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Spectrum Vega: A Blast From the Past
mikejuk writes A new games console is being launched based on the classic Sinclair ZX Spectrum from the 80s. Within days of the start of its Indiegogo campaign all of the 1000 Limited Edition Spectrum Vegas had been claimed but there is still the chance to get your hands on one of the second batch. The Sinclair Spectrum Vega is really retro in the sense that it plugs into a TV, thus avoiding the need for a monitor, and comes complete with around 1,000 games built-in. Games are accessed through a menu based system, and once selected load automatically, taking the player directly into the game play mode. This is very different from the original Spectrum with its rubber-topped keyboard and BASIC interface. If you have existing Spectrum games you'd like to play, you can use an SD card to load them onto the Vega, though the current publicity material doesn't give much clue as to how you go from ancient cassette tape to SD card. As for programming new games, there are ZX Spectrum emulators for Windows that are free and ready to use.
Not having a keyboard (onscreen keyboards suck), and being required to load an emulator onto your PC to program make this an item for people who want to have a bit of nostalgia without actually reliving the past.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I never had access to a Sinclair. I did own a Mattel aquarius, but did not have the controllers and games. All I did was try to program in the (16 or 64) whatever it had memory in BASIC. Learned quite a bit then. Primarily that while I can program (some) it is not my forte. I am a hardware geek at heart.
Silence is a state of mime.
The article is light on technical details, so I wonder if it's an emulator like the NeogeoX, or a reimplementation like the C64 DTV. The price also seems a bit steep since it is now possible to re-implement a full ZX Spectrum on a user-friendly FPGA board which loads games from sound files dumped from tapes. Compatibility is still worked on but you get many other systems as an added bonus, and the HDL code for all of it is open source and available online.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
No-one thinks that the ZX Spectrum was a world-wide phenomenon. You're thinking that because you're interpreting overwhelmingly British media through the eyes of American media (which *does* pitch purely American things as a world-wide phenomenon). Sinclair Research were (are) a British company. The Spectrum was a British computer, and was notoriously eccentric. The American release was a Timex (T-1000, perhaps? I forget, because American media means fuck all to me because I'm not American, and though I don't kid myself that British releases mean jack to Yanks, I must also admit that purely Yank release mean genuinely jack to me, too - oh God the irrelevance hurts, don't it? No? Of course it fucking doesn't, and neither should it), and as I remember did quite poorly. The Russian clones went strong for quite some time.
In the UK, the Spectrum not just contended with the C64 but actually beat it, while the slightly later Amstrad CPC-464 was a worthy contender albeit released a bit too late. We also had the BBC-B, an early Acorn machine, as a third corner of the triangle. (We had a plethora of other machines such as the Dragon 32 and the Oric, along with things like the Vic-20, but I'd say the Spectrum, the C64 and the BBC-B were the three front-runners in the UK.) Outside the UK? Who cares? This kind of thing is marketed at people who remember the Spectrum the first time around. If that doesn't include you, fine - don't buy it. I won't buy it either because there's no fucking point - those Windows emulators they talk about work better than this shit does and, guess what, *also plug into a telly!!11! wowz!!!*, but at least I'm not going to bitch about a target market while totally failing to understand their target market.
TL;DR You're not their target market, because you're a Yank, and despite what you think no-one things the Spectrum was a "world-wide phenomenon" except you. I'm their target market, because I'm a Brit of the right age. And neither of us will buy one, because it's a fucking stupid idea in the first place.
For me, 'classic' would be the Apple II or the early 8088 XT clones, or possibly even the early Macs like the Plus or the SE.
'classic' as a term doesn't really mean anything, other than related to nostalgia from a past era, and nostalgia is entirely subjective. Certainly some things enjoy wide nostalgia, like big-band music, the Radio Flyer, and the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, but most other things lack that widespread appeal.
No one cares about the Apple Newton eMate or the the Packard Bell PB500, but a few had them and had some decent memories from using them. That doesn't mean that such people expect others to share in that perspective.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
While early computers had very limited graphics and usually no sound, the arrival of colour and sound (er beeps) resulted in a large number of games and kids at the time clamoured to get a spectrum, C64 or whatever because it was a games machine and nothing else to them. Sure, you could program them but very few did. I started on a Commodore Pet (horrible BASIC) and went through the Sinclairs, the BBC Micro and then onto UNIX machines skipping PCs entirely (at least until Linux came along) and what I appreciated about all these was the ability to program them (same goes for Linux) but I was a minority.
The sad thing is once you got to PCs and GUIs, programming was largely a thing of the past. My son just got interested in computers and asked me to teach him to program so I pulled my actual Spectrum out and gave it to him. Sadly, age hasn't been kind to the hardware so the modulator failed and wouldn't display a picture. I bypassed that and got composite video out but in the process the keyboard membrane cracked so I had to order a new replacement (yay for retro computer fans) and it works again. He's getting on well and hasn't really shown interest in games on it. I did load up Manic Miner for a laugh but it was awful. I forgot how precise you had to be.
I just wish this was a real Spectrum with a keyboard. As it stands, meh. Emulators are also hard work without the real keyboard.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
From the linK:
If you want to use an emulator, you don't need one of these. Just get a tablet with an HDMI connection, or an Ouya, or a jailbroken Wii.
I was wondering if this implements the Spectrum in hardware the same way the Commodore 64 direct-to-TV did, but apparently not.
Some of the emulators even allowed you to load directly from tape with a simple interface.
As far as I'm aware, the Vega *is* effectively just a cheap ARM-based computer running an emulator anyway (as opposed to a logic-level reimplementation of the original circuitry like the C64 Direct to TV was), supplied in a parodically cut-down mockery of the original Spectrum keyboard.
If I was a Spectrum fanatic, I'd want something that was either a "true" reimplementation of the original Spectrum and/or something that looked and could be used like the original Spectrum- possibly with additional features or connectivity, but retaining the original features.
This is- in some respects- better than Elite's "relaunch" of the ZX Spectrum (reported as such in many places) as a Bluetooth keyboard (i.e. they designed a Bluetooth keyboard that approximates the old Spectrum case and works with some crappy proprietary Android app). But that's a pretty low bar... the Vega is still just an emulator in a nostalgia-exploiting case that won't properly replicate the experience anyway, so why bother? I've no doubt it'll still sell, though.
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For me, 'classic' would be the Apple II or the early 8088 XT clones
I guess the GP meant a/the good classic ;D
The thing though is - and maybe the GP was trolling and I'm falling for the bait - as far as the rest of the world that is not North America (and maybe Japan too) was concerned, the Spectrum *was* a world-wide phenomenon. He could have used the argument that the C64 was technically superior, and then there would be few people to argue that. But market-wise, as you correctly pointed out, the Spectrum beat the shit out of the C64, and not only on the UK, but most of the world.
Case in point: I'm from Brazil, we didn't have legit Spectrums here back then, but we had locally-made clones, which amounted to the same thing and ended up getting exported to all of South America, and you know what? The only way anyone on Latin America knew the C64 actually existed was that it was often mentioned on computer magazines, and that was it - I never knew anyone who even heard about of the C64 around here, let alone owned one. We heard a lot about the TRS-80, Apple II (or rather its clones that were produced locally), MSX and so on, and it wasn't uncommon to find users of such systems, but the C64? Nada. I understand the C64 actually managed to chew a bit more of the market on some parts of europe, but the Spectrum was still far more popular. IIRC, on Russia the situation was similar to South America, in that they had Spectrum clones, and the C64 was a computer only the US cared about.
I grew up in Serbia and Spectrum meant the world to many kids in my generation, even though we had no direct connection with the UK market whatsoever -- no magazines or TV programs or anything really. So it is fair to say that Spectrum was a cross-European phenomenon. C64 was (almost) equally present, though everyone I knew who had a Commodore just played games, whereas lots of Spectrum folks dabbled in programming, at least a little.
