The 3rd piece in the collection uses my original 2020 pixel art piece, 'Alien', enlarged to a 64x64 canvas, tweaked and embellished as a game loading screen.

The 80s ZX Spectrum 8-Bit home computer had raster bars hard coded into its ROM to indicate when data was loading correctly from a cassette tape. The software was encoded on the tape as a series of pulses of varying widths that represented binary 0s and 1s.

The slower red and cyan bars indicated that the computer was searching for data, whereas the thinner blue and yellow bars showed when header and data blocks were loading into the memory at around 160 bytes per second.

Over the years of the ZX Spectrum's life, various data encoding tricks/speeds were used in an attempt to combat piracy that altered the output of the raster bars, but which frequently only led to ether the black screen of death, or a messed-up and flashing loading page with pixels in all the wrong places. Coupled with the possibility of tripping over the power cable, loading a game was a precarious job that needed almost military precision (not really, but you get the idea).

The works in this collection are entirely made within a pixel editor frame-by-frame and then animated to create the desired effect.