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Gamebase ZX81

Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 8:17 pm
by sirmorris
I came across a post which talked about this collection which was found online. Someone had essentially made a menu-driven emulator playable version of ZX81Stuff's online tape database. I don't know how Simon feels about this, I will ask him at some point as I have an idea.

I wanted to put together a menu driven collection for zxpand (other mass-storage-based solutions are available) and this seems to be a good place to start.

I've done some noodling around building a data set to describe the files and it's my intention to build a menu program around that so people can have a collection at their fingertips. It would be really cool if the collection was live - so that new programs could be added at any time with minimal processing required to integrate them.

The filenames of the programs contain info about what cassette they belong to, what side on the tape they are to be found and the program name itself. Processing these to get clean meaningful data that can be used in a menu is proving challenging however. The data produced by my simple code required a lot of cleaning up. This isn't good. It violates the principle of minimal processing.

If I was going to do this I might seek approval to rename the data set using a more regular naming convention. New programs would need to be named appropriately so the database builder could go to work without any manual editing.

Is this a fool's errand? Are people bothered about this kind of thing?

Re: Gamebase ZX81

Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 9:34 pm
by RWAP
It would be really nice and useful if an ethernet module gets built, so people could browse the list, download the file direct from the internet and play it.... :D

It would then be closer to SpectraNet on the Spectrum.

Re: Gamebase ZX81

Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 10:50 pm
by palmheads
Sounds like a great idea!

On Android, I have a BBC Micro & ZX Spectrum emulator that have access to online versions of software accessed at a click of a button.

If the ZXPand could do that as well - would be fantastic!

cheers
Daryn

Re: Gamebase ZX81

Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2015 4:46 pm
by siggi
RWAP wrote:It would be really nice and useful if an ethernet module gets built, so people could browse the list, download the file direct from the internet and play it.... :D
That is one of the things that could be done using my ZX81 web-browser ZeddyFox and the ZeddyNet ethernet card:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=845&p=8325&hilit=Zeddyfox#p8325

Siggi