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The first computer I saw was my dad's Amstrad CPC 464.

Soon I had my own, a Timex TC2068. This is an improved version of the american TS2068 produced by Timex of Portugal, featuring improved Spectrum compatibility, in great part thanks to its emulator cartridge. I understand this is a relatively sought-after item in the american market.

Here's some photos of the portuguese factory in Costa da Caparica from 1986 if anyone's curious. This factory is a bit of a legend for portuguese geeks because it was Portugal's contribution to 8-bit computing with several innovations developed, such as the Timex FDD3000, until the factory was allegedly transferred to Scotland in a shady deal.

ET was nowhere near the worst game of all time. Squij! (a game for the ZX Spectrum) handily beats it in terms of sheer awfulness. What Squij! lacks is the infamy and the truly epic nature of ET's failure.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org...

nobody knows how to truly optimize for limited resources anymore. those guys died off with the commodore 64

The funny thing is that there were people who said the same thing with the Commodore 64 was introduced. I have an old issue of Your Computer where one of the letters to the editor lamented the death of the VIC-20, saying that "The mega-memories of today's 64K elephants are asking for sloppy and wasteful programming".

The entire letter can be read over at The World of Spectrum, which seems a bit ironic now that I come to think about it.

there are ZX Spectrum emulators for Windows that are free and ready to use

There are quite a few of them, on a number of platforms. There's even one that runs in a browser.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org...

B.C. Bill. Very apt naming...

Adding World of Spectrum: http://www.worldofspectrum.org...

If you want to build a modern recreation of the Speccy (absolutely timing perfect too) there's a clone called the Harlequin which was designed by a guy who recently reverse engineered the ZX Spectrum's Ferranti ULA and wrote a book about it. The book's great:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-ZX...

There's a thread on World of Spectrum Forums - a German member has arranged to get the components and PCBs to make a kit. He may still have a few going if you jump in soon:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org... (go to near the end of the very long thread)

Also there is a Verilog HDL description of the ZX ULA on OpenCores (based on Chris Smith's reverse engineering work) if you like to play with FPGAs.

Not to mention Candy Crank

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum manual used to have a program you could type in called Pangolins that did the same.... must admit, I was impressed with the "learning" part of that!

Yeah. When I was about 7 I had a hand-drawn copy of that table. *grin*

Monty Python's Flying Circus had my favorite one though, where you had to identify different types of cheese.

ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-extras/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus_CheeseGuide.gif

Mere possession of a lawfully created copy is not infringement.

What about this?

S&A Group were the vendors of a cart dumper called the "PROM Blaster" for Atari 2600 videogames ... The archival exception for computer software did not apply to programs stored within permanent storage media (in this case a videogame cartridge) because these forms of media are not subject to the sort of risks that the archival clause was designed to guard against. As a result, the court ruled that dumping a videogame cartridge for archival purposes is not covered by the archival clause of copyright law.

And that's without considering the fact that the guy is selling the original ROMs.

You need to RTFM: ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-info/e/Elite(Acorn).pdf

Fuck Flight Simulator. This is the same company that made the Horace [wikipedia.org] games!

That confused me- I thought that was made by Melbourne House's development team, and indeed the Wikipedia article doesn't even mention Psion (except in relation to a Psion Series 3 port years later).

Yet World of Spectrum had it on their list of Psion games and the game and front cover mention both companies. Perhaps Psion acquired the rights and sold it through Sinclair?

as Psion Flight Simulator??

Flight Simulation? Yes, it is.

I remember playing the ZX81 version of it, and while that was undoubtedly basic- because the ZX81 itself *was* basic!- it was quite impressive given the limitations of the machine.

The Speccy games you thought were good until you tried, oh, every other game

What were you comparing them against? Later games? Psion's games were all (AFAIK) released very early on in the Spectrum's life and look decent by the standards of that time.

As with many home computers, the standard of games in general rose significantly as time went on. Later ones often made the older ones look primitive in comparison as programmers got to grips with the machine, learned from the older games, standards rose and (I assume) better development systems became available.

