Matthew Westcott has a rad hack for Podzilla, he writes – “For those who don’t know, the ZX Spectrum was a 1980s home computer (very popular in the UK) for which software was commonly distributed on ordinary audio cassettes. These would contain several minutes of modem-like beeps and squeals that would assemble themselves into programs when played into the computer.
TZX is a file format for storing virtual images of these tapes, primarily for use with emulators – World Of Spectrum has thousands of them available for download. You could think of them as highly specialised, compressed audio files (typically under 50K for a complete Spectrum game) – and that’s exactly what this Podzilla patch does. It adds .tzx as another audio file format playable from the file browser. (The code is heavily derived from the existing WAV playback code.)
So, in short, you can now hook up your iPod to your Spectrum, just as you would hook up a cassette recorder, and load games from it. One iPod will comfortably hold every Spectrum game ever published. Neat huh?
Unfortunately it isn’t really tested yet – still waiting for 4g audio support for that – and while my desktop build successfully produces output that sounds like Spectrum loading data, I haven’t actually tried hooking it up yet. Also, it doesn’t currently support all the obscure features of the .tzx format.
All in all, I suspect it’s a bit obscure to become a core Podzilla feature, but I hope someone will find it useful!” [via] – Link.
Related:
iPod Linux how-tos, hacks, projects and more @ MAKE – Link.
From the pages of MAKE:
- Mod Your Pod – Enhance your iPod with a Linux upgrade. MAKE 02 – Page 135. Subscribers–read this article now in your digital edition!
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