Yeah, I definitely came over a bit harsher than I'd intended. The Spectrum was a great machine at the time it was released (cheaper and mostly better than the Vic 20; and the C64 which came out a few months later was more expensive, especially in the early days). For all its faults, it deserves respect:-)
Chuckie Egg II was a different game though: more than 200 screens, it was a massive game, very similar with another great classic "Manic Miner" - a personal favorite of mine. Yeah; for the sequels to popular games, companies always seemed torn between doing "more of the same" and doing something completely different with the same characters...
Was the Sam Coupe meant to be released earlier? I've only read a little about the machine, but I do remember thinking that 1989 (when the ST/Amiga market was approaching its peak, and the writing was already on the wall for the 8-bits) was really too late for them to be releasing such a machine. Had it come out in 1986, I'm guessing that it might have done really well....?
Not only that, but the 48K was the toughest piece of computing equipment I ever had. As an intolerant little kid, I remember throwing it, stamping on it, and generally treating it like shit. Once a key fell off. How the hell did you get a key to fall off the Speccy?! It was an all-in-one rubber membrane! Or perhaps you had the Spectrum +, with its Lego-like pseudo-real keyboard?
I don't know about Chuckie Egg II, but why was the original Chuckie Egg so damn popular? I played that on both the BBC Micro and my Atari 800XL, and I couldn't understand what the deal was. It's just a platform game, and I've seen more playable ones, and ones with better graphics. It's not even one of those cases where I dislike a game on grounds of personal taste, but can understand others opinion; it just looks like a run-of-the-mill platform game to me.
Seriously, I don't mean to disparage your enjoyment, because lots of people seem to like it (or at least the original Chuckie Egg), but.... I just don't get it. Sorry:-/
Arguably the fastest, in theory, 8-bit machine was the Atari series. [..] But again, these machines always finished at the bottom of the heap in BASIC benchmarks, which again demonstrates the point at the top. So the BASIC wasn't that fast, big deal. It doesn't say that much about the machine itself; Turbo BASIC was miles faster.
I don't know how fast the C64's BASIC is, but it was certainly crude and reliant on control characters and POKEs for even the simplest graphics and sound. In other words, you were *forced* to "hit the hardware" (i.e. bypass BASIC) to access facilities that the BASIC didn't support. This is always going to be faster, but by definition you can't claim that the BASIC itself is faster because of this. FWIW, the Atari was also supposedly much faster if you POKEd directly to the screen in BASIC.
The fanboy wars in the 80s were a bit sad then and here we have them all over again. To be fair, the GP has a fair point; the C64 may have had better hardware (albeit with a slower processor), but its BASIC was generally *not* considered to be one of its strong points. In fact, IIRC, C= basically rehashed the PET's (by now ancient) BASIC implementation because they already had the rights to that from MS.
Spectrum BASIC was nothing outstanding, but at least it didn't rely on countless POKEs and control characters for simple graphics and sound.
FWIW, I didn't own either machine, and if either were shite in any particular respect, I'd be quite happy to say so, so there:-P
Only eejits bought the 16k version of the Speccy. Or people who weren't loaded with money. You were obviously one of those spoilt little gits. **** off back to your rich parents.
No, I didn't have a Spectrum, let alone a 16K model; but in the early days there was a major price difference, and one has to remember that the £175 for the 48K model would translate to almost £400 in today's money. The 16K model was "only" £125.
Most C64 games only ran with a horizontal resolution of 160, as supposed to our 256 horizonal pixels They could have used the same pixel-size with similar restrictions as the Spectrum had (except that because the C64 was able to use more of the screen width, this gave a 320 pixel-width, not 256.) I'm guessing that they consciously because the increased flexibility of the lower-resolution modes more than made up for the "advantages" you describe. The Spectrum's apparently high resolution on paper isn't so good in practice because it has to (e.g.) dither those shades denied by the limited palette and colour resolution; see this post for my views on this.
gave a far, far superior resolution-to-memory-size footprint almost entirely negating the missing 16k of memory, particularly if you were doublebuffering. Probably did the desired job of speeding graphics manipulation up a bit, as well as saving memory, but I'd still rather have the C64's graphics.