I never played the Spectrum version of Flight Simulation, but there's a video of it on YouTube and it looks quite decent for 1982.

I remember some of those games... Here's a quickly googled list if anyone's interested. Nice to have some nitpicking take you down memory lane, cheers :o)

There's been some development on full colour graphics with the Spectrum recently:

- ZXodus engine - a tile engine for full colour graphics http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0026639
- Buzzsaw - A really fun game http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0027057

There's been some other projects on the Spectrum colour pallette, for instance the ULA Plus enhancement, which replaces the flash and bright attributes and uses a colour lookup table. It's very easy to modify existing software to make use of the ULA Plus, and the ULA Plus would have been something achievable at a low cost back when the 128K Spectrum was being developed so is within the spirit of the original machine. The ULA+ has been implemented in hardware, too.

- ULA Plus is here: https://sites.google.com/site/ulaplus/

There's been some development on full colour graphics with the Spectrum recently:

- ZXodus engine - a tile engine for full colour graphics http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0026639
- Buzzsaw - A really fun game http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0027057

There's been some other projects on the Spectrum colour pallette, for instance the ULA Plus enhancement, which replaces the flash and bright attributes and uses a colour lookup table. It's very easy to modify existing software to make use of the ULA Plus, and the ULA Plus would have been something achievable at a low cost back when the 128K Spectrum was being developed so is within the spirit of the original machine. The ULA+ has been implemented in hardware, too.

- ULA Plus is here: https://sites.google.com/site/ulaplus/

There was more in the same style, all from this guy, he also was so kind to allow redistribution so you can play them from links there (if you've got Java). He also wrote my favourite "country management simulator" genre game.

Now go waste some time playing.

There was more in the same style, all from this guy, he also was so kind to allow redistribution so you can play them from links there (if you've got Java). He also wrote my favourite "country management simulator" genre game.

Now go waste some time playing.

There was more in the same style, all from this guy, he also was so kind to allow redistribution so you can play them from links there (if you've got Java). He also wrote my favourite "country management simulator" genre game.

Now go waste some time playing.

There was more in the same style, all from this guy, he also was so kind to allow redistribution so you can play them from links there (if you've got Java). He also wrote my favourite "country management simulator" genre game.

Now go waste some time playing.

There was more in the same style, all from this guy, he also was so kind to allow redistribution so you can play them from links there (if you've got Java). He also wrote my favourite "country management simulator" genre game.

Now go waste some time playing.

There was more in the same style, all from this guy, he also was so kind to allow redistribution so you can play them from links there (if you've got Java). He also wrote my favourite "country management simulator" genre game.

Now go waste some time playing.

My first computer was a spectrum too. I recently I downloaded the excellent open source FUSE emulator which when combined with .TAP format games from World of Spectrum and the right settings, you can watch the tape loading screens.

For the "R Tape loading error" gambler in you, some emulators even let you connect a cassette player to your audio interface's line in for that authentic experience.

While first point was true until ZX Spectrum 128 added AY-8912 sound chip, second is not. Color clash is a problem, but many games just featured plain backgrounds with colourful characters - like this or this, and some went overboard like this (Check those crates, there are FOUR colors on them! Can your C64 do that? Hell, no!) or this. "Two colored affairs" in commercial games were mostly isometric engines, something, AFAIK, not very common on C64

While first point was true until ZX Spectrum 128 added AY-8912 sound chip, second is not. Color clash is a problem, but many games just featured plain backgrounds with colourful characters - like this or this, and some went overboard like this (Check those crates, there are FOUR colors on them! Can your C64 do that? Hell, no!) or this. "Two colored affairs" in commercial games were mostly isometric engines, something, AFAIK, not very common on C64

While first point was true until ZX Spectrum 128 added AY-8912 sound chip, second is not. Color clash is a problem, but many games just featured plain backgrounds with colourful characters - like this or this, and some went overboard like this (Check those crates, there are FOUR colors on them! Can your C64 do that? Hell, no!) or this. "Two colored affairs" in commercial games were mostly isometric engines, something, AFAIK, not very common on C64

