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."
What fun! (Score:5, Interesting)
I even have a couple of 'docking bases' which allowed (IIRC) you to network up to 16 Speccys together in series.
It just really suprises me that there is enough interest still going in the spectrum to actually warrant a magazine relaunch.
'Back in the day' I used to own my spectrum primarily for gaming. The magazine to have was 'Crash' (complete with cover-mounted cassette). Now there was a real magazine; it wasn't even glossy
What I find interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Popularity? (Score:5, Interesting)
Either way, neat show. Wish I could go.
Re:What I find interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:ooh does anyone remember this (Score:5, Interesting)
poke 23659, 0
or
poke 23613, 0
Scary that I can still remember them.
Re:What fun! (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, please, Crash was vastly inferior to YS. It was not funny. YS was.
Great learning machine (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder whether those at that age now find it as easy to learn as much about the basics of computing? How hard is it to understand the fundamentals of how the machine really works, when most teenagers probably have a PC & Windows OS to play with?
Re:Popularity? (Score:5, Interesting)
The first machine I bought was a Sinclair ZX-80. I bought it because it was very inexpensive. It was the first complete system to sell for under 100 pounds, which was revolutionary cheap for the time.
The circuitry was amazing. It had 1 KByte of memory which also serverd as video memory! I remember that someone crammed in a chess program into that. The original BASIC interpreter was 4K. (Why are all program so damned big nowadays?)
To make the system very cheap, it had no dedicated video circuitry! You stored characters in RAM and ended each line with 0x76. (The less text you had on display, the less memory it used.) To display the text on the screen, you set a special bit in hardware and jumped to the RAM character buffer. The CPU would start to fetch instructions from the text buffer, but the hardware would clear all bits fed to the CPU (00=NOP). Instead the RAM output was fed to the BASIC ROM which now served as a character generator. When the end of line was reached, the 0x76 code was fed to the CPU which interprets that code as a HLT (halt) instruction. So no more bits were fed to the display until horizontal sync, which gave the CPU another interrupt. So with a minimum of 74xx logic gates video text could be generated at low cost and extremely low memory requirements. Of course, the screen went blank when executing BASIC code.
It was an amazing machine and I have many fond memories playing with it. The schematics was included so you could do some hardware hacking as well.
Re:Great learning machine (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the same concept as has been used at a lot of universities in teaching Assembly. Since a lot of professors teaching when I went to school cut their teeth on the PDP-11, guess what platform we coded in Assembly for. Did anyone have a PDP-11 to run that code on? Nope. It was nearly all run on a vax-vms system.
A lot of instructors today probably cut their teeth on the Apple II, or early AT/XT computers. I doubt that they will actively promote working with ZX80 instructions, or basic, but who knows.
-Rusty
Re:Last time I checked... (Score:3, Interesting)
The neatest one liner:
FOR n=1 TO 80:CIRCLE n,n,n: NEXT n
The DevPac Assember was also cool.
Anyone remember the teach-it yourself programming course, where one issue came out every week called INPUT? I still have them.
My speccy setup:
Spectrum 48K (sometime along the line: upgraded to a Plus, then replaced with a 128K version)
Interface 1
Timex thermal printer
AMX Mouse
Microdrive
Epson FX80 with serial port.
I wrote most of my school assignments with Tasword 2, if I ever needed any artwork done, I fired up Artstudio...
Artsudio - it used a Lenslock.... I hated those damn things.. This was a piece of plastic with you put on the screen, pressed buttons until the box was as big as the piece of plastic, and then looking through the lenses, you could see two characters which you couldn't see without it.
3 wrong entries and you had to load the app from cassette again... 5 minutes wasted.
Jet Set Willy, Tasword 2, Artstudio, Elite, Attic Attack, Sabre Wolf.
I never really read Crash, because I was more into writing my own software rather than playing games, but but I never missed an issue of "Your Sinclair" - they had a cool style of writing and I also never missed "ZX Computing monthly" which focussed mainly on writing your own programs.
I still miss Z80 assembly (Score:3, Interesting)