https://archive.org/stream/NH2021_Popular_Computing_Weekly_Issue870212.pdf#page/n03/mode/2up (2/2)

No. In fact Steve Vickers labelled the first instruction “PLUGIN:”.

Indeed Macca wrote a custom COPY routine in contended RAM as it is a 16K game. The screen can be copied by pressing ‘P’ on the ZX Spectrum but the output is dithered. Nothing wrong with the ZX Printer - the custom COPY routine is written in contended RAM so the ULA has precedence. #SNOW

Here is one of my favourite pages - better than a blank. The first Example ZX Spectrum BASIC program in the Appendix which is written by the sister of Steven Vickers, Penny. Her mother and father wrote it for the Press demo of the Pilot Ace in 1950 and again for a visit by the Daily Mirror in 1952.

Sadly, David Webb MBE, author of Supercharge Your Spectrum and other ZX books and games died on Tuesday, 6th January.
His NYT, free to read, obituary is here

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/w...

A handy function, by T.P. Mervyn, to display the exponent and mantissa of a six byte floating point number on a Sinclair QL machine (or core).

I had to double check that bug in the middle as I normally press ENTER when an error occurs. One can indeed continue to input a$ as described. I fixed this in the 2003 Gosh Wonderful ZX Spectrum ROM to allow stream 1 to function by making the CLS_LOWER routine precede the stream selection.

Tim Hartnell reports that the 8K ROM that had been sent to America (Syntax Mag.) and Middlesbrough (Linsac books) was to be withdrawn and features, like RESTORE, pulled for the ZX Printer. I would love to know how it printed floating point fractions. Has anybody got a copy of this early 8K ROM ?

By Hugo Davenport who revealed that X_TEMP is a label in the Z80
source code. Page 108.

Things go better with Coca Cola. ZX Spectrum artwork.

It doesn’t add up. In 1946 Steve’s parents were headhunted to work for Alan Turing together with Jim Wilkinson and Charles Clenshaw.
For the ZX81/ZX Spectrum Steve calculated his own Chebyshev coefficients for the LN function. He could never write that crass fuzzy code and choose to stick with it.

The letters page has three letters about niggly ZX Spectrum bugs.
First is that screenful of characters which I fixed by having a special console input routine. Next the manual error that CLEAR does a RESTORE. Steven fixed that in the Pitman Guide but Sinclair/Amstrad printed it in every manual.

Nothing to copy or learn from. A classic case of GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Never process fractional digits one at a time. A lot of the competition had 24 bit mantissas and it beats them but it inhibits collecting the 34th bit to round a 32 bit quotient . It will not work with fuzzy logic. #ulp

A productive letter from Adam Hart-Davis who joined Yorkshire Television in 1977 and would produce “Me and My Micro” as a result of this letter.

A clever ZX Spectrum routine on Page 33 by G Bottomley that uses logarithms to calculate how many hex numbers will appear in the conversion. The ROM PRINT_FP routine does something similar with decimals.

My demon site and email are long gone but most of the ZX Spectrum site is preserved on the Wayback Machine.
Download the ZX ROM Collection for the files listed.

web.archive.org/web/20150602...