I don't get the Diet Coke hatred. I actually prefer it. And not on diets either, I just think it's nicer and always go for it if it's available. [LIFTED] Pepsi though.

Best or worst?

Mark

Lol, sorry, best. Of course it's now inspired me to go looking for the 'Wasp Predator'.

Shure SE215 - Ironically, I'm not so sure about these... I've been in all the options on my MP3 player and none help the fact these seem a bit lifeless indoors somehow. I'm having to max the volume no matter what I'm listening to. This isn't an issue with my current £20 headphones... As a plus point, I suspect this is because everything's more distinct in general.

I'll test them outside - if they block out noise better than my current set I'll have to decide whether to keep them or not. At the moment they're a bit 'meh'.

They'll open up a bit after a few hours use.
You might also want to try a portable headphone amp as most MP3 players can't drive proper headphones

Cheers, didn't even know they existed!

Probably won't buy one though; headphones were dear enough!

You can get them starting at £20 or so and they can make a massive difference

One of these.

The only problem is that it doesn't work well with my TV using analogue tuning. However, there's an RGB socket, so I can get a SCART lead for it.

You'll be drinking some amount of tea waiting for it to load

I had the 128k model without the cassette bit. I remember enjoying plugging it the expansion ports and add ons like microdrives. I also used to enjoy hitting the break button, altering the code and rerunning it so i had extra lives or something.

The trick on the ZX81 was to have software that auto ran by putting a SAVE command as the first line. When you ran the program, it saved and then carried on. When you loaded the programme, it ran from the line after the SAVE command. Pretty handy - software writers did this in an attempt to discourage piracy, or the user from breaking in and seeing the code. Usually the very next line was a machine code call, so pressing BREAK did nothing.

However, there was a POKE command that if you entered it, it disabled the software from running, so you could see what was here. In one case, I found something very much like this in a Chess program:



So, what was going on was this - you got asked for the difficulty level for the game, and off you went. Clearly, the higher the difficulty level was, the more the computer had to process, so the longer it took.

The reality was far simpler - the machine code handled the movement, but returned the user control to BASIC, which then DID A LOOP to cause a delay and then carried on. The higher the difficulty level, the longer the wait. There was probably some kind of move input thing in BASIC too, with the results being POKEd to a variable store for the machine code to handle. The thing was that the difficulty variable was used for nothing else. It just acted as a counter.

So difficulty was the computer took longer to give a response? That's funny. I was never advanced enough to understand BASIC properly. I had the spectrum from the ages of 6-12 or something so had to learn. Whilst I could do more simple things, more advanced stuff was way beyond my ability.

I had a power block which was individually switched. If I switched one of the other sockets (E.g. the one with the cassette recorder plugged in) it caused a spike and the program on the ZX81 stopped running and I could edit the code.

This was great on Defenda, I could change the shape of the ship and it became indestructable, for example.

A six pack of Twirls ( ), they're going lovely with my slightly tipsy state.

Some Frisps were awesome too. And you know, this sort of thing is why I'm fat. And equally don't care