A few times while refurbishing the two ZX81s I've been working on I have unsuccessfully tried to load a few games from my Maxduino device which I originally bought for my Spectrum. In fact, owning this is what persuaded me to get a ZX81 - since in principle I would already have a reliable means of loading programs.
Well in the end I have fitted a
WESPI which is great, but I'll make a
separate thread about that. I thought maybe the firmware of my Maxduino was no good for ZX81. I think it was on v1.50, and I noticed in some more recent release notes there was a specific mention about improved ZX81 compatibility. I've just gone to some effort to update it to v1.64 but I was still getting the same issue. I saw encouraging patterns on screen when starting playback but only for a couple of seconds then it would always go to a solid white screen.
I did some searching about the menu options and couldn't seem to find proper documentation. All the markdown at GitHub seems focused on release notes. I discovered via a
Spanish howto guide that the Menu option called
TSXCzxpUEFSW ? controls the polarity of Sinclair and Amstrad CPC audio signals, and this same option controls turbo loading for MSX, and UEF parity for the BBC Micro. And it appears to default to the wrong polarity, unless perhaps I had changed that long ago when I first got the Maxduino. That option needs to be set to
off. Once that was done it worked perfectly. The
Baud Rate ? setting has no effect for Sinclair machines. I just thought I'd write it up here in case some other poor soul searches the web for "TSXCzxpUEFSW" in future, as I did without success earlier