While first point was true until ZX Spectrum 128 added AY-8912 sound chip, second is not. Color clash is a problem, but many games just featured plain backgrounds with colourful characters - like this or this, and some went overboard like this (Check those crates, there are FOUR colors on them! Can your C64 do that? Hell, no!) or this. "Two colored affairs" in commercial games were mostly isometric engines, something, AFAIK, not very common on C64

All far too dense for an 11 year old, and all pretty much require more background knowledge than an 11 year old is likely to have. I'm not sure there really is an answer to the OP's question though, at that age, even a very bright kid is almost certainly going to lack the prerequisite knowledge to learn to program from just a book.

Say what?! I was programming at age 11, self-taught, using 'just books.' (Unless you count some early -- and very rudimentary -- Logo exposure in grade school; later scholastic use of the computer was, IIRC, limited to Oregon Trail, though once you got to high school you could take a class that taught Pascal...)

I got started hand-keying source code from magazines and books available at local booksellers. As I progressed, I picked up a copy (likely got it as a present) of the AppleSoft Basic Programmer's Reference Manual.

These days, I have to imagine it would be both easier (every API you need to get started is quickly available online, often with excellent accompanying tutorials and/or with user-contributed sample code snippets), and perhaps more intimidating (as the complexity of our systems has increased precipitously). (On the flip side, much, much easier to get a GUI working under Java than back in the day when you had to hand-code memory bank switching and deal with the bizarre "but it saved a chip!" oddities of Apple II graphics programming...)

Mind you, I wasn't a very good programmer, and honestly wouldn't be until I was finally exposed to proper procedural programming (C), then OOP (C++, and when it was released, Java), in college. But I had fun with it, and my stuff worked. Wasn't terribly robust or full-featured, but, it worked. (My database was a flat-file, not relational, and, um, written in BASIC... ;))

Okay, all that said, it might be worth checking out the Head First books. Head First Programming uses Python and is supposed to be a general introduction to programming. There's also Head First Java. No direct experience with either, but people rave about 'em.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ Shedloads of documents, scanned books, pretty much all the magazines scanned in, vast library of games to play (with permission to host more acquired regularly), links to emulators *and ROM images* legally thanks to Amstrad (the current owners of the Sinclair Computers IP) allowing free distribution. A fantastic site.

... and in the UK, it was more like a couple of years, and factor of 6 price difference (£400 compared to £70 - or £50 if you bought the DIY version).

And - also in the UK - if you had that kind of cash, you were buying a BBC Micro, not some foreign nonsense! :-) The BBC was just an amazing machine - it had "good engineering" carved all over it. Properly separated OS vs Language ROMs etc. I built a video format converter in 1990, and I was able to test the input timing conformance using a BBC, because there was one of those *VIDEO commands for directly screwing with the video timings. Amazing.

I never owned a Beeb - I went ZX81 and Spectrum instead, and never regretted it (I wrote this game). But the Commodore 64 was nowhere on the scene. YMMV, of course :-)

Here, get a load of this.

In short: downloading ROMs are illegal, because you must do backup copies yourself, you dirty thief; copiers are illegal, because you can upload copied ROMs, you dirty thief (how the fuck you're supposed to make legal backups without copiers is beyond me); emulators are illegal, because you use them to play illegal downloaded ROMs, you dirty thief; by pirating NES games you damage $15 bln. industry with tens of thousands jobs, you dirty thief; not available anymore != copyright expired, so you won't be playing such gems as Action 52 legally for another half century, you dirty thief.

All around pleasant people.

I wonder, can you go to individual authors asking for permission to distribute, like ZX Spectrum guys do, or Nintendo has a say in it, so you might as well go and get fucked?

