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."

Comments

What fun!

[reality-bytes]

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 ;)

Re:What fun!

[Dot.Com.CEO]

The docking bases were called "Interface 1" and were one of the most amazing hardware at the time. I also remember having a huge box housing a 3.5'' drive (oh yes!) and a composite monitor port - Opus Discovery I think it was called. The joys of loading a game in 3 seconds :->

Also, please, Crash was vastly inferior to YS. It was not funny. YS was.

What I find interesting

[Pan T. Hose]

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?

Re:What I find interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a numbers of Z80-compatible processors, still sold by the company that made the original processor: http://www.zilog.com/

Popularity?

[MBCook]

This brings up a question that I've been wondering. Sinclair machines were very popular over in Europe, right? Could anyone tell me why they took off over there and not over here?

Either way, neat show. Wish I could go.

Re:Popularity?

[pesc]

Sinclair machines were very popular over in Europe, right? Could anyone tell me why they took off over there and not over here?

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:ooh does anyone remember this

[forgotten_my_nick]

or the all time favorite..

poke 23659, 0

or

poke 23613, 0

Scary that I can still remember them.

Great learning machine

[jon514]

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?

Re:Great learning machine

[rusty0101]

Since there is a java based emulator of it, (it even runs on a Sharp Zaurus) you could freely distribute the emulator and point people at the right resources for programing the Z80/1.

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...

[germanbirdman]

POKE 35899,0 is the poke I also still most remember. Even 20 years later, wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me "How do you get infinite lives in Jet Set Willy" and I could tell you :-)

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

[melted]

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.