Featured articles

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum! A series of articles exploring a modern development environment for the classic 8-bit 1980s home computer

Back to the floppy: A musing on the passing of a once-common physical storage medium

Review of the Apollo Vampire 1200 v2 accelerator add-on card for the classic Amiga 1200 computer

Recent Posts

Haiku Package Management

I’ve long since been a die-hard BeOS fan and have been running the open-source recreation Haiku for many years. I think it’s interesting to explore the “alternative OS” world and consider some great ideas that for whatever reason never caught on elsewhere.

A Splinter In Your Mind

Earlier this year, I finally discovered as an adult that I am “on the spectrum” with what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome. The diagnosis helped make sense of a lot things and has given me a greater insight into my “way of being in the world”. Whilst there are times I struggle with things that neuro-typical people usually find easy, or I find some situations draining, the condition has also brought me many positives which often get overlooked when talking about Autis...

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum - Part 4

In Part 3 I covered the backend server processes and protocols, CI/CD pipelines and unit tests I used to build the TNFS site. In this (much shorter) part, I’d like to take a step back from the hardcore geekery, and wrap up with my thoughts on the whole thing.

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum - Part 3

In Part 2 I discussed the server environment, as well as how I built and launched the first prototype version of the site. I hit some speedbumps along the way and quickly reached the limits of what I could do with a pure client-only 1980s BASIC codebase. In this part, I’ll look at how I moved to a backend API system and how all this is deployed and tested.

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum - Part 2

In Part 1, I explored the hardware and development environment. In this article, I’ll cover the server-side components as well as coding and launching the first iteration of the site along with some of the limitations I encountered when programming on such an old system.