Actually, disk drives (both 5.25" and then-newfangled 3.5") were available for the Spectrum. Just not from Sinclair. Which is probably why virtually no commercial games were available on floppy disk for the system.
It's notable that much later (late 1987, IIRC) Amstrad released the Spectrum +3, which had a built-in floppy drive. However, in common with the disk versions of the Amstrad CPC, the +3 used those stupid nonstandard 3" disks. (The 3" format lost the microfloppy war to the better-known 3.5" format. I heard that Amstrad got them cheap for this reason, and that's why they liked them).
However, the +3 didn't do too well; it wasn't all *that* much cheaper than the much better Atari ST (which was quite popular in Europe during the late 80s, until the Amiga came down in price and overtook it). And despite official support this time, there still weren't many Spectrum games on 3" disk.
Sr Clive also gifted us with the Sinclair QL, another product the market largely ignored despite its potentials. From what I've heard, the problem with the QL was that it was marketed to businesses, not the enthusiast market. I've also read that the QL was quite flakey when it launched (i.e. lots of bugs) and that the Microdrives were unproven; much as I hate to say it, I would not have entrusted my business to such a machine, even if it was technologically brilliant.
The Acorn Archimedes was meant to be a powerful innovative PC. But the "market" was aimed to IBM PCs and to Amigas The Amiga was a fantastic and cutting-edge machine when it came out. Don't compare it against the PC which (even at its launch) was conservative and based on pre-existing off-the-shelf technology.
Yes now you mention it, you're right. But I still thought of them as sprites, I used to think of "sprite" clashing. What's the difference, in the end? Character placeholders are "virtual" 8x8 sprites, if you mess around in your code anyway, no? I think they mean hardware sprite support. "Sprites" on the Spectrum were all generated by "manual" software manipulation of pixels on the screen. The C64 and Atari 400/800/XL/XE included hardware support for sprites. For example, on the Atari 800, you could superimpose differently-coloured PMGs (hardware sprites) onto a monochromatic background; actually, PMGs were the height of the screen, so by changing their position on different scan lines, you could generate multiple sprites from one hardware PMG and not have to worry about messing up the background. (The ability to easily change palette/PMG position/character set/etc on multiple scan lines was one of those tricks that made the Atari powerful and able to overcome some of its limitations).
Only better if the game you were playing required 12 shades of chunky brown graphics. As someone who owned an 8-bit Atari computer and thus has no axe to grind either way (I hated both the "Commode 64" and the "Spectrash" on principle at the time:-) ), I'll say this....
20 years later, the Spectrum's graphics look *way* more dated than those of the C64. Partly this is down to the limited colour resolution and subsequent "attribute clash". This meant that (at best) individual objects were monochromatically coloured, and at worst large swathes of the play area were. I'm aware that clever programming could minimise the clash, but it could never be eliminated.
The other problem was the limited colour palette; 8 in-your-face primary/secondary colours with two brightness levels. You take the mick out of the C64's "brown" palette, but at least it could do subtle; and it *could* do primaries if required. Granted, the Spectrum's colours *were* more vibrant than the C64's, but that's all it could do!! The only non-saturated colours were black and white, and the colour-resolution/attribute-clash closed off dithering as a way around the problem.
Clever layout design was the best that could be done to minimise the problem, but it seems to me that (in part due to the machine's lack of graphical flexibility), the Spectrum's graphical limitations could not really be worked around.
I'll admit that in the mid-80s I was jealous of the widespread support that the Spectrum had in the UK, and even wanted to play a lot of the games that weren't available for the Atari. I look at them now though, and the graphics just appear *really* dated and garish, far more so than those of the C64.
FWIW, I don't hate the Spectrum; it was a fantastically-priced machine at the time (far cheaper than the C64 at launch), and its limitations were forgivable in the light of this. The problem was the design decisions which let them do this; they were fine when the machine launched in 1982. Most arcade games then featured bright simple graphics against black backgrounds, computer game graphics were simple as anything, and so (e.g.) the limited palette and colour resolution were acceptable compromises. Unfortunately, within a few years, computer games had improved with (e.g.) more detailed characters and fancy backgrounds. These presented major problems for the Spectrum, particularly in light of better machines that had arrived since its launch.
Although the sound was improved with the launch of the 128K models, the Spectrum's limited graphics hardware were never improved (despite Timex having launched an "improved" Spectrum that addressed these issues circa 1983/84), and had dated badly by the late 1980s. Its incredible popularity even then demonstrates the power of an installed software base.
Huh? The C64's MS BASIC implementation was crude and archaic; it originated on the PET. That lacked support for the most simple facilities; you had to use POKEs to get them. The Spectrum BASIC was not brilliant, but it was better than that.
I think that your problem with Spectrum programming is due to Sinclair's "keyword" system. This first appeared on the ZX80. A single touch of a ZX80 key gave you a whole BASIC keyword (e.g. PRINT, GOTO). This was fast and simple. Symbols were accessed with SHIFT, and you could still type single letters when it was required.
A similar system was used on the ZX81 , but because it was more powerful, there were more keywords to squeeze onto the keyboard. Thus, some keywords required the user to type SHIFT+NEWLINE *then* hit the key.
Sinclair retained the "keyword" system for the ZX Spectrum. Unfortunately, this was *much* more complicated, and there were lots of keywords to fit in. This made the system complicated. Even at its release, the Spectrum was criticised for this. From "Your Computer" magazine:-
Sinclair invented the "one-touch key" system for the ZX-80, which ensured that the computer knew that the first key pressed after a line number, or after the word Then, would produce a keyword, such as Let, Print, Poke or Goto. This meant that programming was fast and positive. The ZX-81 demanded a sequence of key presses - such as Shift, then Function, then a key - to get the results you wanted. Sinclair is obviously wedded to the one-touch entry system, but it is really not suited to the Spectrum. The sequence of key presses required for Ink and Atn, for example, requires the same number of key presses as would be needed to type the word in directly. [..] The one-touch entry system, retained from the ZX-81, is not suitable for the Spectrum and leads to complicated multi-shift operations when keying some functions. It should have been discarded. I also found the Spectrum's keyword system too complicated. I remember having an argument in the school playground where a Spectrum owner said that he could type "RANDOMIZE" in less key presses than my machine.
Of course, at that time, I didn't realise that many BASIC keywords on my Atari 800XL could be abbreviated; for example "PRINT" could be "?", "LIST" could be "L.", and so on. Sinclair should have done that on the Spectrum instead.
Incidentally, when the enhanced 128K Spectrum was released, the new BASIC abandoned the keyword system.
On the other hand, the Japanese offered to take all the jews in Europe The same Japanese who were allied with Nazi Germany and gained an anti-semitic streak from them? Hmm, can't see any problem with that.
All because they can't accept an equal place in society. They didn't exactly get an equal place in Europe under the Nazis. Can't say I blame tham for not taking this one on trust.
They gotta be on top. After all, they're the chosen people. Yeah, well every damn religion or country thinks that they're the best at some level. If anyone (whatever their religion) tried pulling that one on me (a non-religious person), they'd get very short shrift. However, to single out one religion in particular is crap; hope to see you treating everyone whose religion includes such statements in a similar manner, as I'm sure you will. Right?
Because it is easier to type in bluerayplayer.com/blueray1030/index.php on your phone than to take a picture and send it? Rigghhhttt... I've only one thing to say... bastard offspring of TinyURL to the rescue.
Anyone else finds it pretty unfair that the registrar took the domain back from its owner, then allows someone else to buy it for hundreds of dollars? Pretty close to stealing if you ask me. If they did it once, they can do it again. Why would I want to pay out tens of thousands of dollars for a site when that could happen?
Even if I got that money returned, I'd assume that someone willing to spend that amount of money would have spent more money on, or be receiving more income from the site which they *wouldn't* get back.
