Celebrating 40 years of ZX Spectrum
github.blog
github.blog
Looking back now the publishing industry around home computers was a whole world in itself. And in general, the nerdy publishing world was something to behold. Instead of websites we had weekly paper digests like "Practical Electronics", "Wireless World", "Electronic Music Maker".
We also had an electronic component shop in every town, even before Tandy (Radio Shack) and Maplins most places a "radio repairs store". Going to the shop to buy some BC108s, a 555 timer, and a list of caps and resistors was where pocket money went.
I think there is something else going on for the retro-wave generation. who cannot possibly be nostalgic, since they didn't live through that. Instead the relative simplicity and accessibility of old tech has an appeal. When a 12 year old can understand the entire system (yes full schematics), program it and build peripherals with components from the high-street, it felt like an entirely different relationship with technology.
This continued even after consoles were popular, with pirated multi-game carts freely available on the high street.
I have to thank Spanish game and programming magazines, as well as some famous adventure games like La Abadía del Crimen, for being bilingual in mother languages instead of doing the usual Portunhol.
It's how Future Publishing started, their first magazine was Amstrad Action:
Also LibreOffice can trace its lineage back to StarWriter on the CPC.
PC Magazine's December 1983 issue was almost 800 pages (<https://books.google.com/books?id=05wAGZQlo9QC&pg=PP1#v=onep...>); almost certainly the thickest in the history of magazine publishing. (PC soon began publishing every two weeks.)
BYTE peaked in, I believe, November 1983 (<https://archive.org/details/sim_byte_1983-11_8_11>, with a comparably thick issue. 80 Micro peaked in November 1982 (<https://archive.org/details/sim_80-micro_1982-11_34>, at more than 500 pages; by 1983, with the IBM PC clearly becoming the standard, serving the TRS-80 market was less lucrative.
In the 80s I had a BBC Micro with a Z80 second processor attached to its "tube" bus. Usually the Z80 ran CPN, a business operating system similar to CP/M with its own flavour of BBC Basic, including a built-in Z80 assembler. But it could be asked to do anything.
Some Spectrum software ran ok on the Z80 if you could get the memory image loaded, which I eventually did. The 6502 wasn't fast enough to provide good emulation, but it could poll the Z80 memory and convert the video image to something the BBC side could display. With some clever tricks the BBC's ULA could even be persuaded to simulate Spectrum square pixel resolution with most of the colours, and I used rapidly flashing colours to get more.
It wasn't good enough to run games, though it could show some of the screens.
But I remember it successfully playing one of the best Spectrum music demos of the time, because the 6502 was fast enough to poll and relay the 1-bit audio signal being generated by the Z80 music software.
I didn't have access to a computer, just lots of old magazines and books. The Spectrum photo's colourful keyboard with all those interesting keywords was really inspiring to 10 year old me. Somehow, between gazing at that for hours and reading, I would dreamily imagine typing on it, and started to guess what many of the keywords meant. Being colourful, interesting, and decorated with all the keywords was super helpful.
There were type-in listings in magazines in those days, as well as schematics showing how basic computers worked, so there was plenty to learn from even though they didn't specifically explain programming.
Eventually I got a BBC Micro, rather than a Spectrum like most of the other boys at school. The BBC was great and is where I learned to program properly, but socially I'd go round to friends houses where we'd play Spectrum games and write little programs there.
(Yes I do mean boys: I had the strong impression parents bought computers for boys but not girls in those days, and the girls didn't have any access to computers to learn from.)
It's funny you mention that computers were a boy's thing - they definitely were, but two of my neighbours were girls and they both had computers before me, so I would annoy their parents by going around there as often as I could and getting them to help me type out pages of BASIC.
Later my parents bought me a Spectrum, but I always wonder if the neighbours just paid them off in the end to stop me turning up at all hours of the day and night.
It's amazing to see that there's still a sizeable scene devoted to this humble little box, and there's new hardware and impressive hacks being built to this day. In the words of one of the messages from a user of my site: "It’s mad being online with a 40yr old computer designed around a tape recorder."
Part of it's longevity and appeal is how simple the system was - even 11 Year-old me could grasp the memory layout and experiment with writing assembler. I expect I'll still be hacking away on it in another 40 years!
[1] - I wrote a series of blog posts on how I mashed up a modern GitOps/k8s dev environment with 1980s Sinclair BASIC to build a community site: http://www.markround.com/blog/2021/12/21/devops-for-the-sinc...
I'm glad you liked it, the whole project was a labour of love and a huge amount of fun to put together. Particularly the whole "running unit tests through an emulated zx printer" thing!
I'm too young for what you guys are talking about, but I've always have trouble articulating how I got [sucked] into computing. It feels like I did a similar thing with HN and the internet in general.
I think osmosis is one of my new favorite ways to put it hehe.
I guess with internet, it's more like joining something that's rolling on but as big as an ocean..
Times ! they're changing !
https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html
I don't have a physical machine any more, but I have a framed print of the keyboard hanging on the wall behind me, and I've got a single-board Z80-based system running CP/M 2.x on the shelf to my side.
Even now I still go back and play "Chaos" under emulation every month or two. I'm looking forward to introducing our child, currently five, to some of the classic games in the future. He's young enough that they'll be impressive as he's seen nothing more modern. I hope.
