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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

How did this compare to the Commodore 64? A few of the details are similar it sounds like, (instant-on, a small comprehensible system although with a bunch of add-ons). I guess the c64 wasn't as cheap.

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Price! C64 cost £399 at launch, while the top of the line Spectrum was £175 (and there was a cut-down model for £125). In today's prices it's around $500/700 for the Spectrum vs $1600 for the Commodore. And the UK was considerably poorer than the US in the early 80s too. The Commodore certainly did more, but entry price really mattered.

[All prices from Wikipedia]

Thanks, I couldn't find a usd dollar amount for the spectrum. I did know the c64 cost $1600 in today's prices (that's a good self-built pc today, not quite gamer specs but still decent)

c64 famously had its price cut very aggressively multiple time shortly after introduction, as commodore tried to drive texas instruments out of the home computing market (they succeeded, with atari and the rest of the industry becoming collateral damage). I believe not even a year later it cost half as much.

The Spectrum wasn't released in the US. However, the semi-compatible Timex-Sinclair 2068 mentioned by others was. It was quite cheap, selling for under $200 in 1983 (about $570 today). However, it got very little support and software in the US and so it didn't do well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068

Sinclair had terrible keyboards too. C64 had pretty good keyboards for the day.

The Commodore's was a bit mushy compared to the Atari 800.

But they both absolutely crushed the quality of almost any keyboard you get on a computer today.

Very similar. The C64 hardware was better, with a dedicated audio chip, better color and (IIRC) hardware blit support for sprites. Much better keyboard, too.

But it was double the price, putting it out of reach for many more families than the Spectrum. This made a kind of critical mass that lead to a huge community around the spectrum in the UK. And a fantastic burst of creativity as the barrier to entry to writing video games dropped as low as it would ever get.

The c64's sprites were not blitted, they were rendered entirely by the video chip in a separate path from the character/bitmap display.

Even better, with no need to undraw them, and dedicated support for collision detection. Nice.

Similar to the Atari's. And they both offered redefinable character sets and fine scrolling, which allowed you to create giant scrolling maps and backgrounds as screenfuls of characters requiring very little memory.

The C64 was much more game-ready out of the box, with a joystick port, an excellent sound chip and hardware sprites. Also I think the C64 had a decent disk drive available at launch, which the Spectrum never really got one of.

Perhaps the best thing about the Spectrum was that the manual, which documented the built in BASIC programming language and also the Z80 asm opcodes.

Edit: I should probably steer clear of culture war topics but let's be honest - the designers cut every corner they could think of and consequently the Spectrum looked and sounded atrocious compared to the luxurious C64. But I probably do owe my tech career to one.

Yes, the C64 was more expensive (at least early on, when the exchange rate was not in its favour), but also, Sinclair's BASIC enabled use of all the graphics and sound features - even if they weren't as sophisticated as the C64, they were at least accessible without PEEKs and POKEs.

The C64's BASIC really frustrated me as a kid. Now I understand there were license and "being a cheapskate" issues regarding the lack of a newer BASIC version, but imagine the even bigger impact the C64 would have had if most of its features had been available via advanced BASIC statements other than PEEK and POKE.

The 6K VRAM + <1K attribute memory allowed for fast scrolling for games like Rastan and R-Type and fast animation for simulation games.

Closer to the VIC-20, which was $250 IIRC.

Everyone but ZX Spectrum owners understood that the C64 was superior in every way imaginable.

The Speccy owners tried to prove otherwise during countless arguments in the schoolyard, but deep down they knew.

I had both, speccy first and then a C64 later

I used the C64 only for games, and the spectrum for my own programs and the odd top game

and yes I was on both sides in the playground,

but the C64 had something missing that the spectrum had, hard to put a finger on it, the spectrum did have inferior games (based on the specifications), but It was more accessable or hackable (in todays speak)

I'd say the spectrum kids was more into modding it, typing their own code from magazines and learning stuff, but the C64 kids used it more like console. and could not see the reason for having a spectrum (due to the inferior spec etc..)

I didn’t do any speccy hacking, but the C64 was IMO amazing in the regard. The way you could reprogram the VIC each horizontal line into different video modes, changing the screen width to make borders disappear, the way you could disable the kernal ROMs to expose more DRAM etc.

But all machines of that era were so low level with plenty of tricks to exploit.

yes the C64 had some very cool features, I tried to develop some basic games on it using sprites. but it felt like an uphill struggle. I remember making cool music was easy tho

maybe it was the school I went to and the information the collection of kids had

Ah yes, I'll be back to check on all the solid filled 3d games the C64 had.

The C64 was a great music-synth with the capability to do 1 certain type of game kside scrollers) in 16 shades of brown vut that was it.

The sheer endless variety of games the Speccy supported knocked the C64 into a cocked hat.

Good to see that those misguided schoolyard buddies have survived to old age as well!

You talk about schoolyard arguments but you seem to be the only one here trying to start them.

The way you talk, I have the impression that you’re actually taking any of this serious?

Back then, C64 vs Spectrum discussions were like vi vs Emacs. Good old fashioned tribalism is a thing of all ages.

I don't know about number of games, but I owned a C64 and my friend a Speccy, and I liked C64 games way better. They simply looked and sounded better.

I do find the Speccy charming though!

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