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.

Spectrum Next Hardware Sprites Overview The Spectrum Next Wiki lists all the information, but the main points are 128 16x16 pixel sprites Mirror, rotation and magnification of sprites Sprites can be grouped together to make larger sprites The sprite images are stored in their own 16k of memory in the FPGA Think of the sprites as 128 slots in the Next that can each have a small 16x16 pixel image attached to it.

Bigger sprites 16x16 pixel sprites are pretty good, and you should probably make most of your games with them. The screen is only 256x192 pixels in size so a 16x16 pixel sprite looks quite large.

Bank switching and memory paging The Spectrum Next comes with 1 or 2 megabytes of RAM, but being an 8 bit CPU the most it can address at any one time is 64K.

I’m starting an ongoing series where I learn how to write code for the Spectrum Next. Layer 2 The Spectrum Next has additional video modes compared to the original ZX Spectrum.

Today’s lesson in curing headaches by banging your head on the wall until they stop involves joysticks and mice. This is a bit technical, so ensure your seat back and tray table are in the upright and locked position.