That is still way overpowered, you really need very little to run things at speed, look at the true old skool 8-bit computers - ZX Spectrum for example clocked at 3.5MHz and had only 48KB or RAM. There was a game called "Elite" that managed to squeeze vector 3D into it, entire galaxy with countless of star systems, trading simulation, AI for 3D space dog-fighting, asteroid drilling and other interesting things.. all coded directly in CPU machine code for the best efficiency.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001601

Anyone remember this one? Learned all I know about human biology from it. :)

There's a similar lego plotter in this book: http://www.clarkonline.org/william/mapyor/index.html

The book describes using some large lego wheels to form a drum around which the paper was attached, and how to form a small electro magnet around a bolt through a technic lego plate to pull the pen towards the drum. The pen itself was suspended between two lego axles on a butterfly pin. The whole magnet head assembly could pinion left and right using an improvised lego rotary counter to measure progress with a similar block to rotate the drum.

I had the Sinclair Spectrum version of the book as a child and an IO box of relays. I never made the printer, but made lots of other devices.

There's some inside pictures of the book here: http://www.hexapodrobot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=318

A PDF of the book is here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=2000479

Since I'm an old guy who was using PCs in the DOS era, I'm entitled to reminisce about how things were better in the old days:

In the mid 1980's, I was using a Citizen 120D, a 9-pin dot matrix printer (standard for So/Ho use at the time, real professionals were using 24-pin printers), and that cost around £150 in the UK ($180 in the US).
With inflation, that would be around £300 ($330) today.

Similarly, I had the luxury of using a DeskJet 500 in the late '80s. That was a $500 printer, but the thing lasted for nearly ten years. It was bulletproof.

For something like $100 back then, people in the UK could by a crappy thermal printer like the Alphacom 32

And that's when printers had their own ROMs so they knew how to print stuff without relying on drivers or Windows GDI. Before the cost-cutting started.

So I conclude that as printers have got cheaper, they've actually got worse. Any printer these days costing less than about $100 will be absolute crap, and for anything good, we should get used to the idea of spending $200 upwards for something that will probably outlast our PC.

Rant over. Get off my lawn, kids.

Mario,1981 (29 years old)

Link, 1986 (24 years old)

Streetfighter 1987 (23 years old)

Sonic the Hedgehog 1991 (19 years old)

Hell, even Halo will be ten next year. 10 years isn't a long time in gaming anymore..... (especially when you consider that the average AAA game will take between 3 and 5 years to develop).

Do you really want to pay for the same game over and over?

This is not a question about paying for 'old games' repeatedly, but the right to use the IP that the game generated. The examples I gave above are all examples where the IP from the original games are still used to this day to generate new game titles. There's nothing wrong with trying to protect that IP imho. Imagine the outrage that would end up being directed at Nintendo, if a fan made mario game turned mario into a cocaine snorting sex addict. The Mario franchise would be tarnished, as would the company image of Nintendo.

So anyway, back to your view on the subject... I'd love to see the original compiled binaries put into the public domain after 15 years or so, solely for purposes of emulation (i.e. have a read through this on world of spectrum to see what I mean). But for this to be acceptable, it means the original compiled binary from the original game cassette / floppy.
 
New iPhone/wii/ps3/etc versions of classic games do not fall into this category. These are new products that required developers time to port the original code and assets to a new system. This is not something that magically happens overnight, but is something that requires a fair amount of financial investment and a lot of grunt work to accomplish. It's only right that the develops expect to at least break even, or even turn a modest profit. It's not as though the couple of quid it costs to download a version of Sonic the hedgehog from XBOX live is going to break the bank.....

The video game KNOT in 3D was a 3D version of the lightcycle game from Tron. It was released in 1983 and ran on the ZX Spectrum.

"(P.S. this is all tongue-in-cheek. I actually wish I had a Speccy - there was a ton of great software for that little beast)"

You can still enjoy it even without the hardware.

http://www.spectaculator.com/

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/

http://www.tzxvault.org/

One of the games I remember playing was wasteland (fallout is based on this game). In the game you came across various vendors all over the place and a lot of them sold snake oil. I bought it all up thinking it may be needed in the game, never having heard the term before (yes I have since gotten out from under the rock). Boy was I a dumb ass.

