The ZX Spectrum Reverse Engineering and Clone Desgin Blog

Harlequin

A site dedicated to the reverse engineering of the ZX Spectrum and related projects.

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Video - Research

Feb 04, 2007

Being a former ZX Spectrum games programmer I am already aware of the screen byte address to attribute byte address manipulation, floating bus behaviour, video memory contention and screen line timings with respect to the interupt. So I have no real surprises there.Even so, it has been a long time since I used this knowledge, so it's going to be sketchy at best!

The great thing is all of this information is documented at World of Spectrum, so very little original research needs to be done other than collating from on line resources.

Video summary

The ZX Spectrum has a display of 192 lines by 256 pixels (or 32 bytes). To the left and right of this displaty rectangle is a border 48 pixels wide.

The number of border lines before and after the display rectangle can be calculated by knowing that the PAL video display is based on a 625 line at 50 fields/25 frames a second (50HZ). For television transmissions the signal contains two interlaced frames composed of 312 lines each. Computer display does not use interlaced frames because you get a visible vertical judder everytime the frames swap. Thus a single frame PAL picture contains 312 lines.

It is a well documented fact that the ZX Spectrum CPU Interrupt is generated when the TV electron beam is in vertical fly-back. Knowing this and timing the number of CPU T-States that have elapsed between the interrupt and the electron beam scan of the first video display line reveals 64 lines have passed. The number of lines used for the lower border are therefore 312 - 192 - 64 = 56

A time taken for a single display row has been measured at 224 T-States by the above analysis.

Thus a complete frame takes 312 x 224 T-States = 69,888 T per frame. At 3.5MHz, 1 frame will take 0.019968 seconds. 50 frames takes 0.019968 x 50 = 0.9984 seconds. This is a little under the expected 1 second for 50 frames due to the fact that each frame should really be 625 / 2 = 312.5 lines (the half line allows each frame to be offset from the other when interlacing), and explains why a clock program running on a ZX Spectrum will run a little fast.