ZX81 Software Archive

[gus]

Hi,

I' working on the preservation of a good bunch of ZX81 Software. Most of those programs are from Argentina, Brasil and Portugal. I have the software, the manuals and the cassette inlays.

So at this point I realised that we, the ZX81 community, do not have a good Software Repository.

Lets see. The ZX81 Stuff site is really good but is limited to the software of one personal collection, the FTP like archives are very limmited in order to browse the titles and do not include, in general, relevant information about the software. There are too a lot of specific "mini" sites, some examples are: Software Farm's tribute, WRAP software pages, the Brasilian pages of Micro Sistemas and Toddy Forth, the XavSnap French software collections, and maybe you can name others.

All are very good places to found and enjoy the old zx81 titles.

But we do NOT have an archive like the Spectrum fans has on WOS... and I think we need one in order to Preserve all the ZX81 software.

What do you think ?

Gus

[sirmorris]

I think you're right.

Curating a collection like that would be a lot of work, but it would be worthwhile.

Perhaps the owners of the aforementioned collections could comment?

Would it be practical to amalgamate?

C

[yerzmyey]

But we do NOT have an archive like the Spectrum fans has on WOS... and I think we need one in order to Preserve all the ZX81 software.
What do you think ?
Gus

That's exactly what I was thinking about. A good data-base with screenshots, infos of required config, and so on - it would be veeeeeery desirable.
Although, I'm afraid, it's too huge job, even to several persons, not to mention one.
And without some script "helping" in the work, I cannot imagine how it could be done.

For instance, I constructed my ZX Spectrum 48K portal http://zxspectrum48.i-demo.pl/ by myself only, making all the required classification, screenshots, HTML itself, gathering photos, infos - and so on. And I took _only_ a part of software, that I needed for the profile of the site.

[1024MAK]

100% agree.
Could also do with an "Essential software" list complete with brief info and links.

Mark

[RetroTechie]

Having spitted through a couple ZX81 software archives, I disagree: many 'titles' are in the "hey I've coded a couple lines of BASIC, look at this demo!" genre. Or there's a half dozen slightly different versions of the same program. Often without source / info on original author etc. Many of which IMHO not worth even the few bytes of diskspace... The nature of the ZX81 and the kind of coding that is (or mostly: was) done for it, just makes it so.

Could also do with an "Essential software" list complete with brief info and links.

THAT I do agree with. A compilation of 'best of', 'most interesting', 'most popular' etc. For ZX81 software I have myself, I include at least the .p, a screenshot, and a .wav file for loading into a real ZX81 (on-the-fly creation of a .wav is better in theory, but I think just storing it with a program is easier in practice). If available: cassette inlay, description / controls / author info, assembler sources etc. Everything zipped up per title for easier archiving. Storing at least 1 screenshot for every title makes it easy to produce a screenshot index, which makes it easy to find titles for which you have a vague idea what a game looked like.

Info on hardware requirements would be very useful - for example I've seen a few 1K programs that work on 1K but NOT (properly) on >1K machines. That kind of info (or what hardware is supported when available, what keys are used for controls etc) is not always easy to figure out.

[Andy Rea]

This is an excellent idea, i hope you can pull it off. it would be great to have a good repository, with some basic description as a bare minimum, but inlays and instructions ect. would be good too.

It's funny but this was a subject i was talking about only a few days ago.

Regards andy