Old Computer Challenge – Modern Web for the ZX Spectrum

Summary

Old Computer Challenge - Modern web for the ZX Spectrum 2025/10/19 Table of contents # Last year I participated in the OCC challenge and between work and personal life I totally forgot about it, luckily I saw a post online of someone doing the challenge and remembered about it. I didn’t want to miss this year challenge as it was fun learning something new last year, so hopefully its not too late. This years challenge it was a DIY, you could create your own OCC challenge. So I thought it’d be fun to try to recreate a website and navigation for the ZX Spectrum using BASIC and the limited graphics capabilities of the computer. Hardware # Well, in this case the hardware is the ZX Spectrum, though I must say that I used an emulator (Fuse) to test and run my code. Limitations # The ZX Spectrum image resolution is 256x192 pixels, so the space is very limited. The colour palette is made up of 8 colors, with a “brighter” variation. With this in mind I had to design a website for the ZX Spectrum and how you’d navigate with it. Challenge # So given the hardware and limitations I thought that I’d first do Google, since they have a simple design and is I’d say well known by everyone. Google # The image below, is what Googles homepage would look like. You’d access their services listed by pressing the first letter of that service, in case there is more than 1 with the same letter you’d use another letter or simply add a second page of services. In this case you can access Search by pressing “S”. It will simply prompt for your search and in this case I searched for “How to run LLM on a microprocessor” and you’d navigate through the different results by going pressing “w” (up) or “s” (down). Hacker news # Hacker news is text heavy content, so it makes it “easy” to design it for the ZX Spectrum as its graphics capabilities are kinda limited. As you can see, you’ll be able to see your username and the amount of points you have in the top bar and in this case I decided that navigation...