Sep 1, 2026, 9:41 PMOne silly way to reduce the load time of your game loading screen in the ZX Spectrum would be:
1. Figure out how many "on" pixels are in each 8x8 square.
2. If there are more "on" pixels than "off" pixels, invert the pixels in that square and swap its PAPER and INK values.
3. This reduces the time because "on" pixels are encoded as "1" and off pixels are encoded as "0", and (usually) "1" bit pulses are twice the length of "0" bit pulses (on tape).
Sep 1, 2026, 10:00 PMThis picture takes 50.72 seconds to load. It is the loading screen of the Erbe version of Arkanoid. Most of the pixels are on.
If I apply the transformation I mention, it only takes 34.13 seconds.
How is this useful? It isn't, probably.
Sep 1, 2026, 10:12 PM(Probably the best method is using a compressor, like ZX0, so it reduces the 6912 bytes a lot, and that'll be much faster...)
@FromTheFourthPlanet it's still an elegant little optimization and i love it for that
@FromTheFourthPlanet Even more uselessly, you could use this knowledge of the upper and lower bound to load time to cleverly choose which 8x8 squares to flip and by doing so set something very close to the load time of your choice within the given constraints.
Sep 1, 2026, 10:34 PM@conniptions Yeah, but shortest is better because it takes less space on tape :) I bet that would've meant some savings for the tape manufacturers.