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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
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?
No.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Norwich?
Arrrharrrrr!!!
</Partridge>
#define ROSE any_other_name
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 ----
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.