Dead Flesh Retro

29/06/2025

Don’t see these very often!

A Rowtron 2000.

I believe it was the only MPT-03 clone sold in the U.K. Hanimex cloned the Emerson architecture and Rowtron cloned the MTP-03 design.

This one’s fully working but needs tlc. I also need it to diagnose a broken one!

Love these old Signetics machines. 🎉

31/03/2025

We're starting a new game this evening, over at the Hit it with a Hammer youtube channel!!

The Big Sleaze by Fergus McNeill, a classic ZX Spectrum satirical adventure, published by Delta4 and Piranha in 1987. Let's hope it's still funny after all these years!!

We'll be on from 7pm BST, tonight! 🙌

Our little band of adventurers play classic text adventures most Monday evenings, and stream them here for people to enjoy, participate in, and catch up with...

16/03/2025

I've been a bit quiet on here recently, as I've been spending time on our live YouTube Text Adventure playthroughs at Hit It With A Hammer, however I do now have something to report:

It's super-niche, but I've successfully reconstructed a complete microdrive version of the Tasword 3 word processor, with all example docs & utilities!

You can see the application's ReadMe file loaded into the applciation and the full file catalogue in the attached screenshots.

Everything works: T2T3 to convert version 2 docs to version 3; and the MF and TM programmes that modify Masterfile v09 to produce Tasword 3 compatible data merge files. I've tested the mail merge features and it all works - it's impressively feature-rich actually.

And in addition to figuring out how it all works, which versions of what work on a 48K Spectrum, and how to transfer from .opd and .tzx to .mdr, I also discovered something about writing ultra-memory-efficient BASIC...

Both Tasword and Masterfile were desendents of applications & ZX81 programmers use a lot of tricks to save RAM - in particular using mathematical operators instead of numbers for common integers!

Just check out the code in the 3rd screenshot, which is from the Tasword 3 BASIC loader! On the ZX81 and Spectrum, all numbers are held in RAM as 5 byte floating point numbers, even if they are only ever integers - there is no strong typing in Sinclair BASIC. But many mathematical operators are handled by the ULA (Universal Logic Array) and can be addressed with just one byte.

So for example if you want to return control back to the beginning of the programme, it's 'cheaper' to GO TO SGN PI (which is TRUE if PI is a positive number), than it is to simply GOTO 1!

03/03/2025

The Hit it with a Hammer crew is back on Counterfeit Monkey from 7pm GMT this evening! We've beefed up our letter remover and compiled a veritable arsenal of potential examples of homonym shame - game on!!

https://youtube.com/live/VmLa66ly7gA?feature=share

(And if the above makes no sense to you, by all means watch the previous ten hours of gameplay we've streamed! 😜)

Our little band of adventurers play classic text adventures most Monday evenings, and stream them here for people to enjoy, participate in, and catch up with...

16/02/2025

Our "Hit It With A Hammer!" collaborative text adventure gaming project is being featured in this month's Pixel Addict magazine!!

How cool is that! Thanks so much Lee Oades for making this happen, and thanks to all the HiwaH players Svandis Sigjonsdottir, Rosie Dymond, Chris Dymond, Mike Dymond and Wood

Pixel Addict magazine latest issue

22/12/2024

Really looking forward to this!!

Counterfeit Monkey is a complex game, but a couple of hours in we're starting to figure out what's going on - catch up with previous episodes or join it live tomorrow night, you don't need to have watched from the beginning :)

Our little band of adventurers play classic text adventures most Monday evenings, and stream them here for people to enjoy, participate in, and catch up with...

16/12/2024

We're continuing our classic text adventure and interactive fiction playthroughs on a new YouTube channel called "Hit it with a Hammer!", which is dedicated to those weekly livestreams. With any luck I'll then be able to do more repair and coding content here at DFR next year! :)

In the meantime, to watch our playthroughs, (and even join in!) please go to Hit it with a Hammer! and subscribe!

Our little band of adventurers play classic text adventures most Monday evenings, and stream them here for people to enjoy, participate in, and catch up with...

22/09/2024

We kicked off season two of our livestreamed collaborative classic text adventure play throughs a couple of weeks ago, and we're continuing the experience tomorrow evening, from 7pm UK time.
This time we're exploring Ballyhoo by Infocom & hoping it's an underrated gem! 🙏😂

Our little band of adventurers play classic text adventures most Monday evenings, and stream them here for people to enjoy, particupate and for live players ...

18/08/2024

Hi folks!

Well, after four months and 15 episodes, our experiment in playing through Magnetic Scrolls’ Fish! from scratch, collaboratively online via live stream, with novice players, and then converting it into a regular audio-only podcast, has come to a conclusion!

And it’s been bloody good fun!!

We’re definitely going to run another game, but probably won’t be producing a podcast as it’s really a lot of extra effort.

I think we’ve definitely shown that it’s possible though, and that it makes for an enjoyable listening experience - thanks so much to anyone who’s been listening and/or watching along over the last four months!

You can check out the whole podcast playlist at the attached here, and there’s a bonus chat between me and Lee at the end of the final episode where we discuss the whole effort and what the experience has been like for us 🙂

It’s certainly brought us closer together as friends, especially as we now live so far apart from each other, but more than that, it’s given us a deep appreciation for just how good this game was and still is! ❤️🐠

We can’t wait for the next one!!

Podcast · [object Object] · This is a little experiment in live collaborative text adventure playing - we're going to see if it's possible to play some classic and significant adventures together, starting with Magnetic Scrolls' Fish! We aim to play these sessions every Monday evening and live str...

08/06/2024

For the last two months, we've been livestreaming a collaborative playthrough of the 1988 game "Fish!" by Magnetic Scrolls. This has been an experiment to see whether it's possible to play it in public this way, with players some of whom have ever played a text adventure before, and whether we can also produce it as a regular audio-only podcast.

After 7 episodes it's turned out to be *really* good fun, and has become something we all look forward to playing on a Monday evening.
So I thought it was time to do an update on what we're trying to achieve, how we're doing it and how other people can get involved :)

Part one if this update is now on our (extremely new and evolving) website:

This is part 1 of an update on a little experiment I am running with a few friends and family members, to see if it's possible to collaborative play a classic text adventure game online and in public, and keep it fun and inclusive while we do so.

05/06/2024

I’m almost dizzy with excitement to be participating in MendIt Mark’s workshops next week! He’s the G.O.A.T. of vintage electronics repair channels on YouTube, in my book, especially old high end audio equipment.

I love that he’s doing this!

Mend It Mark Workshop Sales Page

03/05/2024

The 3rd episode of our collaborative playthrough of the classic Fish! by Magnetic Scrolls is now out.

A few friends & family get together each week to play for an hour, which we stream live to YouTube and then edit into a 40-50 minute audio podcast.

It's a bit of an experiment to see whether this works as an audio-only experience, but I've spend a lot of time editing it so it hopefully doesn't drag and I'd really love to know what people think of it :)

Listen to DFR Plays Fish! by Magnetic Scrolls on Spotify. This is a little experiment in live collaborative text adventure playing - we're going to see if it's possible to play some classic and significant adventures together, starting with Magnetic Scrolls' Fish! We aim to play these sessions every...