Retroleum

Restoring the white ZX Spectrum case logo

Crikey, a site update!

I’ve finally had a few spare minutes to type up an article on restoring the white logo on the ZX Spectrum. Hope others have success with this method!

Snapload V3.2

Added a little feature to the NMI menu of the SMART Card’s snapload ROM: When a .tap file has been loaded, the current position of the (virtual) tape can be stored and restored allowing “rewinding” for multi-load games (the tape now also automatically rewinds at the end). The latest ROMs are – as always – available at www.retroleum.co.uk/smart.zip

LOAD “”

I sometimes get questions about difficulties encountered when loading (Spectrum) games from cassette tape, and end up typing the same info over and over.  To save time in future I’ve pasted my thoughts here :)

Long filename support for SMART Card

I’ve just added long filename support to the SMART Card’s Snapload ROM. This pretty much necessitated a proportional font renderer so I did that and added icons too whilst I was at it :) As always, the latest version is in the project archive at www.retroleum.co.uk/smart.zip

SMART Card V2

I’ve redesigned the SMART Card PCB so that it will physically fit all versions of the Spectrum. At the same time I’ve made a few improvements such as removing the DIP switches and adding auto-detect for the Spectrum 128+2A / 3.  The SMART Card V2 will of course be available from the store (when I’ve made some more:)

On the software side, I’ve rewritten the game loader ROM – it now allows snapshots to be saved to the SD Card, Pokes to be entered (in all games not just those loaded from .taps as was the case before) and is generally neater looking. The new software should work fine on the V1 SMART Card too, so if you have one of those you can update it by installing the latest ROM from the project archive downloadable here.

Update: 26/9/2017: I’ve also made a toolkit ROM which allows SD Cards to be formatted to FAT16 actually in the SMART Card (even those larger than 4GB).