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. It’s a big project and…

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…

30–07–2021 I don’t often talk about my work on the internet — it’s been somewhat under wraps for a while now. But just recently, I’ve had a little breakthrough, writing up my results in a paper and getting all the code and data ready for folks to review online. Since…

30–06–2021 The Nintendo Famicom — one of the earliest consoles, released in 1983. To most of us in the West, we know it as the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). I was lucky to pick this up in Ojamakan for around £9 and at the same time, snaffle a couple…

28–05–2021 The ZX Spectrum is quite the beloved retro computer here in the UK (and in other parts of the world too I believe). It was cheap, it looked cool and it enabled a lot of young folks to get into computing and create their own software. Designed and…