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Sinclair And Clones Computer Show
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."
When you're LISTing a program on the Speccy and it asks you to scroll go into extended mode and press a key... the screen scrolls up lots of garbage. Bug or easter egg?
Am I the only one who thought that T'zer was no hottie? That magazine was years ahead of its time, by the way...
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
does it run Linux?
I must have a dozen Spectrums of various iterations kicking about here - including 2 of the early blue-key types complete with microdrives and microprinters.
;)
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
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
is why doesn't anyone massively manufacture faster CPUs basing their underlying design on the ZX Spectrum architecture which while being notably simple algorithmically (low count of transistor gates and intergate connections) would be significantly more effective considering the heat and power they would produce as compared to the legacy 386 architecture we use now. That might be something we all wait for: battery powered, silent PCs with no moving parts. Could that be the ironic future of computing: simplicity?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Either way, neat show. Wish I could go.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Video of the hardware panel at NotCon '04, showing a demonstration of the current speccy DemoScene, and playback of a music video off an HD.
o ne.com/notcon04/NotCon-Hardware-hig h.mov
http://quernstone.com/notcon04/
http://quernst
Poor Marketing
This is what prevented them from being a really big player here.
It's also what killed the atari comptuer products..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My 16k Speccy still worked... it came down from the Attic about 3 months ago, I was amazed.
:(
I don't have a cassette player that I can plug in to load any games though.
JET SET WILLY LIVES FOREVER.
POKE 35899, 0
Maybe ID will release Doom3 for the Spectrum? What about Halflife 2? And here's hoping for UT2K4..... Sp3ctrUm PwnS j00r 4MD!!!
In Argentina there were some authorized clones made by a local motor company (Czwerny). Here are some pictures: czwerny (these are not mine).
Also in Brazil, I got this model imported from Brazil:
TK85.
I also have some CZ1000 and CZ1500 (were called TS in US).
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
I got a Spectrum when they first appeared (aged about 13). I found it was a great machine to learn about computing - you had a Sinclair Basic interpreter as the main interface & Z80 assembler underneath. I spent many happy hours coding & hacking games on it. It & its predecessor, the ZX81, were what got me hooked on IT & software development. One of the great things was full manual it came with & fairly straightforward books you could buy detailing the full ROM disassembly!
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?
Just create on in a FPGA..
Hell, you can re-create an *entire* spectrum in a single FPGA, and a couple of support chips..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... see the name Sinclair and think:
"Great, what did those bastards do now?"
sig != null
No.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I studied Computing in Norwich (hello City College!) and there's something rather sadly appropriate about Norwich being the venue for a show about, well how shall we put this, "dated" computers.
Alan Partridge (Aha!) had his radio show in Norwich. And loved the place. 'Nuff said.
...The hidden "debug/test" mode.
Norwich?
Arrrharrrrr!!!
</Partridge>
#define ROSE any_other_name
I feel for you with the zen-like patience while 10k of code loads from an audio cassette.
Unfortunatley, I just can't resist giving you nightmares tonight;
BWAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR BIP! BWAAAAAAARRRRRR BEEEEBEBEEEEEBEEEBEEE BIP!
Do you remember those hypnotic lines around the restriced area of the screen too?
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
A new issue of YS?
And nobody even emailed me?
Gah! I've been robbed!
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Well, you can get that today with an ARM based unit..
Extreme low power, and they run really cool... Just check out your PDA if you doubt that...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was pleased to find it still functioned. But there were two disappointments. (1) It's turned yellow. That plastic needs care if you want to to stay looking white. (2) It doesn't smell the same. I miss hat heady aroma of fresh new electronics. Now it smells of absolutely nothing.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I keep telling people that you're not a real spectrum nut unless you've got your pride and joy hanging on the office wall, with the original manuals and a signed photo of sir clive himself.
The chap at the gallery claimed they don't get many computers in to be framed. I find that hard to understand...
0daymeme.com: Great stuff.
In my last year at School I got caught reading Crash magazine and Sinclair User in English class a few times and my teacher said I was throwing my life away by not paying attention to O'Level English. But now, I have a job supporting over 800 Windows XP Desktops, all because of that little rubber keyed bugger. Oh hang on.. supporting XP is hell, bollocks he was right, I'm wasting my life ;)
Jonathan
They sold 12,000 Sam Coupes? I had no idea it was so many.
I remember I got one of the early models with the dodgy ROM and the shop I bought it from tried to charge me £25 to replace it until we complained.
