld (de),a dec de and d jr loop At 21 12 bytes when assembled, you may be interested to know that this is so far the shortest entry submitted to CSSCGC 2008.
Comments	This little known deep underground coding triumvirate (a.ka. Tres Hombres) have done it again, sneaking this 12-byter out onto an unsuspecting compo spectatorship. In fact, if you can excuse the difficulty I was faced with on writing an entire paragraph on a twelve byte piece of code, I don't really have anything additional to say about this one apart from it does exactly what the BASIC version does, is about a million times faster at filling high-memory and has been expertly byte crunched by our optimising friends. The machine code trick used is one for the books though - use the source, Luke. It is a little known fact, but the ultimate 2008 crap game experience can be had by using this program to step through all of the 16K games in the compo and find out which ones work under it yet had missing UDGs in 48K mode (not that I ever did this).