I haven't played it for like 20 years or so, but IIRC this game had the same ... err ... "feature". :)

I rather liked Stonkers but it was prone to crashing

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004913

Much like movies based on super heroes and video games have gotten better, some even to the point of being able to be called good, the same has happened with games based on movies.

Have you played any of the Evil Dead games? Fistful of Boomstick was fun and while I didn't play all of Hail to the King, what I did play of it was good.

Have you played the original Evil Dead game? I think it proves your point about movie games having improved since that era :)

No I haven't. You've done a rare thing finding a game I was not aware of. Being a video game and evil dead geek, I'm going to have to check it out in spite of it being terrible.

Much like movies based on super heroes and video games have gotten better, some even to the point of being able to be called good, the same has happened with games based on movies. Have you played any of the Evil Dead games? Fistful of Boomstick was fun and while I didn't play all of Hail to the King, what I did play of it was good.

Have you played the original Evil Dead game? I think it proves your point about movie games having improved since that era :)

Many games that are distributed as abandonware, developers endorse the practice because they want their game to be played by people. Yet big companies bought out the old development houses and go after abandonware sites.

So true. As can be seen here. Even if people legally own the games, they can't play them on emulators unless they know the voodoo of converting old media to emulator supported files (which at least in case of ZX Spectrum tapes is rather easy for everyone).

Yet I'd welcome if houses like Rare or Code Master release old games for free.

You've obviously never heard of Virtual Game Station, or emulators in general, then. Virtual Game Station was important at the time because it emulated a current gen console on current gen PCs. (well, okay, Macintoshes ... this was back when RISC was still king of the hill).

In the end, Sony bought Virtual Game Station from Connectix to keep the Playstation emulator off the market.

If the Wii is really as underpowered as a people claim, and the controlers are just bluetooth, I'm surprised that I haven't seen emulators for it yet. (and before people say that'd be legal, remember that the US Supreme Court said that it'd just create more market for the games (and peripherals, being they're bluetooth), and the Court of Appeals declared that reverse engineering is fair use ... I know, you're asking, 'what about the DMCA?' Well, oddly enough, that was passed in 1998, and the complaint wasn't filed 'til 1999 ... but Sony never brought the anti-circumvention provisions.

(note -- I'm not a lawyer, and I have no idea if any new laws apply, and it's likely that current manufacturers would try to claim relief under the DMCA)

For us in Rightpondia, it was the Sinclair Spectrum http://www.worldofspectrum.org/. Less than half the price of a Commodore 64, and with a faster processor, and smaller form factor, we got to feel smug despite the rubber keyboard :-)

Also, the BBC Microcomputer. Twice as fast as the C64, and about the same price when it came out, and with a disc system that was actually worth a damn. The Beeb was fast, expandable (it could take sideways ROMs and RAMs), was easily upgradable to being networked (our school had a LAN in 1985 of BBC Microcomputers using Econet).

The nice thing about the 8 bit days were there were lots of different, interesting architectures. It wasn't just a homogenous, boring, Wintel hegemony. So even though us Sinclair fans think the C64 is rubbish, it's still good it existed!

There were several multi-load games for the ZX Spectrum including Agent X". Yes, it was annoying.

With a little knowledge of the tape hardware and the way it's used to store data, you can store the data on a tape much more efficiently than an MP3 does (and get faster encoding and decoding to boot). Your average 8-bit with a tape deck (for example, a ZX Spectrum) essentially has a 1-bit ADC and DAC hooked up to the tape deck. Data is (mostly) stored on tape as a long series of pulses of two different lengths (each representing a 0 or 1). Therefore, to create a nice and small tape image file (even of data in a custom copy protected format), simply detect and store a description of these pulses in e.g. TZX format. Especially Spectrum emulation users often work with tape files like these.

I knew it from my old Speccy (ZX Spectrum) game with the same name.

This Luddite should recuse himself and allow the state to pick, at the very least, somebody who once hooked a modem up to a ZX Spectrum, if nobody more modern is available.