Old Computer Challenge – Modern Web for the ZX Spectrum | Hacker News Reader

Old Computer Challenge – Modern Web for the ZX Spectrum

0x00.cl

78 points0x00cl17 comments

Provided one had a network stack, it would've actually been possible to use Google on a ZX Spectrum until a short while ago, as it still listened on port 80 and the usual /search?q=<query goes here> was all that was necessary. Now Google has destroyed that, and even with HTTPS it refuses to do anything without JS.

Once you have gopher (magical.fish and soon a gopher->gemini bridge, thus gemini://gemi.dev will be available from gopher, and from that, the News Waffle) and irc -> bitlbee to the rest of the networks, you won't need the web at all.

I mean:

gopher->gemini->web via News Waffle, enough to read news sites and blogs

irc->bitlbee->IM and chat networks, from Mastodon to XMPP, Steam, Discord...

Gopher would be far easier, they already are some gopher clients for the ZX and you can visit an HN mirror at gopher://hngopher.com

Also:

    gopher://magical.fish (web-like portal with news feeds, games and services)

    gopher://sdf.org (blogs basically)

    gopher://bitreich.org (huge directory a la Altavista/Yahoo back in the day)
 
    gopher://gopher.icu (Nice personal page)

    gopher://gopher.icu/7.gutenberg (Gutenberg project)

    gopher://1436.ninja (Nice personal page too)

There is also Spectranet[1] and clones for the Sinclair Spectrum, which allows for a much richer Internet-connected experience. It can load and boot remote programs from a server which allows you to get quite creative and produce sites like my TNFS server[2]. You can also try it out from an emulated Spectrum in a web browser at https://jsspeccy.markround.com if you don't have the original hardware lying around to see the sort of stuff you can build!

There's also Telnet clients so you can access old-school BBSes, and a variety of interesting "bridges" that grant access to Gopher or even parse websites. Quite amazing to access the modern Internet on an 8-bit machine from the early 80s that originally loaded games from cassette tape :)

[1]=https://www.bytedelight.com/?page_id=3515

[2]=https://tnfs.markround.com

Once you have telnet you just get an SDF account and do anything you want with a Unix shell. And, if you fire up Emacs, you are god. IRC, EMail, Jabber, Mastodon, gopher, gemini, a calculator, a Lisp environment, play ZMachine games with Malyon (and spawn full v5 and v8 games unlike the Speccy which could just handle v3 ones)...

Slightly disappointed there's no Tasword 2 (page 3 of [0]) tiny font shenanigans to horizontally extend the visible screen space.

There's Vaticanus[1][2] on a (mostly) 4x6 grid for 64x32. Or Tiny Talk[3] on a 5x5 grid for 51x38 if you prefer slightly more height.

[0] https://ia902300.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/4/...

[1] https://www.fontspace.com/vaticanus-font-f128585

[2] With some tweaks to characters and using 2px for space[4], I think you can get e.g. "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." into 158px (61.7% of a line) instead of 344px. One of the headlines shown ("[2] Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?" would fit into 149px (58.2% line) rather than being truncated to "[2] Is Postgres read heavy or..."

[3] https://v3x3d.itch.io/tiny-talk

[4] https://git.rjp.is/rjp/zx-vaticanus-spacing

Maybe this could help show 64 chars per line: https://chuntey.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/64-column-print/

Excellent, thanks[0].

[0] Although slightly distressing because I certainly read this at the time and typed it in to play around with but had lost all memory of it. Ah, age.

-edit-: Also I had completely forgotten all about the channels and streams shenanigans.

> Slightly disappointed there's no Tasword 2 (page 3 of [0]) tiny font shenanigans to horizontally extend the visible screen space.

I thought the same thing.

Hmmm. There was an 8-bit IPv4 stack around that might compile to Z80 assembly, and we could always chirp out data at 1500baud or whatever, so… might well happen in real life some day.

There are several ZX Spectrum IP stacks, e.g.

https://github.com/milankowww/ppp_tcpip_zxspectrum

The more elegant solution is probably a Spectranet interface, which does TCP offload:

https://www.bytedelight.com/?page_id=3515

Some of those views are delightfully terrible, no surprise; but I did think the Google homepage and the HN new-comment form turned out satisfyingly clean.

Reminds me of Gopher / Lynx from back in the day.

And today:

gopher://magical.fish (the news section it's huge)

gopher://sdf.org

gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn (the directory it's huge)

gopher://gopher.icu (good site)

gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver

gopher://typed-hole.org (some adventures)

But you can't click any of the links... :(

I had the Datel Genius mouse for my spectrum. It came bundled with the OCP Art Studio (which never worked on my spectrum). You could 'peek' into memory addresses to find the position and button state, so I wrote silly little BASIC programs for it.

This is so ridiculous. Love it!

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