DeadFleshRetro

An photo of an Academy Apollo 80 games console from the late 1970s

A photo showing the Academy Apollo 80 console displaying one of the built-in games: Bowling.

Lovely to spend a Sunday evening exploring a rarity - does anyone else out there own an Academy Apollo 80? It’s a British / Hong Kong clone of the RCA Studio III, made under license by Conic in the late 1970s.

No joysticks or paddles & the keypads aren’t removable.
Its crap.

But also lovely ❤️😜

Really looking forward to this!

Let's Play The Guild of Thieves - Episode 6 Our little band of adventurers play classic text adventures most Monday evenings, and stream them here for people to enjoy, participate in, and catch up with if they miss a session. By all means joi...

We'll soon be entering hour 6 of our weekly exploration of Magnetic Scrolls' Guild of Thieves!

It's been super fun so far; as full of intrguing clues as it is "aha" moments!!

Join us on YouTube to watch along & by all means drop in your suggestions if you have any!

youtube.com/live/KCtdYhF...

Photo of a vintage Rowtron 2000 videogames console on an electronics workbench.

Photo of a vintage Rowtron 2000 videogames console on an electronics workbench. The colsone is open, showing the circuit board and wiring.

Don’t see these very often!

A Rowtron 2000. I believe it was the only MPT-03 clone sold in the U.K. Hanimex cloned the Emerson architecture and Rowtron cloned the MTP-03 design.

This one’s fully working but needs tlc. I also need it to diagnose a broken one!

Love these old Signetics machines. 🎉

I just fixed another #ZXSpectrum 🎉
Woohoo! 🥳 🤓

Really looking forward to this! :)
And *so* happy to be back in a Magnetic Scrolls game! It just oozes quality and humour!

Let's Play Counterfeit Monkey - Episode 13 YouTube video by Hit it with a Hammer!

Join us for Episode 13 of our Counterfeit Monkey playthrough tomorrow evening from 7pm, GMT!

We're definitely in the end game now - just 17 points left to get, will we finish it in the next hour of playtime??

youtube.com/live/7gdLojj...

#textadventures #interactivefiction #IF

Code snippet showing ZX Spectrum BASIC that uses constructs such as VAL "25000" instead of just using the number 25000, and SGN PI instead of the number 1.

Both Tasword and Masterfile were desendents of #ZX81 applications & ZX81 programmers use a lot of tricks to save RAM - in particular using mathematical operators instead of numbers for common integers!

Just check out this bit of code from the Tasword 3 BASIC loader!

Apart from figuring out how it all works, which versions of what work on a 48K Spectrum, and how to transfer from .opd and .tzx to .mdr, I also discovered something about writing ultra-memory-efficient BASIC...

File listing showing the contents of the Tasword 3 cartridge

Here's the file catalogue. Everything works: T2T3 to convert version 2 docs to version 3; and the MF and TM programmes that modify Masterfile v09 to produce Tasword 3 compatible data merge files. I've tested the mail merge features and it all works - it's impressively feature-rich actually.

Screenshot of Tasword 3 with its ReadMe file loaded and being displayed.

I've been a bit quiet on here recently, as I've been spending time on @hititwithahammer.bsky.social, however I do now have something to report:

It's super-niche, but I've successfully reconstructed a complete #ZXSpectrum microdrive version of Tasword 3, with all example docs & utilities!

Let's Play Counterfeit Monkey - Episode 11 YouTube video by Hit it with a Hammer!

We're back on Counterfeit Monkey from 7pm GMT this evening! We've beefed up our letter remover and have compiled a veritable arsenal of potential examples of homonym shame - game on!!

youtube.com/live/VmLa66l...

The cover of Issue 27 of Pixel Addict magazine

We're SUPER CHUFFED to announce that we're being featured in this month's edition of @pixeladdict.bsky.social!!

It's a great mag and we're so pleased to get some text adventure content into it, so do please buy a copy, either in physical form or as a pdf.

www.pixel.addict.media/shop/current...

Really looking forward to this, later - we finished on a 'downhill slope' last week! :)

Our foray into (relatively) modern Interactive Fiction continues this evening at 7pm UK time.

