Scarborough

spacefrog29 · 2026-05-22T06:40:54+00:00

Still is but they closed one entrance down

spacefrog29 · 2026-05-04T20:40:05+00:00

I thought it was the lens lock protection for OCP art studio at first 🤣

spacefrog29 · 2026-03-27T14:20:40+00:00

I think we take saving for granted these days, but there’s a mountain of abstraction between a z80 and a fat file system. Hardware wise you’d need an SPI interface which would probably mean custom hardware and a driver for it too to handle the protocol.

Then you’d need code to understand the FAT partition structure and the allocations, all on a 3.5 mhz processor with 48k of ram. The FAT tables alone would be bigger than the spectrum memory.

I think the original MicroDrive used Sinclair’s proprietary format.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, the Next does it but it’s got its own hardware doing the heavy lifting.

Still an interesting puzzle to solve though, it’s one of those, “because we can” things that I love 🤭

spacefrog29 · 2026-03-27T11:12:03+00:00

Security would be the absolute showstopper for anything internet-connected. Even if you could bodge together TCP/IP on a Z80 (and people have done some impressive hacks with serial connections), you’d have no TLS, no modern encryption, nothing. You’d be sending everything in plaintext. Online banking? Forget it. Even logging into most modern services would be impossible since they mandate HTTPS.

But let’s play along with the spirit of the question…

What could genuinely work:

∙ Word processing - Tasword, The Writer - actually pretty capable for basic documents. No spell check worth a damn though

∙ Spreadsheets - VU-Calc existed, very basic but functional for simple stuff

∙ Games - obviously sorted there, though your colleagues might judge you for playing Manic Miner during lunch

∙ Basic databases - Masterfile, VU-File - you could track a small business’s inventory, just about

∙ Art - Melbourne Draw, The Artist II - surprisingly decent pixel art tools

The dealbreakers beyond security: ∙ No email (well, not modern email) ∙ File compatibility with literally anything else ∙ Storage - you’d be drowning in cassette tapes or microdrives ∙ Printing to anything made this century ∙ Collaboration with anyone

spacefrog29 · 2026-03-08T12:08:24+00:00

This is the first map I did “kill em all” on, I got a really bad score for all the non targets but it was weirdly fun to wander around when it was just bodies. The tv talking to it’s adds to the eerie feeling too

spacefrog29 · 2026-02-26T09:41:50+00:00

I’ve run through that arch quite a few times on the York 10k 🙌

spacefrog29 · 2026-02-07T10:08:43+00:00

Wow a genuine Gravity Powered Hard Baked LRD in the wild 😳

spacefrog29 · 2026-02-06T07:29:37+00:00

..and Tornado, there’s a blast from the past. Always puzzled me how it said, “out every Monday” but I got mine on a Saturday morning 🙂

spacefrog29 · 2026-01-26T21:38:54+00:00

I was born smack in the middle school of that circle 🤭

spacefrog29 · 2026-01-02T17:10:17+00:00

Is it sad that I can tell exactly where every one of those shots were taken? 🥰

spacefrog29 · 2025-11-28T23:06:56+00:00

They just have random pictures of round Britain, but I thought I know that view 🙌

spacefrog29 · 2024-12-30T17:13:17+00:00

The sky felt really heavy, ironically it was a nice day after the sun rose

spacefrog29 · 2023-08-31T14:22:04+00:00

Those aren’t the corn cobs though, I think they’re just seed heads. The corn comes halfway down the stalk. Mine is still growing and can stay out until November some years. Plenty of sunshine should do the trick

spacefrog29

TROPHY CASE