How do you make an underpowered 8 bit CPU seem a bit more capable than it really is? Interrupts! that mechanism where the CPU can be poked and told to do something completely different, then resume whatever it was originally doing as if it’d never stopped.

So as explained in the previous video, our little Z80 CPU only has 16 bit address lines, and that means the maximum memory it can address is 64K.

Computers from the 1980s seemed to be quite limited in their abilities, there was a big drive to make a machine as cheaply as possible. Competition was fierce between manufacturers.

How to set up Z88DK to develop C programs for the ZX Spectrum Next in about 20 minutes. This video aims to show how straight forward setting up a modern, easy to use development environment for the ZX Spectrum Next can be.

Let’s look at how to make an 8bit computer produce graphics normally seen on an Amiga. The Spectrum Next contains extra hardware that lets us very accurately control when things happen relative to the screen being drawn.

25 years ago I was in college doing my A-Levels. Now I’m a teacher teaching A-Levels. I recently found my old programming project from my A-Level computer science course.

Meet the world’s worse mouse design ever. The Atari ST mouse. Amiga owners liked their tank mice, we ST owners didn’t like ours. It was square, uncomfortable and prone to breaking quite easily.

Are you a programmer? Are you learning how to be one? Come to think of it, how do you even learn how to think like a programmer?

One of the first upgrades I ever got for my ST was a RAM upgrade to take it from the stock 512KB to 1MB. The one I got was the Marpet XTra RAM Deluxe board as I quite liked the idea of being able to add more RAM in the future.

This isn’t an instructional video, if you try this yourself be careful and don’t touch anything while the PSU is plugged in. It’s connected to the mains, and we all know touching live wiring is bad.