ZX80 & the Dawn of 'Surreal' UK Game Industry | Hacker News Reader

ZX80 & the Dawn of 'Surreal' UK Game Industry

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I started with a ZX81, and wrote and sold (one copy!) of a... Xevious clone, called "ZXevious". Perfect name, heh? All assembly, cross-compiled from another machine, many simultaneous objects on screen, and I even emulated (or tried to) the brand new Macintosh interface that had just come out, in the "GUI" for selecting the keyboard layout.

The ZX81 BASIC (and "OS", such as it was) was written by Steve Vickers, and everything fitted into an 8K ROM. I have always been impressed by this guy's work. The whole unit had only 4 chips (ROM, RAM, CPU and a custom chip). Scroll done for a photo: http://oldcomputers.net/zx81.html

Steve Vickers went on to create the Jupiter Ace (with the main ZX81 hardware guy), which had similar hardware, but instead of BASIC, it had Forth.

I really wanted a Jupiter Ace, but had to do with the Sinclair and Apple devices at school. I had read a bit about Forth and thought it sounded rather cool.

I've been fascinated by RPN languages ever since - even managing to have great fun doing interactive PostScript development on slightly more expensive kit.

I had an Oric-1 in those days, but really wanted a Jupiter Ace as well .. there was something so sexy about that machine, for some reason.

Here's your chance:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Jupiter-Ace-Computer-/290440498106?cmd...

I have to say that it doesn't look quite as interesting as it did when I was 16.

I had similar feelings of lust. A couple of years ago I satisfied them by pulling the rom binaries off the web and writing a z80 emulator (in python) that could run them. Conclusion: a) don't expect to write fast cpu emulators in python. b) the jupiter ace failed because the hardware missed the boat. It was basically a zx81 running Forth, released at a time when the zx spectrum was wowing everybody with its color. It's probably the case that the use of Forth didn't give it any great advantages over BASIC given that the underlying machine was so incapable.

Forth claimed to be 5 times faster than BASIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace

Everyone went to assembly if they wanted speed. I think Forth requires more thinking than BASIC (at least, of a mathematically flexible kind).

I'm a huge fan of Xevious and have it on my Pandora gaming console as a stock-standard go-to for when I need to shoot something.

I'd love to see ZXevious - any chance you've still got a copy somewhere? We Pandora fanboix have lots of emulators in our pockets these days ..

Thanks! Unfortunately, I have no idea where it is (and it would be on tape... transferring that would be another issue). I have fond memories of it - but of the writing, not the playing. :-)

I also started with a ZX81, I still have all the docs that came with it, the ZX81 got binned while I was away at University to my horror. I used to play 3D Monster Maze on it all the time.

> The whole unit had only 4 chips (ROM, RAM, CPU and a custom chip).

It always amazes me why would anyone need more than that. Well... Memory could be an exception - a single memory chip is limiting - but the rest is doable.

PCs are ugly overcomplicated things.

Well, the C64 for instance had complicated enough video and sound to warrant separate devices, plus a bunch of peripheral ports (joysticks, etc) and then you need address decoding logic to support all of that. It all depends how much of it you can bundle up into your "custom chip". The first Apple had no custom chips and generated video and sound with extremely clever arrangements of standard logic gates.

The later incarnations of the C64 had a much reduced chip-count in relation to the first ones.

http://www.commodore.ca/products/c64/commodore_64_motherboar... and http://www.commodore.ca/gallery/hardware/c65.jpg

Even if you don't get to 4 chips, a simple and elegant design is very desirable. And, in the case of PCs, quite impossible.

And as history shows, doesn't matter much - users don't care how many chips are in their computers.

It just has to be cheap and run the software they want to use.

Engineers like me care.

I find it disturbing that my computer has, somewhere inside its sleek and modern body, a complete IBM 5150, with its ISA bus, serial ports, real-time clock, keyboard micro-controller (with that horrendous A20 hack so that the 286 it can emulate can switch between user and whatever mode OS/2 1.0 would need to run) and CGA display adapter ready to boot up PC-DOS from something it thinks is an MFM hard disk. The only thing missing is Microsoft's BASIC burned in ROM.

