Sinclair And Clones Computer Show 218
Anonymous Coward writes "The Sinclair ZX Spectrum seems to be alive and well with 'Your Sinclair' magazine being relaunched at WH Smiths newsagents, and according to this, there is a Spectrum and clones computer show in Norwich, England, (the other Sinclair formats and clones include the QL, SAM Coupe, Timex/Sinclair, ZX81, Z88 etc). It looks like it could be fun. I must get my Spectrum out and play some games."
Video Playback off an HD... via a spectrum (Score:5, Informative)
http://quernstone.com/notcon04/
http://quernst
Re:What I find interesting (Score:2, Informative)
In the other hand, not all "uP in a library" can be scaled up to 500Mhz, i.e., as example, you can not push to 500Mhz a 4Mhz designed Z80, may be just up to 32 or 50Mhz.
Simpler is good and nice, but the simplest isn't
TK85 (Score:3, Informative)
Also in Brazil, I got this model imported from Brazil:
TK85 [outlawnet.com].
I also have some CZ1000 and CZ1500 (were called TS in US).
Re:What fun! (Score:2, Informative)
And the new YS can be found... (Score:2, Informative)
More information and a review can be found at http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/ys94_review.htm/ [ysrnry.co.uk]
If you liked... (Score:5, Informative)
Sinclair was notorious for over-hyping his products, advertising them long before they ever came to market, and aimed much more for numbers than for quality. (If he hadn't built that stupid C5, Sinclair might well today have the kind of grip Microsoft has. Clive had been inventing and marketing products from radios to metal detectors for several decades before the ZX80, so he was very well established. In the early days of home computing, he very probably had more cash on hand than Bill Gates and Paul Allen. If the QL had been true 32-bit, and he'd not gone bust over building an electric car from washing machine motors, there is every reason to believe that the industry today would be bowing to him.)
Legend has it that one reason his computers were so cheap was that he'd buy defective parts. His argument, apparently, was that home users were never going to put industrial-sized loads onto their computers, so there was no point in buying chips up to that grade. Consumer electronics barely existed, back then, so the cheapest alternative was to buy stuff that had failed QC. The stuff would likely still work well enough for home use, you just didn't want to use those machines to control nuclear reactors.
(Maybe that explains what happened at Chernobyl...)
Re:Popularity? (Score:5, Informative)
Applications for games and applications [hw.ac.uk].
It's amazing they managed to get a flight simulator (if a bit blocky) running.
The $149 computer [hw.ac.uk]
The $99.95 computer [hw.ac.uk]
Sam Coupé, with an é (Score:3, Informative)
Just to be pedantic, the Sam Coupé wasn't manufactured by Sinclair, nor was it exactly a clone as it had many capabilities in excess of what the Spectrum could do. Some links:
The Sam Coupé Scrapbook [mono.org] - all-round comprehensive information
Shameless plugging of my own site [intensity.org.uk] - mostly software rather than hardware information
SimCoupe [simcoupe.org] - a free and legal Sam emulator for Windows, Linux, MacOS X etc.
To anyone not involved in the scene, it probably seems very odd to be holding a show for such old computers. But I spent very nearly ten years using that old 8-bit computer, which means it lasted longer than any other computer I've bought since at many times the price, and in that time I've met a lot of people who also used it, and who have had much influence on me in various ways. Most obviously, my interest - and now my job - in programming can be traced back to the days I spent trying to squeeze every drop of performance out of the Z80 that I could possibly get (and back then, every t-state counted!)
Obviously it's interesting to go to these shows and see what new things people can still do with the old technology. But even more than that, I'm hoping just to have another friendly chat with a few of the people I've known for about the last decade and a half.
I loved 'Your Sinclair'... (Score:3, Informative)
Some of the magazine's original content is archived here: The Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years [ysrnry.co.uk]. Go easy on the server, people.
More info about Chaos (one of the most addictive eight-player games ever) here: The battle of the wizards [alt-tab.net].
