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I still have my zx-81, it powers up but the keyboard membrane is long gone. Learnt z80 assembly on it. Good times.
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.

This book was the ignition that changed my life... https://archive.org/details/z-80-reference-guide-alan-tullya...

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.
ZX Renew sells replacement membranes for £12 if you want to get it in working order.
The ZX81 did not have a copyright on boot.
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.

true - it's an homage to the zx81, ts1000, spectrum and ts2068
Cool stuff! My first computer was the Timex Sinclair 1000 (when I was 6). Good times!

We did something similar for the Apple II, to compile Merlin assembly into a running emulator instance:

https://paleotronic.com/merlinplus/

Looks nice, however on laptop screens not all buttons are visible, it took a while to discover I could scroll to find "Assemble and Run".
Can you say what parts Claude was used for to speed this up?
Fast / slow mode breaks “Space Invader” by the way.
if by break you mean you can't see the action, that's by design :) otherwise, pls let me know.
Good stuff. I still have my ZX-Spectrum and working fine. Impressive the value that those machines provided for the time