Thursday, September 14, 2023

ZX81 sound digitizer by NICKMANN Studio

Yes, the ZX81 can do it, too. 

The ZX81's audio capabilities are seriously limited, meaning it simply lacks any sound chip or DAC or anything, thus everyhing. But it does write and read data to audio cassette tape recorders, sooo...

...precisely. The MIC and EAR connectors on the ZX81 are in no way meant to deliver what a sane person would call sound, but of course it still is an audio signal, only in a very crude way. ZX81's BASIC only provides the LOAD and SAVE commands to access the tape ports, so some machine code is required to get in control. The idea is not really new, but it looks as if "Sound Digitizer" by NICKMANN Studio is an exceptionally nice implementation. Also the accompanying article (see link below) gives a lot of interesting and helpful information about the fundamentals of digitized sound.

Here you can see and hear it in action on NICKMANN Studio's YouTube channel (2023-03-16):

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

Check out NICKMANN Studio's website for more information, and don't forget to send some coffee:

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/nickmannstudio/zx81-sound-digitizer-english

 

Sunday, September 3, 2023

Fast 3D graphics in low-res

A nice project by "X-periment" provides a framework to do fast 3D graphics in "plot" mode, and shows some well known 3D objects. 

"A fast 3D low-res graphics library for the ZX81" (Nov 5, 2022)


If you want to know more, check out its github pages:

https://github.com/X-periment/ZX81-graphics-library

...and X-periment's YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu3NpSb3OgZoGpMpKNxUM8w