Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum

Download Now Intro In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many decades later, I’ve finally managed it! I’m now the proud author of a hand-rolled retro demoscene intro that runs on a stock 128Kb Spectrum. It features all those late 80s tropes: A smooth scrolltext (with ‘leet custom fonts!), a three-channel AY soundtrack, bouncing VU meters and the essential parallax starfield. It’s currently 10287 bytes of code, or 19552 bytes as a complete tape image - which, given I’ve been working on this since December 13th last year, means my average rate of code-production is a paltry ~ 455 bytes per week! This blog post is a technical overview of how I got there, some cool tricks I picked up, and everything I had to learn…