#Sharptember A chance find amongst a bunch of tapes I won in an auction turned up something pretty interesting, a compilation tape of games written by Col Needham (the inventor of IMDb) and possibly his master tape from which he sold his mail order games. Here's his game "UFO Attack".

#Sharptember If you replace the CG-ROM file in the emulator with the Japanese one you can play Japanese MZ games with the correct graphics showing. Here's a bit of Namco's Galaxian demonstrating the much coveted single pixel graphic character that was not available in the western ROM.

#Sharptember The popular "Greedy Gremlins" game, this time for the MZ-80A. I recently rescued this from an official Knights tape - I don't think I realised there was an MZ-80A version until now! It makes use of the 80A's inverse display quite a lot.

#Sharptember One of the more popular assembler environments on the MZ was Avalon's program Zen. It's a simple line editor and here I show a few of the commands. E to enter lines of code. P which prints x number of lines of the program and T to target a line of the program. /1

#Sharptember So what makes the MZ-80A a bit unique amongst the other MZs available in the West? Well, it had double the VRAM. This meant, unlike other 8-bit computers, you could scroll the screen up and down as you can see in the video. Lines of BASIC could come back onto the screen! /1

#Sharptember ! And here is a small bit of gameplay from the excellent adventure game Ropoko for the MZ-700, the English language version which will be available later this year. It's a tricky puzzle adventure with some bold big sprites and graphics that will keep you entertained for quite some time!

My entry for the recent 'BASIC Card Game Jam' on itch.io was a reasonably accurate simulation of 2-player UNO. Here's a video which shows some of it working. I still have some improvements to make though but will release for download eventually. It also works better in the BASIC compiler :D