Spectrum Analyser, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum reverse engineering tool

https://colourclash.co.uk/spectrum-analyser/

by rcarmo • 2 years ago

122 30 2 years ago

colourclash.co.uk

snvzz• 2 years ago

I love how it is now open source under MIT license.

matternous• 2 years ago

Interesting choice of name

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_analyzer

rkagerer• 2 years ago

Yeah - great tool, awful name (because it already means something else).

grodriguez1002• 2 years ago

I would say that was on purpose.

I have to say I personally like it :-)

bowsamic2• 2 years ago

I think it's a great name, and it's easily found as "ZX Spectrum analyser", which is the obvious description of the tool. I think it's actually kind of a perfect name

EvanAnderson• 2 years ago

I never had a Spectrum, however I recognized the game being displayed in the screenshots. TIL that "Star Quake", that I played on a 286 w/ a Hercules card and a horrendous TSR CGA "emulator", was actually a Spectrum game first[1]. Maybe I should give the Spectrum a look.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starquake_(video_game)

rahimnathwani• 2 years ago

Another cool spectrum-first game was Nebulus. I remember buying it at a shop on Tottenham Court Road.

I recently learned Nintendo released versions of the game as 'Castelian'. The level design, at least for level 1, is the same as in the original Nebulus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebulus_(video_game)

JNRowe• 2 years ago

There is a fun SDL remake¹, packages available in Debian and a few other distributions too.

¹ https://gitlab.com/roever/toppler/

mrspuratic2• 2 years ago

aka "Tower Toppler" or "Castelian". The 3D tower rotation was mind blowing--on an 8-bit with no coprocessor or even hardware multiply! Walk-through video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuLgJeXBB-A

NikkiA2• 2 years ago

I suspect, given their widespread adoption by devs at the time, that the tatung einstein 'port' would 'technically' have been the original, but the spectrum version was the first released version that more than 10 people cared about.

The tatung was an absolute beast of a z80 dev machine, and the favourite of many Spectrum and CPC devs.

nickt• 2 years ago

I’m aware of the Apricot PC based PDS - Programmers Development System [1], but unfamiliar with a Tatung Einstein based dev environment, it’s mentioned briefly in this (interesting thread) [2], but would love to know more…

[1] https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/PDS_development_system

[2] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3314/how-...

oniony2• 2 years ago

I bought my first Spectrum (a Spectrum+) in 1985. It was a great machine for its time and cost. I learnt to code using the manual that came with it and can probably thank it for my career as a software developer.

I still have fond memories of that computer, the games I played on it and the time I spent hacking about on it, but it had some serious capability limitations compared to its competitors, most notably the Commodore 64, and I spent several years longingly looking at the C64 screenshots of games in Crash magazine, wishing I had gone down that route instead. Check out Paperboy on Spectrum versus C64 for example, where the Spectrum version is practically monochrome in a window that's approximately half the screen size.

Marazan• 2 years ago

Sure, but then you look at Carrier Command on the ZX Spectrum vs the Commodore and the jealousy fades awy.

foobarian• 2 years ago

Man, I wish I had this in the 80s :-)

Reminds me of computers that came with very nice built-in monitors [1] which could be quite a luxury. Orao [2] had a monitor with a miniassembler and disassembly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_code_monitor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orao_(computer)

becurious• 2 years ago

That’s great! Back in the day I’d have to take a snapshot with my +D and then disassemble parts of it and print them on my dot matrix printer. At least the HiSoft Devpac Mons debugger was relocatable so you could move it around to get out of the way of the code you wanted to look at. Which then became a target of curiosity for how the relocation code worked :)

grodriguez1002• 2 years ago

I love this :-)

bowsamic2• 2 years ago

Looks great, also it's quite funny, it seems to me like just how HTML+JS+CSS is the universal GUI of the web, imgui seems to be becoming the universal GUI of native applications.

PS: I wish we had something this nice for x86 DOS programming. I have been trying to write little 256b intros for DOS and the debugging options for .COM files are not great.

flohofwoe3• 2 years ago

This is the sort of thing where Dear ImGui is simply perfect :) I also used it for the debugging UI in my emulators (https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/) - here's an example screenshot with the debug UI open (and the emulator integrated into a VSCode tab):

https://floooh.github.io/images/vscode-wasm-wasi-3.webp

There are a lot of advantages when you can tightly couple the UI with the guts of the emulator (e.g. everything in the UI automatically shows the current emulator state at full display refresh rate without having to worry about UI update and rendering performance or doing complicated "data binding", just point the UI to the memory locations of the "live data", and everything updates automatically).

PS: the Spectrum Analyzer is actually using emulators from that same 'chips project' (https://github.com/floooh/chips). Props for the shoutout :)

Here in the "sister project" there are some re-used windows from my debugger ui visible (https://colourclash.co.uk/cpc-analyser/), which I think is very cool because it shows how existing Dear ImGui code can be used as UI components (for instance I also re-used the hex editor from here: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui_club/tree/main/imgui_memory...)

gschizas• 2 years ago

Just one note: Please use UI scaling; it's near impossible to read on a 150% 4k screen (much less on 100%). Unfortunately, young eyes don't last forever.

The UI looks very much like ImHex (https://imhex.werwolv.net/). Is this a coincidence, or is it the standard ImGui look and feel?

I wish ImHex had a decompiler for Z80 as well, but this is much better.

flohofwoe3• 2 years ago

It's the vanilla ImGui color scheme.

TBH I never tried it with scaling, but at least here in Chrome on macOS, it actually works nicely with the browser's scale feature (e.g. Cmd-plus/minus):

https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64-ui.html

Actually a bit surprising because I don't handle the scaling explicitly anywhere.

PS: I also got "computer glasses" for that problem ;)

crabfists2• 2 years ago

It's not very well documented but if you put a font in the ./Fonts directory you can tell Spectrum Analyser to use it. If you edit the GlobalConfig.json you can put the font filename in the "Font" section. You can set the font size via the "FontSizePixels" entry. We can try to make this more obvious.

roydivision• 2 years ago

Really nice project, props to Sam!

crabfists2• 2 years ago

Hi, I'm the maintainer of the colourclash website for Spectrum Analyser. Unfortunately I hit a bandwidth limit so the site is currently available.

In the meantime, feel free to join our discord server for Spectrum Analyser and the other 8 bit analysers. You can download the latest PC build of Spectrum Analyser there on the #builds channel. https://discord.gg/VQ3m6W4ZRu

Or if you want to build your own, the github page is here: https://github.com/TheGoodDoktor/8BitAnalysers

I'm not the author of the tool. I'm just helping out TheDoktor. I'm also working on the CPC Analyser port.

Good to see this cool tool getting some attention!

Spectrum Analyser, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum reverse engineering tool

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