If you’re a similar age to me, then the sounds you hear in the video above will trigger some nostalgic memories. I wrote about my childhood growing

Old School Tape Loading - by Chris Greening - atomic14

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2024-11-24 21:00:05

If you’re a similar age to me, then the sounds you hear in the video above will trigger some nostalgic memories. I wrote about my childhood growing up some time back here.

I distinctly remember the loading screens and change in tone between loading the bits that made up the high resolution part of the image and the color information. The layout of the ZX Spectrum screen fascinated me as I tried my first forays into assembly language trying to write my own sprite routings for games.

Anyway, as a lot of you will know, I’ve been working on my personal tribute to the ZX Spectrum - the ESP32 Rainbow - available to back on Crowd Supply right now!

You have Z80 files - which are simply snapshots of the machine’s state (the registers and memory contents). These Z80 files load pretty much instantaneously.

And you have TAP and TZX files - these files let you accurately recreate the pulses of highs and lows that would have been stored on tape, so you can play them back into the emulator.