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25th Anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Alioth writes "Twenty five years ago today, Sinclair Research launched Britain's most popular home computer of the 1980s — the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Costing about one third of the price of its rivals such as the Commodore 64 while having a faster CPU and a better BASIC interpreter, the machine sold well in many guises throughout the 1980s and had more than a staggering 9,000 software titles. The machine may well have done well in the US too, had Timex — the company building the machine under license in the US — not already been in financial trouble and about to fold. The machine was also extremely successful in Russia, although not for Sinclair Research — because the Russians made dozens of different clones of the machine, and did so right into the mid 1990s. The machine still has a healthy retro scene, including the development of new commercial software by Cronosoft, and new hardware such as the DivIDE, which allows a standard PC hard disc or compact flash card to be connected to the machine."
A friend who did ASM on these chips said that the Z80 processors and variations there of is still (or at least until recently) the most common microprocessor in the world.
Apparently they are common in dishwashers, washing machines and other programmable appliances. (Can your dishwasher run Linux?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z80
I started with a Sinclair ZX81, 1Kb of RAM expanded to 16Kb with a "RAM pack" that had an edge connector to the main PCB inside. It got hot (as did the power supply) and was often unstable. You could suddenly lose everything you were working on because the system just froze.
Along came the ZX Spectrum, 48Kb (and later 128Kb) with 8 colours (the ZX81 was black & white), sprites (the ZX81 was limited to the built in character set which included blocks & things until someone worked out how to hack that) and rubber keys (the ZX81 had touch sensitive membrane things).
It was a revolution, at my school we swapped tapes which didn't always load, had multiface cartridges to enter POKEs (changing a value at a particular memory address) for cheats and in order to create backups... and a big magazine scene.
I even ran an emulator on my PC to play one game in particular: the game that everyone tried to beat, and still fiendishly hard (and created by a mysterious genius who "disappeared", Matthew Smith) : Manic Miner (link to a Windows version).
Those were the days. The UK 8 bit scene was dominated by this machine.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Here's me and a million other Brits aged 25-35 saying 'thank you' for the Spectrum. If it wasn't for this little rubber wonder I doubt I'd be sat at this desk today, working in IT as a career. I'll be botting up the emulator" tonight to celebrate!
It's also worth noting Amstrad's healthy attitude to the retro scene (they bought Sinclair Research in 1986, and many of those million Brits will think of Spectra every time they watch The Apprentice...). Anyway, the Spectrum ROM was cracked & emulated before permission was sought. When someone decided to approach Amstrad to seek permission, one Cliff Wilson stepped forward with a simple reply: "Yes, do what you like with the Spectrum ROM, just don't charge money for it and don't remove our copyright message." Such an open attitude towards the scene in 1999 means that it's still thriving today.
Me too. Seeing this thread made me feel really happy and pretty old at the same time.
n es/Crash/Issue18/CRCover18.jpg
A 48K Spectrum was my second computer after a ZX81. I don't think I ever got so much pleasure out of any other possession I had as a child (and I didn't even have Sam Fox Strip Poker [props to those who actually remember her, and double to those who remember the game]).
The Spectrum just went to show how limited hardware resources would force game developers to write creative, original and addictive games. Knight Lore, RedHawk, Manic Miner, Heavy on the Magick, Spellbound, Knight Tyme, Skooldaze, Sweevo's World and above all Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge were among the best games I have played on any platform. Shame on game developers for the formulaic crap they spew these days.
Does anyone else remember CRASH magazine? Whatever happened to those guys? It was almost worth being a spectrum owner just for that mag. Best and funniest game reviews ever, and Oliver Frey's covers were fantastic. For years I wanted to meet a girl like the one on this cover he did.
ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/magazi
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
I've also made a 25th anniversary hardware project for the Sinclair Spectrum - an add-on board to be used for helping diagnose problems with sick Sinclair Spectrums:
http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Spectrum-Diag
It uses LEDs to display the test progress and status, so even if you can't get a picture out of the Spectrum, you can at least find out if the CPU and memory is working, and a good idea whether the ULA is servicable.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Living in Eastern Europe, we didn't have access to most western hardware/software.
When I was 7, my father built a 48K Spectrum from scratch using smuggled components (the Z80 processor, the EEPROMs), parts from other computers (the case and keyboard); he made the PCB by himself as well as copying and programming the ROMs. I still remember the hardware debugging sessions.
Later we managed to make the Interface II (I think that was its name) addon board and get a floppy drive to work. It was an East-German Robotron 5.25" drive; we were using 360Kb Bulgarian floppies (sorry, can't remember the brand).
It was a wonderful machine and it's the way I got into computers and learn assembler (Zeus ruled). At 12 I was busy cracking the games' copy protection to be able to copy them from tape to disks. Oh, btw, games had to be smuggled in too - one network used airline pilots, some of the few kind of people who could travel outside the country with ease. Don't get me started with books, it was hard even to photocopy one, as access to photocopiers was restricted.
I worked for Acorn from '79 to -'82, primarily programming (in assembler) the 6502 based BBC micro (and it's little brother the Electron), and from what I can recall the 6502 was - at same clock speed - faster than the Z80. The Z80's main advantage was being available in higher clock speeds, althogh the 6502 did I think get up to 4MHz in the end
While the Z80 had more registers, the 6502 had "page 0" addresses that allowed offset-only access to the first 256 bytes of RAM, which in a way made up for it. The 6502 instruction set was very minimal, and in fact was the inspiration for the ARM RISC processor designed by Acorn (originall ARM = Acorn RISC Machine, later re-acronymed as Advanced RISC machine).
The trick with getting performance out of the 6502 (or any of the early 8 bitters) was to execute as few instructions as possible - things like the BBC Basic and Acorns's ISO Pascal (I was 1/2 of the team that wrote the latter) were written in extremely hand optimized assember. You would never do JSR sub; RET - always JMP sub instead. Never do LD A, 0 (two bytes), always XOR A, A (one byte, same effect) instead. Never JMP addr, when you knew the state of the CPU flags and could do JRZ addr (jump relative on zero flag vs jump absolute) instead.
These are only a few examples, but it was surprising how much fucntionality you could fit into a tiny space by using efficient code like this. The Acorn ISO Pascal implementation fitted into 2 16KB EPROMS, yet packed in a full ISO compliant Pascal compiler (written in Pascal, and self-compiling to an internal pseudo-code - 16KB), the pseudo-code interpreter, run-time library (floating point, heap, I/O, etc), full screen editor (in 4KB of code) with regular expression search/replace, block move etc, and a command line interpreter.. The pseudo-code interpreter, etc, comprised the other 16KB and were all written in super-tight assembler... and the interpreter had to self-relocate itself out of EPROM into RAM to be able to run the compiler since the two 16K EPROMS (1 = compiler in pseudo-code, 2 = p-code interpreter, etc) occupied the same address space in the BBC micro.
Computing was generally a hell of a lot more fun back then, partly because it was new but also partly because of the challenge of getting stuff like this to run given the limitied CPU/memory resources. I hate to think how big a modern ISO Pascal implementation with all the extras (interpreter, library, screen editor, etc) would be - maybe a factor of 1000 times bigger (32MB vs 32K) or thereabouts?!
Those really were the good old days, although it's also exciting what's possible given the speed/memory available today.