ZX Spectrum BASIC Challenges

Recently I've entered a few of the programming challenges in the BASIC on the ZX Spectrum group on Facebook. They vary in difficultly but it's possible to write a program for most in under 30 minutes. If you're looking for a quick challenge or the opportunity to improve you BASIC, why not take a look.

Here are some examples of the challenges:

Earth/Venus Orbits

David Saphier challenged us to write the fastest code to display the Earth and Venus orbit pattern in BASIC. Being a bit of a rebel I aimed to write the shortest code and managed to completely botch it before coming up with this working version:

Grid

Matthew Logue asked us recreate a grid-like pattern with the shortest code. Surprisingly I actually managed to discover the smallest program:

Weaving

‎Uwe Geiken challenged us to recreate a pattern of weaving attributes. I found this one pretty tricky to reduce in size, but finally got it down to 109 bytes:

Flag

Matthew Logue asked for the shortest code to recreate a 31×21 attribute flag-like pattern. Uwe Geiken solved this is 67 bytes, easily beating my 74:

Rudimentary Gear

Matthew Logue challenged us again, this time to draw a rudimentary gear with 10 teeth and a circular radius. Here's what I came up with: