User:Edward

I'm a young and hotheaded coder who's occasionally been a bit of a nuisance in the past, but now even Guesser thinks I've grown up.

I studied maths at Cambridge, and spend my time hacking up anything and everything in C (from an IRC client to the lambda calculus, and most things in between).

I hang around on #spin, #speccy and #zx on irc.coldfront.net; occasionally I post to WoS (as AY Chip) or comp.sys.sinclair (as ec429).

My location on the web isn't all that constant, but there's usually an up-to-date pointer at [1]. My website runs a homebrew webserver running on my laptop, so occasionally Bad Things may happen to it (it doesn't fall over much).

Things I'm responsible for

My main crime against Specchumanity is the scrplus image-converter, which started out as a tool for the ULAplus but is now branching out and becoming a general image conversion tool. Somewhat unusually for a project of mine (I'm a Linux fanboy through and through), it's also available for Windows.

I'm also working on a Spectrum emulator, Spiffy, which as of May 2012 can emulate a 48 well enough to load games from tape and play them, and supports a few peripherals such as the ZX Printer, ULAplus and an AY chip. Spiffy is unusual in that the main bus (A0–A15, D0–D7, MREQ, IORQ, RD, WR, M1, RFSH, WAIT) is fully populated with the correct control signals; for instance all memory reads by the Z80 are actually performed by asserting the bus, then reading D0-D7 on the next Tstate. In other words, the communication between the Z80 and other 'virtual chips' is confined entirely to the virtual bus. Hopefully this should make it easier to implement peripherals and accurate ULA behaviour (contention, floating bus, and all that). Certainly, the peripherals I've implemented so far have been simple, self-contained additions to the source.

There's also blast, a curses-alike library, useful for making simple text-based interfaces. It can be used as an ASM library or a Spectranet module, and Z88DK C bindings are being developed by Guesser.

Another project is bast (yes, the similar names are confusing), a sort of compiler-linker for ZX Basic. Actually 'compiler' might be the wrong word, since it doesn't actually compile Basic to m/c; rather it compiles a text file on the host machine into a .TAP file containing a tokenised Basic program. It also does some clever stuff like linking in binary (m/c) segments, auto-numbering program lines, and some optimisations. Interface-wise, it's a command-line program with lots of options, somewhat modelled on gcc (which might have been a mistake). The name is an abbreviation of "The BASIC Tapemaker".

Getting into a narrower niche now, I'm hacking on a FUSE (that's Filesystem in Userspace, not pak21's emulator) driver for the Spectranet's TNFS (Trivial Network File System); it's called tnfuse. Also a driver for IDEDOS .HDF images and +3DOS partitions thereon, called idedosfs.

A project that I've started work on but not released yet is ZX Lisp, a LISP system for the Speccy. I've written the (PC-based) compiler that converts LISP source into bytecode; still to do are the runtime and possibly a REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop).

Then of course there's a load of non-Speccy-related stuff, most of which lives on my github page or dotted around SourceForge (where my username is Soundandfury); a comprehensive list may or may not exist somewhere on my website.