Can we all agree that "blogosphere" is one of the worst buzzwords ever invented? It's one of those words that manages to sound both moronic and pretentious, like it was invented by a 12-year-old who wasn't half as clever as he liked to think he was.
Several episodes were broadcast live an never officially recorded. I don't believe that Doctor Who was ever broadcast live, although the early episodes were often *recorded* in an almost live manner (i.e. a single run-through, or something very close to it). However, some of the BBC's Quatermass serials were broadcast live, and I believe that many of *them* were never recorded. Perhaps that's what you had in mind?
I'm sufficiently paranoid that I use MD5 for some stuff as you suggest; if you're doing each disc/whatever at once and have no intention of adding to it at a future date, doing a single MD5 for all the files on the disc is fine. However, if you intend adding to the archive later, it's a bit of a nuisance keeping a single/multiple MD5 file(s) up-to-date.
I think the countless lost Doctor Who-episodes is a good example of how analog video storage isn't perfect either. That's because in most cases they *deliberately* got rid of them to free up space. It's nothing to do with deterioration of the original videotapes/film.
From what I remember, some of the original 'Babylon 5' negatives were eaten by rats. When asked why they hadn't eaten the original Star Trek negatives, the rats replied "We're not that desparate."
I don't disagree that digg sucks -- when you give away free money (mod points) it rapidly becomes worthless. Mod points aren't- or rather shouldn't be- viewed in such a way. Ideally they should be seen as tools to ensure that more insightful and/or interesting comments (whether or not you agree with them) are modded up.
Unfortunately, if you have more than a small amount of partisanship, no meta-moderation and no transparency, it doesn't work that way.
If Digg were giving away enough free *real* money, I'd still be using it.:-)
This is exactly what happened to BYTE. It was the largest and most respected magazine in its field for at least an entire generation and then the new owners switched to an online model. If I remember correctly (Jerry Pournelle wrote an article about it, but I can't find it now), the dead-tree incarnation of Byte ended some time before it was resurrected online. Perhaps they always intended it to go online eventually, anyway.
However, the explanation I heard is (IIRC) that although Byte was well-respected and had a decent readership of people who should (theoretically) be leading Computer Science and IT types, it was hard to sell to advertisers, because the demographic was unclear. And, as we know (or ought to know) magazines and newspapers make most of their profit from advertising.
Another generation learns the old truth... the upstarts always seem to start as the Good Guys taking on the Big Faceless Corporate Machines. [..] Then one day, the upstarts turn into the Big Bad Guys. There's just no way to tell the difference. The need to dominate the industry is overriding, and the end justifies every means. Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Slashdot Mirror
Next week: We reveal that Digg doesn't really love you, and is just using you for sex.
Yeah, I definitely came over a bit harsher than I'd intended. The Spectrum was a great machine at the time it was released (cheaper and mostly better than the Vic 20; and the C64 which came out a few months later was more expensive, especially in the early days). For all its faults, it deserves respect :-)
Was the Sam Coupe meant to be released earlier? I've only read a little about the machine, but I do remember thinking that 1989 (when the ST/Amiga market was approaching its peak, and the writing was already on the wall for the 8-bits) was really too late for them to be releasing such a machine. Had it come out in 1986, I'm guessing that it might have done really well....?
I don't know about Chuckie Egg II, but why was the original Chuckie Egg so damn popular? I played that on both the BBC Micro and my Atari 800XL, and I couldn't understand what the deal was. It's just a platform game, and I've seen more playable ones, and ones with better graphics. It's not even one of those cases where I dislike a game on grounds of personal taste, but can understand others opinion; it just looks like a run-of-the-mill platform game to me.
:-/
Seriously, I don't mean to disparage your enjoyment, because lots of people seem to like it (or at least the original Chuckie Egg), but.... I just don't get it. Sorry
I don't know how fast the C64's BASIC is, but it was certainly crude and reliant on control characters and POKEs for even the simplest graphics and sound. In other words, you were *forced* to "hit the hardware" (i.e. bypass BASIC) to access facilities that the BASIC didn't support. This is always going to be faster, but by definition you can't claim that the BASIC itself is faster because of this. FWIW, the Atari was also supposedly much faster if you POKEd directly to the screen in BASIC.
