Your weekend task, should you accept it

Procrastinating aged nerds of the world, unite! After literally minutes scouring the literal powerhouse of computing excellence that literally is comp.sys.sinclair (current hot topic - "Why do Spectrum users have tapeworms?"), I have found a challenge worthy of the best of you.

I speak of none other than the ZX81 Graphic Competition 2007. Challenging indeed, given that the mighty ZX81 has a graphics resolution of 64x48 pixels, each of which can be either on or off - I'm sure I've used fonts where the full stop was higher resolution than that. Furthermore, it's not just a matter of doodling your meisterwork on a piece of graph paper: you have to write a program that draws it.

"But I'm not one of those blessed with a genuine working ZX81!" , you may say. Off to eBay with you, scamp: there's no excuse for that state of affairs these days. But while you're waiting the competition website has links to a selection of emulators, so you can get cracking the while - and there is a certain pleasure in making your quad-core 2GHz megamachine pretend to be a Z80 running at 3.54MHz in a 1K sea of memory.

Don't just sit there like a BBC Micro user! Get cracking!