It's almost as if the last fifteen years never happened.
Re:flame war to end all flame wars (Score:1, Informative)
Re:If you liked... (Score:3, Informative)
More than legend...
Pictures... [sothius.com]
The memory chips in the secondary bank of the 48k ZX Spectrum were all faulty 64kbit chips of which either the top or bottom half had failed testing (so they were "cheap as chips" when he bought them - haha.) They were put into the Spectrum, wired up so it only accessed whichever 32kbit actually worked properly, and the defective half was just ignored.
Re:Popularity? (Score:3, Informative)
Good old Speccy! (Score:3, Informative)
I grew up on this computer. Back in Russia, Spectrum clone kits were very popular. They were cheap, the electronics were "close enough", such that intricate timing-based video tricks didn't quite work, but everything else worked.
I never used the real thing for more than a few minutes. Instead, I used a Russian clone called "Hobbit" (just googled this [tarunz.org]). My dad was involved in selling them, and so I got one. Apparently only 50000 were made. The great thing about this clone was the PC-style extended keyboard, which obviated the need for some of the trickiest key combos.
Paired to a small monochrome screen, I used to write (at the tender age of 11) programs and games for it. One game that I wrote was very simple: there was a line through the screen, a person in the middle, and a car running left to right. The sole control was the spacebar: pressing it at the right time would make the person jump long enough for the car to pass under. Despite that, I remember adults playing the game for 5-10 minutes, far longer than I expected.
Now, I was not one of the l33t assembly coders: instead, I stuck to good old onboard BASIC. One of the niftiest features it had (as far as I was concerned at the time) was the ability to define custom (USR) characters. You could define tens of 8x8 pixel chars, and then print them as normal letters. I used to sit down with a graph paper notebook, separate it into 8x8 cells, draw objects and then shade pixels. I wrote small animations, typically involving cars, little people (Lode Runner, anyone?), helicopters, parachutes, robots, and stuff exploding. The exploding was accomplished by XOR'ing X, O and other characters over the site of explosion.
Of course, there was the BEEP command. The computer's manual (or some Spectrum-related book) came with a listing to play the funeral march. Much fun was had by shortening the durations of the notes in that march, making it sound upbeat. I tried writing some of my BEEP statement music, but I recall the results were pleasing only to me and not the family
Back in Soviet Russia... oh wait, this was post-Soviet Russia, the black market was rampant and much tape copying was had. Name any game and you could pick it up for less than $1. Childhood memories include sitting in front of the TV, having cleaned the tape head with alcohol (of the rubbing kind, not vodka), hoping that the 5-minute load of this game will succeed.
The particular version of the Hobbit that I had also included a version of the LOGO interpreter. Since all the books about logo that I had were in Russian, and the interpreter was in English, I pretty much failed to invoke all but the basic drawing commands (DRAW was translated fine by the dictionary, but most other keywords weren't).
I probably didn't play quite the same games that most Spectrum users did. Some of the ones that I remember include "Lode Runner" (amazing), "Chuckie Egg", "Iron " (yeah!), "Commando", "Knight Lore", "Target Renegade" (boy was this one a pain in the ass to load), "Lotus Esprit Turbo", "Nebulus" (good stuff!), "Saboteur" (how many hours spent on that baby), "Chequered Flag", "Chase HQ" (oh yeah!), "Deathchase" (teh winn!11!!), "Wec Le Mans", "Crazy Cars 1" and "Crazy Cars 2" (nice!), and more that I am too tired of listing. I was not cool enough at the time to play "Elite" (required too much concentration
Unfortunately, one sad day, the Hobbit blew a fuse. My dad decided to try inserting a wire for the fuse, since we couldn't find an appropriate replacement fuse. That's when I learned the meanings of "fuses don't blow for no reason" and "magic smoke."
Recently, I bought a ZX Spectrum from UK off eBay, but the working condition wasn't clear. I still haven't tried it.
Linus used speccy (Score:2, Informative)