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  This week on the blog: I now have enough stuff about the sound stuff to write up! This week I look more closely at what the sound waves *really* look like when I play "chords" out of a monaural 1-bit audio channel. Also an old-school bloggy link roundup for things I've found that don't rate full articles, because I get to do those sometimes as a treat. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/09/19/unfinished-business-with-1-bit-audio-chords/ Digital audio next time! #ret...

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  This week on the blog: Adding shots to our shmup. Possibly also intentionally architecting things wrong to see if they're bad ideas. (Conclusion: Maybe? But it's pretty close to a even set of tradeoffs.) https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/07/25/finishing-the-zx-spectrum-shooting-gallery/ #retrocomputing #zxspectrum #z80

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  This week on the blog: I get enough out of the ZX Spectrum's various sound chips to match what BASIC offers. Still struggling a bit to replicate my digital-sound-effect techniques, but that just means there'll be a follow-up post at some point. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/08/01/zx-spectrum-system-tour-sound/ #retrocomputing #zxspectrum

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  I've been focusing almost entirely on the ZX Spectrum for my hobby stuff since May. Now that I've gotten a few projects under my belt, I'm comparing what I've learned and remembered from a guide written by Jonathan Cauldwell, a prolific author for the platform past and present. This week on the blog! https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/08/08/zx-spectrum-comparing-notes-with-an-old-hand/ #retrocomputing #zxspectrum

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  This week on the blog: Finishing my tour of the base ZX Spectrum hardware by looking at the memory mapper in the 128K version, with a nod to the +2 and +3 successors. I'm not totally done with the platform, but now that I've looked closely at everything I saw in my initial tour, I'm shifting gears for a bit before I return. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/08/15/zx-spectrum-system-tour-memory-mapping/ #retrocomputing #zxspectrum

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  This week on the blog: Posting some photos from this year's Vintage Computer Fair. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/08/22/vintage-computer-fair-west-2026/ #retrocomputing #vcf2026

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  This week on the blog: I just finished accomplishing a fancy ZX Spectrum port of a project I'd done a half-dozen times already. I set about bringing the fancy parts back to earlier systems and then end up source-diving my favorite emulator instead. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/08/29/spectrum-shooting-gallery-taking-back-what-weve-learned/ #retrocomputing #colecovision

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  This week on the blog: Some stuff I didn't get to in the ZX Spectrum tour. I've been trying to get better sound out of its 1-bit speaker and the results have been... mixed. I've still got some homework left to do but I got some *very* nice chord progressions out at least. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/09/05/zx-spectrum-experimenting-with-1-bit-sound/ #retrocomputing #zxspectrum

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  Made some progress on my Sinclair PWM experiments. No sample playback yet, but I can generate a proper sawtooth wave, which means I should be able to convince Fuse to behave enough to *do* sample playback. #retrocomputing #zxspectrum

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  This week on the blog: Not enough progress on the sound stuff to write up, but I *did* finally sit down and make a proper cheat-sheet for cycle-exact delays on the systems I mess with. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/designing-cycle-exact-delays-on-several-8-bit-cpus/ #retrocomputing

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  I've said this before, but I may as well say it again: more people should be doing 8- and 16-bit homebrewing, Even in assembly language, these have dozens of the friendliest tutorials ever, and the hardest part is just getting a toolchain together that will turn your source code into binaries that *run* on the consoles or in emulators. I've been putting together quick build-and-run tutorials to close that gap, for a great many systems. Check it out. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.co...

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  This week on the blog: I take a quick tour of the weirdest old computer that still ended up (very indirectly) influencing my childhood computing: the Exidy Sorcerer. Never had one, never saw one, but one of the big books o' programs I had as a kid was published as Apple II but started over on the Exidy. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/04/25/staying-a-spell-with-the-exidy-sorcerer/ #retrocomputing #exidy

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  Hey there retrocoding friends. Indirectly prodded by @pervognsen I decided to dig out my old GBA stuff and then try to put together a quick "platform guide" for my blog: a round up of resources and resource hubs, along with just enough information to get bare-metal dev off the ground and clear away any toolchain nonsense. Here's what I have so far, but I bet there are some GBA devs out there who can help me expand it. Any takers? https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/...

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  This week on the blog: I go close some gaps in my understanding of the capabilities offered by the TI-99/4A's firmware. Now that I've picked up a working knowledge of most of the underlying hardware, on the system itself and its successors, I can see a bit more clearly. https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/01/17/ti-99-4a-leaning-more-heavily-on-the-firmware/ #retrocomputing #ti99_4a