ZX Spectrum 25 Years Old This Month

LOAD " ", RUN

Check out the video for some groovy Manic Miner action and crazy cassette loading sounds.

This was my first ever computer. ZX Spectrum plus with space invaders! Spent hours on it instead of studying. Hence ending up working for bloody Connexions!

Was in the Commodore 64 camp meself....

Computers back then were cool. Many a fun Saturday where we got the ones in Comet to scroll Fanny, Tits or similar down the screen before discreetly leaving.

I don't care I had, well still have my fully functioning Vic 20 with tape drive.

My second machine after a ZX81.

All hail sir Clive....even if he was ginger and consequently smelled of piss and biscuits.

You are aware that you can run speccy games on a PC?

I often still play with miner willy :D

Only thing is, cos Macroshaft are involved, it takes a 1GHz+ PC to emulate a 4MHz Speccy. Does work a treat though. I have emulators for every machine u can image, even the flamin Dragon32!!

Not tricky, load emulator, load game, hit "run".

LOL....took me YEARS to get used to typing my own stuff after all Sir Clives shift-extended-this and ctrl-shift-the-other.

wasnt is L shift O " ",8

bring back my 1541 disk drive, actually think i still have it.

Elegia wrote: wasnt is L shift O " ",8

bring back my 1541 disk drive, actually think i still have it.

Close, but LOAD was, logically enough, on J.

So J ""

Unless I missed your meaning of course.

yeah u could be correct, i was actually thinking of my Commodore 64..RIP :)

Elegia wrote: yeah u could be correct, i was actually thinking of my Commodore 64..RIP :)

Burn in 6502 hell Commodorian scum

I swear it was those rubbery keys that have kept my fingertips so smooth, silky and sensual. I get comments about them all the time. Only yesterday I was asked by a middle-aged man on the bus if I would stroke the tip of his cock with my lovely fingertips

Thank you, Sir Clive Sinclair.

Doctor? wrote: I often still play with miner willy :D

I don't care what you call it, we don't need to know about it! Some things are best left private

It was bigger than Xbox v Playstation.....Spectrum v Commodore 64.

While the C64 boasted its own cassette player, multi-track sound and better definition in graphics the Spectrum made up for with better playability of games and strange querks.

Spent many an hour playing hundreds of games.

Ghost n Goblins Alcatraz Harry 1942 Attic Attack Match Of The Day Blockbusters Jetpac Kokatoni Wolf Daly Thompsons Decathlon Green Beret Horace Goes Skiing etc, etc

I dont think you get the same fun factor with computers nowadays (although you do get slightly better graphics). Nostalga...ah a dangerous thing.

sorry, c64 for me , cool sounds you have to pay nearly £600.00 for these days!,(electron sidstation)

Got a TRS-80 color in the 80's. Good times...

Nah, no way, that was shit. 5 fucking minutes to load a 5 kb game on tape

Surprised if any ZX has lasted 25 minutes.Used to sell them years ago before I joined the Post Office.The keyboard cover used to bend upwards like those bi-metal strips they had in Physics,which bend with heat.We sold Commodore 64s and ORIC,which was okay,but hardly had any games. No one could get near the demo models,because it turned into a free arcade when the kids came out of school!

My first comp as well... Fantasy World Dizzy still rocks my socks.

knock yerselves out

If you need a particular game you cannot find to download, lemme know, I have em all probably.

Doctor? wrote: My second machine after a ZX81.

quote]

Same here too... Ah... How I miss the feel of moist rubber!

The Speccy had some great games, though for every good game their were probably another thousand shit ones

Daley Thompson Track & Field is still fucking excellent though

old lead foot wrote: sorry, c64 for me , cool sounds you have to pay nearly £600.00 for these days!,(electron sidstation)

Meant to say, there are several virtual instruments, free ones, that are based on SID type noises. You're welcome to em, bloody Yamaha FM based racket, horrid, just horrid

3.5 MHZ.....so my PC is 1000 times faster.

48KB, so my PC is 20,000 times better.

And yet games still take the same time to install (loading from tape to volitile RAM is the same as copying to non-volitile disk), and many of them run just as slowly, and most of them are shit to play just like back in the day.

We've traded "looks bad and runs fairly welll" for "looks great and runs like treacle on a January morning"

Progress?

Well, I was thinking about this earlier.....I currently get pissed off if my PC and it's video card (I just got the 2nd fastest AGP card ever made, and it can OC to beat the fastest), if they fail to do,30 times a second, that which took my Atari over a day to do once. (ie, a ray traced 3d frame....20-40 hours on the Atari, 20-50ms on the PC). Yet it still takes as long to run a word processor

never had a spectrum, had a trs80 though. Overclocked it from 1.77Mhz to 2.66Mhz. Didn't even need a heatsink, yet alone a fan, unlike my current machine which sounds like a helicopter taking off.

Talking of sad geeky things, has anyone seen 'Sunshine'? That has to have the only dramatic sequence about CPU cooling ever filmed.

Doctor? wrote:

old lead foot wrote: sorry, c64 for me , cool sounds you have to pay nearly £600.00 for these days!,(electron sidstation)

Meant to say, there are several virtual instruments, free ones, that are based on SID type noises. You're welcome to em, bloody Yamaha FM based racket, horrid, just horrid

clangy fizzy gorgeosness, you do realise that half of new orders songs contain there fair share of FM synthesis, along with every other form of synthesis, was once at steves farm/studio and behind one of the old backdrops from the regret tour in his barn is every synth ever made by anyone ever, floor to ceiling

I'm well aware of New Order's flirtations with Yamaha gear, but try not to hold it against them ;)

Still got an Atari in the loft - must dig it out and see if it loads up pacman.