Ready to ZXpand
My mini TV has arrived and with a bit of fine-tuning we're in business:
However, the quality is pretty poor. I can only get a clear display if I stand up to the right of the machine and hold onto the UHF cable, which it makes it pretty hard to key stuff in 8-( The Sony TV remote makes a great monitor riser though.
Better news on the saving/loading front though. You can see
what looks like an uncased RAM pack on the rear of the ZX81. I really couldn't face the prospect of using a retro tape recorder so managed to source a ZXpand unit. This is a great piece of kit, containing a 32K RAM expansion and an SD card reader. With a 512Mb card in there I probably couldn't ever find (let alone write) enough code to fill it.
I was concerned at first that it wasn't going to work but it turned out that the expansion connector contacts were corroded and needed a gentle clean up before it would boot up.
Saving my test code took about a second and loading a simple game took about the same so this is going to make life much easier.
The ZXpand board came from www.sellmyretro.com, courtesy of Rich Mellor (www.rwapsoftware.co.uk).
Better think of something to code now...