[cesaref]

Yeah, with those early machines it was inevitably about lookup tables, and producing the illusion of doing work which was otherwise impossible in the number of cpu cycles you had available. I did lots of this sort of thing for the C64, where similarly CPU cycles were short, and then you end up scratching around trying to find enough spare memory...

It's great to see people still exploring and pushing the boundaries of what these machines are capable of. Coding this on a more modern machine, getting the effect right, then back-porting to the Spectrum seems like a smart move and would have been a game changer during the prime of these machines!

[bzzzt]

Lots of commercial Spectrum games were coded on a 'more modern' machine, often an IBM PC with a better keyboard and a cross assembler to generate Z80 code.