Starting a ZX Spectrum shooting gallery in earnest

Michael Martin is working through a port of a shooting gallery Rosetta-stone program to the ZX Spectrum.

It’s been a long road. We started out knowing how to control text and bitmap output and a decent handle on I/O. From there we designed a reasonably efficient blitting system that operated on 16×16 “sprites” that we carefully prepared for efficient blitting.

Even this wasn’t enough to keep our graphics updates smooth, though, so we then had to carefully arrange our bitmap operations to tear instead of flicker. I’ve been putting this project together bit by bit.

See how Michael has built out other parts in the post here.

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Using a MikroTik as a home router

Rafał Opiłowski was looking at setting up a new homelab, starting with a comprehensive networking setup.

Given my experiences related to performance and security issues with ISP-provider routers, I wanted to have a better control over the traffic on my home network. I decided to heavily focus traffic on wired connections, to offload WiFi and ensure connection between devices over local network are as fast as possible.

That’s where Mikrotik L009UiGS-RM comes in play. It has enough Gigabit Ethernet ports to connect all my Ethernet ports on the walls. PoE is a nice bonus too, as I can power my access point without having to use a wall wart.

See how each part of the network were set up in the post here.

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The Brick Game, through the ages

The handheld games of 2000: how could we forget the LCD screens and the cheesiness. Nicole Express got one at a church fundraiser and did a comparison with another model which advertises voice.

Another oddity about the box. Take a look at the screen. Notice that it has square blocks with a square inside, and a number of icons. Now compare it to the real thing.

Now notice on the real thing. The block have spades inside each of them, and the sidebar segments are different too, with an odd child. I don’t really think anything of it, but it is odd.

So, what is the Talking Brick Game 118-in-1? Well, the packaging promises all sorts of games…

See the analysis in the post here.

 

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The SmartFont Library for LED matrix displays

The SmartFont Library by Chaiwat Leanyos is a generic C++ font library for embedded systems (Arduino, ESP32, etc.), designed for efficient rendering of UTF-8 strings on pixel-based displays. It features special support for Thai Language, correctly positioning vowels and tone marks (0x0E00 – 0x0E7F).

Features

• UTF-8 Support: Handles multi-byte characters automatically.
• Thai Language Layout: Automatically adjusts vertical position of upper/lower vowels and tone marks to prevent overlapping.
• Memory Efficient: Fonts are stored in program memory (PROGMEM on AVR/ESP).
• Callback Based: Agnostic to display hardware. You provide drawPixel and clearPixel callbacks.
• Font Converter: Includes a Python tool to generate compatible C source files from .ttf or .otf fonts.

See details on GitHub.

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Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux

Simon Park still has a netbook bought back in 2009. The ASUS Eee PC 1000HE has an Intel Atom N280 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The Atom N series was Intel’s line of cheap, low-performance CPUs for netbooks.

The chip has 56KB of L1 cache and 512KB of L2 cache, and its clock speed is 1.667GHz. Compare that with the Intel Core i3 N305, a budget laptop processor released in 2023, which has 768KB of L1 cache, 4MB of L2 cache, and runs at 3.8GHz, and you get a feel for how poor the Eee PC’s performance is.

Once the netbook was out of storage again, I decided to bring it back to life and put it to use again, whether as a server or a YouTube machine.

See the process Simon used to load Linux in the post here.

 

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Celestial Summer in Madison Square Park

How am I just finding out about the concept of a Moon Tree? How twee! How early 1970s late-stage Space Age optimism! Learn more about Celestial Celebrations here from Madison Square Park Conservancy:

In 1971, NASA astronaut Stuart Roosa carried seeds from five tree species on the Apollo 14 mission. After returning to Earth, the seeds were germinated, and the resulting seedlings, known as Moon Trees, were distributed to schools, state capitals, national parks, NASA centers, and dignitaries around the world.

Building on this legacy, in 2022, NASA’s Artemis Program sent a new generation of Moon Tree seeds into space, where they orbited the moon for four weeks aboard the Orion spacecraft. When they returned to Earth, Forest Service scientists studied and germinated the seeds, and Madison Square Park Conservancy (MSPC) was chosen by NASA to receive one of the seedlings!

On July 16, join Madison Square Park Conservancy for a celebration inspired by our Moon Tree, an American Sweetgum sapling grown from seeds that traveled around the Moon aboard NASA’s Artemis I mission.

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Subscribe to the Adafruit Youtube channel! #Youtube #AdafruitLearnSystem

Are you subscribed to the Adafruit Youtube channel? If you’re not already subscribed, click here! http://adafru.it/subscribe . It’s a free and easy way to keep up with our newest episodes. Here’s some of what we’re up to.

• Electronics Show and Tell Wednesdays 7:30pm

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