I am sure ours is a whole generation impacted in a similar way. Perhaps such a flood of games made me bored with gaming and more curious about software design, programming, and computer design, all of which eventually became my life-long profession and a hobby.
Thanks to a friend whose brother in Germany was supplying an incessant stream of games for the machine, I had the privilege of checking out most of them and picking only the best ones to play. I went through my formative years playing (and eventually disassembling and hacking) Spectrum games.
In this blog, I will show you how to interface an Atari-style joystick to the Altera DE1 FPGA board running a Spectrum implementation, how to change the ROM to enable you to input some game-cheat pokes, and a few games I eventually completed using this setup.Īlthough this article revolves around my particular ZX Spectrum implementation, the code and ideas are applicable to all similar setups.
