The Chonkerton

Starting a ZX Spectrum shooting gallery in earnest

tech

Adafruit is reporting on Michael Martin's ongoing port of a shooting gallery program to the ZX Spectrum. The project has required solving one optimization challenge after another—from mastering text and bitmap output control, to designing an efficient blitting system for sixteen-by-sixteen sprites. Even that wasn't enough to keep graphics smooth, so the team had to arrange their bitmap operations to tear instead of flicker. It's a detailed walkthrough of the engineering required to make a shooting gallery run smoothly on classic hardware.

Source: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/07/20/starting-a-zx-spectr...

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