They were great machines - still played speccy 48K games, 3.5" disk drives, 256Kb RAM. The SAM BASIC was great: it had an EDIT command, for writing self-modifying BASIC programs. I wonder where I put the thing...
Well it looks like its settled 8-) The speccy is Definitley BETTER than the C64 and here is the proof! We won the war only about 15 years too late Now if you will excuse me time to sit back and hopefully toast some marshmallows on the heat
Why isn't there a 'starter' computer system around any more? I went from self-taught Sinclair and C64 BASIC to minor levels of assembler on both systems before life shifted me away from computers for a while, until I came back to C++ on a Mac more than a decade later - and I think learning assembler properly would have made C++ a snap!
But the way systems are now, there doesn't seem to be anything to get people into programming easily. Anyone could piss about in BASIC for a couple of hours and get things moving about the screen that actually respond to their inputs, but in C++ on a GUI-based machine?
For that matter, why isn't there a BASIC interpreter built into modern machines? I mean, jeez, how fast would *that* run? 64-bits at 4Gh compared to 8-bits at 1Mh? For a program I could write myself in an afternoon for a particular job, I'd quite happily sacrifice GUI elements and go back to 'Enter value here_' options.
Kind of makes me wonder if you could take the gameplay refinements we take for granted today and apply them to an old machine. I'd love to see a (top-down, obviously) C64 version of Crazy Taxi! Or going the other way, how about a totally real-time version of The Sentinel powered by a G5 or 4Ghz Pentium?
You must think in Russian.
Ooooh... I'll get out my Apple IIe and we could have a LAN party!
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
Bundled with this month's RetroGamer magazine, for those of you in the U.K.
More information and a review can be found at http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/ys94_review.htm/
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...)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Still have the ZX81, sold the speccy to buy a BBC Model B, sold the beeb to buy a PC. Then started working on mainframes, System/36, System/38 and AS/400, RS/6000 etc etc etc. That Clive Sinclair fellow has a lot to answer for!
Currently I have a P4 thingy and an old AS/400.
Also, I'm building some 8bit single board machines. Z80, 6502, 8086, 6800. Good fun, though running them at 1mhz doesn;t really get anything done.
the other Sinclair formats and clones include the QL, SAM Coupe, Timex/Sinclair, ZX81, Z88 etc
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 - all-round comprehensive information
Shameless plugging of my own site - mostly software rather than hardware information
SimCoupe - 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.
Some of the magazine's original content is archived here: The Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years. 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.
It's almost as if the last fifteen years never happened.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Seems improved then. I always hated that run from
LS to Norwich (thorpe station), because the other
bit (from Bristol Temple Meads to London) was a wizzy 125MPH (about 1.5 hours). Back in my student
days (in Bristol, SW England), I always favoured the
sedate Bus approach (Bristol->London (victoria)->Norwich). But someone clearly had a sense of humour in the numbering schemes for busses, because the "747" (cackles hysterically)
used to run between the end points of Norwich and Bristol (and visited most of the (un)known universe in between). Still, it had the great taste to visit *both* cambridge and oxford, so
if you were broke (most students always are) and
not in a hurry was sort of fun...
(should point out that the 747 wasn't the fast
via london bus, but the one most of us poor dumb
idiots ending up using because it was a wee bit
cheaper)..
Go kiss the singing postman for me (big grin)
Should work just fine, and plenty of games would fit on a CD.
Just use the sound card on your PC, it works a lot better! And you can save your programs as a file on your hard drive.
:)
This got me thinking I should dig out that ol' ZX81 for a bit of nostalga
The story we heard in Britain was that Sinclair expected Timex to make a US version of the Spectrum, with just enough changes to produce NTSC instead of PAL, but Timex decided to re-design it. They changed the keyboard, added a ROM cartridge etc. By the time they had finished:
a) the Spectrum was getting old
b) the machine they came up with would not run a lot of Spectrum software
Since the main selling point of the Spectrum was the software you could run on it, that killed off the US version.
Allegedly.
"You have won tonight's star prize, the entire Norwich city council!"
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
..a Sinclair ZX-81. People said, "No, Holly, she's not for you." She's cheap, she's stupid, and she wouldn't load - well, not for me, anyway.
Smeghead every day of the week.
The best, most logical assembly language I've seen was in my Spectrum. Quite frankly I think Zilog deserves a lot more respect than it gets these days. Anyone who's programmed Z80 assembly will puke from just seeing the ugly x86 flavor.
Ah, the joys of Jet Set Willy...
... what a great game.
And I still have my manual for Elite lying around somewhere
No one mentioned the MK14. A single board kit before the ZX-nn's. some pics here: http://www.pkshiu.com/review/mk14.html/
YS is back? Brilliant! It was total crap when it was originally in print, but in a skillo funky way that we all loved.
