Load “Goblin” Press play, Good Luck!

It’s Saturday, and time to reveal Week 2 of my 52 Projects in 52 Weeks experiment.

A week ago, I had a pretty ridiculous idea. I’d recently bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 on eBay, and found a janky Jensen walkman at a local thrift store, partly to reconnect with the computer that first introduced me to the concept of programming more than 40 years ago.

Back then, I spent afternoons with my friend Bruce painstakingly typing BASIC programs from a magazine into his TS1000, hoping they’d work, and praying that the cassette recorder would actually save them.

Now that I owned one again, I wanted to start writing software for it. But I wasn’t particularly excited about spending weeks learning whatever obscure-ass version of BASIC this thing uses. Seriously, this machine doesn’t even have an exclamation point!

That made it a perfect candidate for my 52 Projects in 52 Weeks experiment. Could I use AI to save myself the time and energy of learning all the peculiarities of this ancient machine, and actually create something useful that actually runs on it.

And while I was at it, could I replace the cassette recorder with my iPhone? Better yet, could I build a website where a community of like-minded enthusiasts could find, create, and share software for these ancient little computers?

Four decades later, I wanted to see what thwe could accomplish with AI, a modern phone, and a machine with a whopping 16K of RAM.

If you’ve been following my daily posts, you know it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. Wrong cables, wrong jacks, an iPhone convinced I was trying to destroy my hearing, games that crashed, and a computer that was sometimes just taking its sweet damn time.

There was definitely a mischievous goblin at play, but it worked!

Introducing Load Goblin

LoadGoblin.com is a mobile-friendly website that turns your phone into a cassette player for vintage computers, beginning with the Timex Sinclair 1000.

Select a program, connect your phone to the computer’s EAR jack using the appropriate audio cables, type LOAD"" on your Timex Sinclair 1000, and press Play on the site.

The website plays the audio encoding of the program, just like an old cassette recorder. Except you don’t need the cassette recorder, or a box full of tapes.

Of course, a web-based player isn’t particularly useful without something to play.

So thwe built a library where you can discover programs, download them, maintain your own collection, and publish software you’ve created. Programs can include descriptions, screenshots, and version information.

I spent a surprising amount of time making the publishing experience something that actually wasn’t terrible to use.

And then I had to put my money where my mouth was.

Thwe created several programs, including Brick Goblin, a very questionable Breakout clone, GOBLIN 15, a sliding-tile puzzle featuring our grumpy mascot, and a recreation of my earliest act of software vandalism or onsite retail media, KMART SUCKS.

Getting those programs to run on the actual machine turned into my own little Lord of the Rings adventure. One obstacle after another, with plenty of moments when throwing the whole damn computer into Mount Doom seemed like the sensible option.

GOBLIN 15 the sliding tile game was particularly satisfying. All puzzles are solvable as we start by creating a random sequence of valid moves to scramble the tiles mathematically, then we render them in position. After solving the traditional number based puzzle, the computer (very slowly) draws the completed goblin picture on the screen. Only a lunatic would try the picture mode and the goblin setting (40 moves!)

I love it.

One last goblin in the machine

Naturally, launch day wasn’t going to be completely uneventful.

This morning, my WordPress app got chattier than I am, bombarding my hosting provider with who knows how many requests, resulting in a terrifying HTTP 429 Too Many Requests error.

Then I discovered I couldn’t access any of my websites from my home Wi-Fi. Uh oh!

The cause wasn’t entirely clear, but the workaround was simple enough. Connect my computer through my phone’s cellular hotspot and keep working while my home too many requests cooled down.

I had built a website that turned my phone into a cassette player for a computer from 1981, and now I needed that same phone to rescue me from the modern internet.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Now it’s your turn

What began as a way to avoid fiddling with cassette tapes has become something more interesting to me: the beginnings of a place where people who love these old computers can show off what they’ve created.

I want to see the clever games, bizarre experiments, and elegant little programs people can squeeze out of hardware that was obsolete decades ago. Maybe there will be ten different versions of Snake. I’d love to see what makes the eleventh special.

There’s plenty more I could build, including an emulator and a way to record programs back from the physical computer. But that’s for another day.

For now, the coming-soon screen is coming down.

Head over to LoadGoblin.com, explore the library, and give it a try. If you have a Timex Sinclair 1000 gathering dust somewhere, perhaps it’s time to dust it off. And if you’ve written something for one, I’d love to see it.

Please send me feedback. Tell me what works, what doesn’t, and what you wish it could do.

ChatGPT is telling me it’s time to stop for the night! Or at least 9:59pm…

Two weeks down. Fifty to go.