Yeah me too in 1982, using the Melbourne House Z80 reference, aged a young 10 years old. Working with POKE and no macro-assembler, I wrote mnemonics then translated them to machine-code by hand. A baptism of fire that to this day that I've not forgotten.
I have my ZX-81 (with the 16KB expansion pack) and my ZX-Spectrum (with a microdrive). I think they're in working condition though they haven't been powered up like in 30+ years.
An interesting observation. It prompts the thought of how far away this simulator is from an actual ZX81, and how much it has been pulled away from a ZX81 by dint of training data where simulated retrocomputers of other types all boot into copyright messages. I wonder how often the spicy autocomplete engine tried to make it put up a "READY" or "OK" prompt.
One ZX81 clone actually did have a "READY" prompt, I read. Actual intelligence was doing the same in the 1980s. (-:
Almost none of the domain knowledge came from Claude. This is something I did by hand 40+ years ago (an assembler and a disassemble/debugger, which is in parts similar to the emulator)
This time it was almost as fun : 1/8 of the mental effort per line, x 8 the speed.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 43.4 ms ] threadThis book was the ignition that changed my life... https://archive.org/details/z-80-reference-guide-alan-tullya...
One ZX81 clone actually did have a "READY" prompt, I read. Actual intelligence was doing the same in the 1980s. (-:
This time it was almost as fun : 1/8 of the mental effort per line, x 8 the speed.
We did something similar for the Apple II, to compile Merlin assembly into a running emulator instance:
https://paleotronic.com/merlinplus/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spectrumnext/zx-spectru...