ZX Spectrum Assembly. Let's make a game?

What a fantastic book this is, it’s been great refreshing my older brain after all these years away from z80 coding.. it’s true, if you don’t use it you lose it - I’m a tad rusty at z80 coding and this has been an excellent refresher… love it!

This is a fantastic book and goes into all the details with three real whole games as examples. It even explains and shows how todo loading screens. An absolute must for anyone writing retro zx spectrum games. It has qr code links to source code as well

Release of Retro’s The Spectrum has rekindled love for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Back in the 80s while being proficient in BASIC, Z80 machine code just eluded me. If only I had this book back then! It takes you through development of 3 games: pong, a space shooter ‘em up and tic-tac-toe. It is well explained and all code and resources are free and downloadable from QR code links in the book. Z80 is hard work but I’m starting to get it now and write my own short routines. Highly recommended.

I didn't think too much about why this book was on sale for such a low price.Once I'd downloaded it onto my Kindle however,I found out that much of the content I bought the book for was only available on-line ! While I fully understand that many folk are happy with this arrangement,I am not.I'm an old fogey and like old fogey ways.That'll teach me,I'll be more aware in future.

I'm not all the way through yet but I'm nearly at the end of the first game (Pong) and have understood every word so far which is a bit of a miracle as I've tried many times to learn assembler in a few flavours and I've never really quite got it. This time things seem to be sticking and I'm really "getting it". I think the reason for that is that it doesn't bother going into the theory. Like, at all. There's no big section on two's compliment at the beggining which frankly, is enough to confuse any newcomer and put them off (actually, maybe there was and I just skipped it?!). Instead this get's straight into demonstrating how we do things and the techniques and commands we use to get there. One thing that I found very confusing and ultimately I have mentally done a different way is that the author insists on referring to video memory addresses as "thirds, scanlines, lines and columns". Having scanlines and lines is just confusing for the sake of it. I'm rolling with "thirds, scanlines, rows and columns" which for a character based display makes much more sense to me. That's it so far though, everything else has seemed perfectly reasonable. Finally, I'm not using the assembler and emulator the book uses. I'm using sjasmplus with the simulator from the VSCode plugin DeZog. I've only hit one issue with doing this and that is the HALT instruction didn't do what the book said it did. It turns out sjasmplus disables interrupts in the header it generates for the snapshot file. A quick chat on discord revealed I needed to add a single 'EI' command to the start of the program and everything else worked like a charm.

very good book! Wish I had it in the 80's

super

ottimo! molto utile

Great book, I highly recommend

Primeiro livro que aborda de forma direta o tema de criação de jogos em Assembler Z80, com a analise de algoritmos exemplo muito concretos que qualquer jogo comercial dos anos 80 poderia usar. Há 40 anos atrás, esta livro teria sido absolutamente revolucionário. Hoje creio que seja um documento imprescindível para quem continua acalentando o sonho de criar um jogo para o ZX Spectrum.

Szybka dostawa, ale jak widać na załączonych zdjęciach okładka jest uszkodzona.

bravi una ottima versione di questo libro