In the USA and Canada, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum did not exist.
In the U.S. I had a Timex-Sinclair 2068, which was basically the Spectrum but with some improvements.
It was a lot nicer to use and program for than the Timex-Sinclair 1000 (ZX-81), really a pretty solid machine and nice to program for.
It absolutely was a classic in every sense that the C64 was, just for a smaller group of people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'll be interested to see how many rights holders agree to contribute their games for free, especially when the unit itself is being sold for such a tidy profit. I can't imagine it would be very many.
Or maybe they plan on shipping the games of 'uncontactable' (ie those who don't reply) rights holders and 'remove' them if they later turn up and complain? Kind of shifty if this is the case.
Someone I know has pointed out that Clive SInclair doesn't actually even own the rights to the Speccy; he sold them to Amstrad. So having him as a shareholder may not actually give this mob the right to replicate the likeness or the ROMS.
This could prove interesting...
Is it going to have "R:Tape Loading Error"?
That was always my favourite.
£20 for a RPi.
£10 for an SD card.
£10 for a pretty casing.
£10 per hour of faffing about getting it to work and installing 1000 games for it.
And you have spent as much in time/money as it costs, for an unlicensed, homebrew, sort-it-out-yourself solution, without electrical certifications, etc. as it costs for an off-the-shelf "just works" official Spectrum-y looking cool gadget.
The price is not a problem. The licensing may well be, but that's another matter.
The beauty of the Spectrum was that the design was ingeniously simple, and the hardware and software/firmware was so well documented, that actually you knew the machine inside in and out, and could do whatever you fancied with it.
Good times. I actually maintained some correspondence with the authors of warajevo, and their original tape routine was "stolen" from me with my permission.
Thing is ZX Spectrum is part of my childhood, and as my thesis I wrote the first emulator for Windows. I cut my teeth on understanding how a computer worked, and BASIC was too limited for me, it was almost assembly from the very beginning. The best present my father gave me was either a book of Z80 programming and I asked for money to buy the ZX Spectrum ROM listing. And thanks for the MicroHobby and their articles, we knew that machine inside out. But besides this, at the time, we had the notion that games were too limited, and that darn tape interface was horrid and slow. Some things are best left in the past. While I enjoy the ocasional peek or game on an emulator, it is just ocasional. An iPad or iPhone nowadays is a world of distance in capabilities, and whilst that games are the basis to many of the ideas of later games, they are rather poor on the interface side, and the sound is terrible. The speccy would be another machine with a proper sound chip. It would be far more interesting to have a interface to develop and debug assembly as an educational introduction to programming. P.S. I still have a directory of around 6000 speccy games on my NAS at home.
Are you sure? I am from Portugal, and in Portugal and Spain people were crazy about it. In Brazil, they invented clones because of stupid restriction on trade and heavy taxes on imported computers. In the USA Timex sold TC and TS clones, that were also used a lot in Latin america. In Russia there were lots of "pirate"/non-licensed clones too, that were widely used in the former east block country. The thing with Spectrum is that it was cheap and the hardware was quite easy to understand.
Pity you post as anon. Long live MicroHobby.
Online archive of the most popular magazine for the ZX Spectrum in Portugal and Spain, and for those saying ZX Spectrum was only a uk craze. http://www.microhobby.org/
the death of the Spectrum for me was the Psion Series 3. Still got mine, same one I bought in 1991 just before I started college. Did all my WP on that.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I used it constantly for a good two years. The tape was always out of order, and I remember I blew up around 3 or 4 tape recorders with it, and my parents were not too happy of my using of the tape recorders and the TV. I clearly remember at one point my father literally kicked the tape recorder out of frustration. There were maybe months in a row I wrote my assembly programs in paper, and poked them on BASIC to try them because I had not a tape recorder in working conditions. By around the 3rd year I bought myself a XT, and maybe a year and something after, or two, a 386SX, and I only picked up the Spectrum maybe one year later on where I experimented with it during summer time to understand better some undocumented instructions for an emulator I was beginning to write in C.