It's offensive. Really.

I have a collection of 80's and 90's computers. No computer in the collection is as inelegant as the IBM PC and its clones. Many of them (original Mac, Apple II - despite the chip count - Ataris) are absolute works of art. Sheer elegance in their simplicity.

You might want to have a special ship for graphics processing, if you are doing lots of it.

Those in the UK should keep an eye out for re-runs of Micro Men, which tells the story of Sinclair vs Acorn in the 1980s. Brilliant television: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92

That looks pretty hilarious! I've seen more realistic hair on Action Men than on the actor playing Sir Clive :)

It's on YouTube for those wanting to take a peek: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y8IkcUGV9w

Oddly enough, this BBC production seems to put the people who were behind the BBC micro in a far better light than Sinclair - who is presented as a caricature of an evil scientist. I can't imagine he was really like that. Very funny though.

Ever wondered why Dundee in Scotland has a lot of game companies? In the 80's Timex made the Spectrum there, so all the local kids ended up with the machines thanks to (sometimes ahem 'unofficial') employee discounts.

So you have Clive Sinclair to thank for both Lemmings and GTA!

One of my friend had the ZX-81 with about every option under the sun: 64K extension, color display extension, microdrive, floppy drive, mechanical keyboard, joystick extension port, serial extension port, printer. It was hilarious to see, the tiny ZX in the middle of a huge heap of devices of all forms and colors. Plus at the slightest bump to the table the whole setup would crash or reset... :)

Oh the memories of Chuckie Egg, R-Type, Daley Thompson Decathlon, etc....

My first computer was also a Sinclair ZX-80. My father had bought it, believing that he might be able to use it to organize his company accounts. When he discovered that it was useless for such a purpose he gave it to me as a toy, and the rest as they say is history.

Everytime someone mentions the a Sinclair and accounts, I always think of Hey Hey 16k - http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

The home computers of the early 1980s were more curiosities than utilitarian devices, although spreadsheets and word processors did begin to emerge at that time.

The practical difficulties such as very restricted memory (the ZX-80 had < 1kB of usable RAM), unreliable cassette tape drives, long loading/saving times and non-ergonomic keyboards meant that even the most dedicated business user would struggle to use them for any serious purpose.

I just played a C64 game written in 2009, Knight 'n' Grail. The interesting thing is it's the first game I'd played to completion in 8 years. So I can't say it's me that's the problem (and not the modern games), it's that modern games suck.

I was a little unclear. Knight 'n' Grail is a game done in the style of a 1985 arcade adventure platformer - like the BBC's Citadel. I used to love playing games like that. My point is that apart from Ultima Online - which I got bored of - I haven't liked any PC or console game, even platformers.

So is it that modern games suck, or that I'm too used to the game of the 80s? I don't know, but I know it'll be a while till I find another game as good as Knight 'n' Grail.

To each his own.

I would much rather play Half Life 2: Episode 3 or Starcraft 2 to Pacman or Joust (my first computer was a 1986 vintage PC XT clone, so it's not that I'm not aware of the old games).

Growing up with the ZX Spectrum this article was a really interesting read. I never questioned toilets as enemies when I was 7 years old, but I do now =)

If my X360 had more surrealism and toilet-based enemies I'd probably actually play it instead of leaving it gathering dust.

Perhaps this is because these general-purpose computers were an open platform, while modern videogames like X360 (and iPhone, for that matter) are closed platforms. The open approach lends a lot more space to hobbyists, who I think are more prone to whimsy.

My first computer, ZX-80 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/268165912

Thankfully, the days of surreal games are here again, the form of homebrew .. see "Pandora Panic!" for example, one of the first homebrew games for the Open Pandora gaming console .. http://open-pandora.org/

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