All the Colours We Have (for Paul Carter)

Paul Carter — Scottish artist and good friend — died ten years ago today. We grew up together, and this is part of my memorial for him.

When Paul's family got their first computer, he found that the Sinclair ZX Spectrum's limited palette wasn't enough. The text in this installation — “How can I get more colours?” — is what I remember him asking me.

medium: Sinclair BASIC, Z80 assembly language.

description: an emulated ZX Spectrum home computer is embedded in this web page. The screen, initially white text on a black background, is mostly filled with question marks except for a box in the centre that reads How can I get more colours? - Paul Carter. A program then runs in an infinite loop replacing the colours of each character cell randomly with all the colours available in the computer's palette. The original text remains despite the colour changes.

Blog post with more information: All the Colours We Have (for Paul Carter), YouTube demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frRJIcFK8Og

Code

You can load this on your own ZX Spectrum: for_paul-2016.tzx.

— Stewart C. Russell, 2016-08-12.

Paul Carter
1970–2006
miss you, buddy