It still turns on, however, approx. 90% of the keys don't function anymore.
Replacements are sold on ebay and online retro stores. I've had to replace the membranes on both my acquired Speccys.
https://retroradionics.co.uk/#!/Zx-Spectrum-48k-&-128k-toast...
On the ZX81, the metal on the ribbon cable is exposed on one side. Which means you can put one multimeter lead somewhere close to the bottom of each trace, and the other lead you trace along the exposed wire. If your multimeter stops showing continuity, you know you have a break there and if you look really hard you should be able to see it.
If you have a lot of breaks close to the connector (quite likely), take a pair of scissors and cut off the part with the break and plug the remainder of the ribbon cable back in. Otherwise, cut the electrically conductive tape into a thin slice and tape that over the affected spot. (Soldering won't work, you'll just melt the ribbon cable).
[1]: https://www.sintech-shop.de/en/48k-keyboard-membrane/a-3025
16 Kilobytes of ROM, which (with, I think, a whole KB to spare!) implemented a pretty functional BASIC environment. This was good, but still had significant limitations, especially when looking at all the cool stuff other people were doing.
At age 12 or so, I became absolute fascinated with a pretty simple thing: Spectrum programs included a 'loading screen' most of the time, which, while being loaded from tape at a leisurely 100bps or so, populated the screen top-to-bottom, left-to-right, pixels first, then (color) attributes, as per the layout of the video RAM. However, some games loaded the screen in reverse, or did not incrementally show the screen content while loading at all!
The latter problem was the easiest to solve: instead of loading directly from tape (the header of which included the base address) into video RAM, those programs would use an alternate base address, plus a small program to copy the contents afterwards. The former was way, way more tricky, and required the realization that you did not need to use the actual ROM code to load from tape, but you could disassemble/change that code, include it in your own program, and make it do whatever you want!
This realization enabled me to implement my own 'speed loader' (bumping tape I/O speeds from 100bps to, like, 111!), in addition to the usual fare of removing copy protection from programs and cheating at games by adding extra lives, removing barriers, or just fixing broken levels (waves at Jet Set Willy).
Is a Spectrum a useful computing device today? Absolutely not, and it hasn't been for over two decades or so. But that's not the point of all this nostalgia: it's the fact that it instilled a "Hackers mindset" in me and many, many others.
It was a lot of fun! Coding for these strange old machines is very interesting and challenging.
You can see the source code in the nfo file: http://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=54076
And it had to be, because the UK was much, much poorer in terms of average disposable income than the US at the time (and still is really).
Can’t wait to receive my Next in 2023.
Cheers to Clive and the team (and also to Alan Sugar for keeping it going into the 1990s).
[0] https://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/jmg7/groups/prismpd.html
The loading sounds and graphics still make me feel very nostalgic...and I don't care what anyone else says - chuntey is real!
The ZX Spectrum was my first computer and I was a bit too young to write any software for it sadly, but it was my second (TV Pong was my first) introduction to gaming...on a black and white TV.
Still managed to get into tinkering with computers and it opened a big door for me later in life. I am now a game developer (designer/engineer), and might not have gone down this amazing path if it wasn't for the familiarity with computing at an early age.
It was such an important computer and I'm glad to see the price of capable computers continuing to fall, so that more and more kids can have a similar experience to mine.
The loading sounds still give me chills!!
If you're looking to relive the loading sounds as a musical toy, check out the ZX Plectrum.
" loading sounds with your own mouth " I feel thats a video or it didn't happen moment.
That was a powerful hacking/debugging/programming utility. I am still proud of the HILOAD command which was capable of loading files from tape in any condition: if any error was found, this command would fill a separate buffer with the relative address of every error. Then you could use other commands to inspect the data and painstakingly recover it by guessing the correct value for damaged bits or bytes (they utility could dump memory in many ways, including some popular encodings of sprites for games). There was also a whole-block SHIFT command useful for this task because a loading error could make all following bytes to be shifted left or right some bits, because the tape data format didn't have a byte-boundary delimiter, it was just a stream of bits.
When faced with the difficult decision between Spectrum or C64, i turned to my older cousin for advice.
He recommended the Spectrum so that was chosen. However in hindsight the quirky keyboard, colour clash and less impressive sounds made the C64 look like the superior choice.
Colour clash can be seen in this link: https://www.nomadsreviews.co.uk/post/the-history-of-video-ga...
Still, the Spectrum had some awesome games back then, such as Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.
64 was and is clearly the better choice over Spectrum—superior in every single way other than perhaps the BASIC—but the relatively small price difference even then (and even more 40 years later) was enough to cause many Britons to choose the latter. That said, there is a reason why 64 dominated the wealthier US, Canada, Germany, and Australia.
The weird thing was that nobody I knew had the same computer - in my circle of friends and family, there was a ZX81, my Spectrum, a Vic20, a C64, an Apple II, a TRS-80, a BBC Micro, and a friends family even had a Dick Smith computer (after some searching it might've been a VZ-300). Only the ZX81 and the Spectrum got any programming done on them though :(
LOAD — argh, symbol shift doesn't work any more!
Although the first year was mostly spent playing River Raid, Lunar Jetman, Spy Hunter, while trying to understand the manual as a 10 year's old kid.
at vintagesimulator.com
From memory, 40 years later...