My first real computer was as ZX Spectrum, I spent hours writing programs in BASIC, even learned some Z80 assembler as well. Last I check, it still works fine as well. One of these days I'll get it shipped over to me and figure out a way to run it on these funny NTSC sets they use here. I suspect Radio Shack has something to convert the signal.
Well, modern cpus are clocked so much faster for two reasons. 1, the transistors are smaller, and therefore faster. 2, modern cpus do less per instruction per clock, due to instructions moving through the cpu's pipeline. While a sinclair might execute an entire instruction in a single clock, a modern Pentium will break that instruction into close to 30 clock cycles, doing a very small portion of the instruction in each pipeline stage. The downside to this, is that when a jump or branch occurs, which is very common, the pipeline must be cleared. Modern chips use branch prediction to try and use which way a branch went the last time it was evaluated, to predict which way it will go in the future. This does add tranistors, which increases power consumption, due to smaller transistor, I thikn the change is negligible. In addition, modern cpus provice floating point capabilities, larger word width, and things like dma controllers, page frame pointers and cache built into hardware. The sinclair probably only had a stack pointer.
It is true that a modern sinclair with smaller transistors would use less power, but so much has been done in this field in the last 25 years, that a modern design could do so much better. Look at something like a motorola hc12 for a modern version of a cpu similar to the sinclais. Even this has a 2 stage pipeline if I recall correctly.
Furthermore, the ISA of old chips is quite limited.
Industry doesnt change designs unless valid. x86 is a great example of this. It is a pretty much messed up design, some instructions are 17 words long, but it can be made to work. Industry moved away from the sinclair because a better solution was found.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
BTW. How's that Doom clone on the Speccy doing?
Fond memories indeed!
:)
:) ), although I did have it. "Elite" was regarded as "the game to play", from what I remember. Strangely enough, I don't think I've ever played "Jet Set Willie".
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). 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.
I remember being 10 or 11 years old in the early `80's and seeing an ad for the ZX81 in the back of a Popular Science mag. I really wanted one of those things as I had not yet used a computer or owned one. A few years later, after I had been using an Atari 800, bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000 from a kid at school who didn't want it. Even after using the Atari, I thought the TS-1000 was cool. Now, over 20 years later, I'm talking to a 18 year old kid at work. He has a TS-1000 from a yard sale and doesn't know a thing about it. Even more sad, he's not even tried to use it. There is a whole generation or more that only knows Windows and have no idea what is underneath. Yeah, the kid is a geek and knows HTML, but is afraid of the stuff underneath. How sad!
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
'tis a wonderful place, full of pubs (over 300) as well as the two cathedrals. There's supposed to be one pub for every day of the week and one church a week for repentance. There aren't any computer shops worth visiting in Norwich. OSB (one step beyond) is just off Bedford street next to Jarrolds. They *do* own a spectrum though. But they did have to pick the week I'm off to china!
http://www.neobard.info - wacky world of me
There was a link a few months ago to the first part in a nostalgic series on programming early home pc games, written by a British fellow. It was a great read, and I wanted to see more, but I've since lost it. Anyone know where I might find it again?
I made a post on the Internet!
All you wannabies :)
I play on my parents' +2 every time I visit them. My dad plays on it every day, give or take.
The only reason it is around is for a nice little puzzle game called Peking.
Uptime would be about 10 years if they didn't turn it off when they go on holiday.
Having read some of the other comments, I fear I may be in danger of losing an afternoon to playing Chaos. Ah well.
Cheers,
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
I must get my Spectrum out and play some games.
Yeah.. every once a while I feel nostalgic, so I'll find a C64 or Nintendo emulator and fire up some classics. That's fun for all of 5 minutes, until I realize that old games really suck.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Its not the software that really made the old machines great, it was the hardware.
No emulator can ever replace the 'realness' of having the real machine on your desk.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What some people might not know is that Linus was a Sinclair user as well. Before he got a PC he had a QL, which had a 32bit architecture with a multitasking OS and was a pretty nifty machine for the time.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I loaned it to a friend, who busted it I think.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Yes I can confirm this is true - I work for the electronics distributor that supplied the faulty (I think they were Texas Instruments) memory chips - my boss was the man that did the dirty deal!
On a side note, could anyone ever get the Monopoly game in the back of the Timex Sinclair manual to work? I must've tried 4-5 times, but no luck.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
A Windows-based clone of Chaos called Chaos-Funk can be downloaded here.
http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/