13–09–2022 It’s not something you might expect to read about on a technology blog, but then I’ve always tried to put a little bit of heart into my posts — it’s an essential ingredient. …

17–08–2022 When I first met the lady I would eventually marry, she told me that she’d started work on a book about a collection of calculators. For various reasons, over the next few years, the project would lay dormant. When the pandemic hit and the UK went into the lockdown…

08–06–2022 So this year, I went to my first festival since the pandemic — the hacker camp Electromagnetic Field 2022 (or emfcamp as many folks call it). Contributing to the festival was the demoparty FieldFX. I decided I’d like to enter a demo, building on my ZX Spectrum work. …

18–05–2022 For Revision 2022 — the world’s largest demoparty — my friend Will Flux and I entered the Wild Category with a demo of our own — a completely unique FPGA board running a short visual and audio treat. Completely designed in Verilog and unlike other demos we used…

22–04–2022 The ZX Spectrum is one of these amazing little computers from the 80s. It inspired a great number of programmers, games developers and many other young people in the UK. It was the RaspberryPi of it’s day. Sure, there were other computers out there with more impressive specifications, but…

30–11–2021 I’m going to explore a slightly different topic this month — writing. And not just blogging but the academic stuff I’ve been working on of late (and a couple of secret projects too!). I’m a bit of a beginner at this, but I’ve already discovered a number of tools…

30–10–2021 What is a game from scratch? Is it something written in Unity? Is it writing your own game engine? I’d go one further and say it’s about building your own hardware! Yep! Lets start right at the bottom and work our way up. …

30–09–2021 Much like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum I fixed up, the Amiga has a special place in my heart. I’m not alone in this, by a long way. For folks who were into computers in the late 80s / early 90s, the Amiga was one of the most interesting…

30–08–2021 Field programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs are wonderful little devices. In a nutshell, they are a whole load of logic blocks, wired together with interconnects. These logic blocks can be wired up however you like, to create simple, or complicated circuits. Anything from a simple XOR gate, to…