Tune in to chip in! 😜

Explain your username:
I started in this hobby by learning to repair, refurb & mod my childhood ZX Spectrum & when I started streaming during the Covid lockdowns I initially intended to do mainly Spectrum content, but got v sidetracked 😬😂
The name still refers to the 'dead flesh' rubber keyboard 🤷🧟🧟‍♀️

An advert for our Counterfeit Monkey playthrough, feauring a cartoonishly stylised siamese cat.

Tune in from 7pm GMT this evening for Ep. 5 of our collaborative Counterfeit Monkey playthrough! Will we finally magic up a fully working vehicle to drive past the protesting crowds in???

youtube.com/live/525JPjK...

(Bluesky still doesn't show YouTube thumbnails properly, so here it is attached!)

Really looking forward to this!!

This is a complex game, but a couple of hours in we're starting to figure out what's going on - catch up with previous episodes or join it live tomorrow night, you don't need to have watched from the beginning :)

#TextAdventures #InteractiveFiction #IF

We're continuing our classic text adventure and interactive fiction playthroughs on a new YouTube channel called "Hit it with a Hammer!", so I can do more repair and (hopefully) coding content here at DFR next year :)

To watch, or join in, our playthroughs, please go there & subscribe!

We kicked off season two of our livestreamed collaborative classic text adventure play throughs a couple of weeks ago, and we're continuing the experience tomorrow evening, from 7pm UK time.
This time we're exploring Ballyhoo by Infocom & hoping it's an underrated gem! 🙏😂

#textadventures #infocom

🤣

It’s certainly brought us closer together as friends, especially as we now live so far apart from each other, but more than that, it’s given us a deep appreciation for just how good this game was and still is! ❤️🐠

We can’t wait for the next one!!

You can check out the whole podcast playlist at the link attached to this thread, and there’s a bonus chat between me and Lee at the end of the final episode where we discuss the whole effort and what the experience has been like for us 🙂

I think we’ve definitely shown that it’s possible though, and that it makes for an enjoyable listening experience - thanks so much to anyone who’s been listening and/or watching along over the last four months!

We’re definitely going to run another game, but probably won’t be producing a podcast as it’s really a lot of extra effort.

DFR Plays Fish! by Magnetic Scrolls Podcast · [object Object] · This is a little experiment in live collaborative text adventure playing - we're going to see if it's possible to play some classic and significant adventures together, sta...

Well, after four months and 15 episodes, our experiment in playing through #MagneticScrolls’ Fish! from scratch, collaboratively online via live stream, with novice players, and then converting it into a regular audio-only podcast, has come to a conclusion!

And it’s been bloody good fun!!

Let's Play Fish! - Episode 12 This is a little experiment in live collaborative text adventure playing - we're going to see if it's possible to play some classic and significant adventure...

We just solved the "In the Dimensions" maze in Fish! Absolutely buzzing we managed to do that - it's such a clever idea! 🎉

We're going to have to wait two weeks to find out what happens at the end of it though, as we're away next week. Here's the livestream from this Monday's episode though!

DFR Plays Fish! Podcast Ep08 - Sent to the Principal's office! Listen to this episode from DFR Plays Fish! by Magnetic Scrolls on Spotify. This is the eighth episode of our Let's Play Fish! by Magnetic Scrolls podcast experiment! In this episode: We ride the tube...

The podcast version of Episode 08 of our collaborative playthrough of the #textadventure Fish! by #MagneticScrolls is now live and should be propagating to your favourite podcatcher :)

Here it is on Spotify:
open.spotify.com/episode/6Aar...

There are sooo many, but if I can only pick one it’s got to be Elite. It has to be. It kept me going back for months and months ❤️🕹️🙌

Fish! Update - Part 3 — Dead Flesh Retro In this final part of this update, I’m going to write about things we’ve observed during the first seven sessions, things that we’ve talked about and ways that other people could get involved - scro...

And part 3 of my update is now live too, covering things we’ve observed during the first seven sessions, things that we’ve talked about and ways that other people could get involved!

www.deadfleshretro.com/blog/fish-up...