Spectrum BASIC was nothing outstanding, but at least it didn't rely on countless POKEs and control characters for simple graphics and sound.
FWIW, I didn't own either machine, and if either were shite in any particular respect, I'd be quite happy to say so, so there
No, I didn't have a Spectrum, let alone a 16K model; but in the early days there was a major price difference, and one has to remember that the £175 for the 48K model would translate to almost £400 in today's money. The 16K model was "only" £125. Most C64 games only ran with a horizontal resolution of 160, as supposed to our 256 horizonal pixels They could have used the same pixel-size with similar restrictions as the Spectrum had (except that because the C64 was able to use more of the screen width, this gave a 320 pixel-width, not 256.) I'm guessing that they consciously because the increased flexibility of the lower-resolution modes more than made up for the "advantages" you describe. The Spectrum's apparently high resolution on paper isn't so good in practice because it has to (e.g.) dither those shades denied by the limited palette and colour resolution; see this post for my views on this. gave a far, far superior resolution-to-memory-size footprint almost entirely negating the missing 16k of memory, particularly if you were doublebuffering. Probably did the desired job of speeding graphics manipulation up a bit, as well as saving memory, but I'd still rather have the C64's graphics.
It's notable that much later (late 1987, IIRC) Amstrad released the Spectrum +3, which had a built-in floppy drive. However, in common with the disk versions of the Amstrad CPC, the +3 used those stupid nonstandard 3" disks. (The 3" format lost the microfloppy war to the better-known 3.5" format. I heard that Amstrad got them cheap for this reason, and that's why they liked them).
However, the +3 didn't do too well; it wasn't all *that* much cheaper than the much better Atari ST (which was quite popular in Europe during the late 80s, until the Amiga came down in price and overtook it). And despite official support this time, there still weren't many Spectrum games on 3" disk.
The Acorn Archimedes was meant to be a powerful innovative PC. But the "market" was aimed to IBM PCs and to Amigas The Amiga was a fantastic and cutting-edge machine when it came out. Don't compare it against the PC which (even at its launch) was conservative and based on pre-existing off-the-shelf technology.
20 years later, the Spectrum's graphics look *way* more dated than those of the C64. Partly this is down to the limited colour resolution and subsequent "attribute clash". This meant that (at best) individual objects were monochromatically coloured, and at worst large swathes of the play area were. I'm aware that clever programming could minimise the clash, but it could never be eliminated.
The other problem was the limited colour palette; 8 in-your-face primary/secondary colours with two brightness levels. You take the mick out of the C64's "brown" palette, but at least it could do subtle; and it *could* do primaries if required. Granted, the Spectrum's colours *were* more vibrant than the C64's, but that's all it could do!! The only non-saturated colours were black and white, and the colour-resolution/attribute-clash closed off dithering as a way around the problem.
Clever layout design was the best that could be done to minimise the problem, but it seems to me that (in part due to the machine's lack of graphical flexibility), the Spectrum's graphical limitations could not really be worked around.
I'll admit that in the mid-80s I was jealous of the widespread support that the Spectrum had in the UK, and even wanted to play a lot of the games that weren't available for the Atari. I look at them now though, and the graphics just appear *really* dated and garish, far more so than those of the C64.
FWIW, I don't hate the Spectrum; it was a fantastically-priced machine at the time (far cheaper than the C64 at launch), and its limitations were forgivable in the light of this. The problem was the design decisions which let them do this; they were fine when the machine launched in 1982. Most arcade games then featured bright simple graphics against black backgrounds, computer game graphics were simple as anything, and so (e.g.) the limited palette and colour resolution were acceptable compromises. Unfortunately, within a few years, computer games had improved with (e.g.) more detailed characters and fancy backgrounds. These presented major problems for the Spectrum, particularly in light of better machines that had arrived since its launch.
Although the sound was improved with the launch of the 128K models, the Spectrum's limited graphics hardware were never improved (despite Timex having launched an "improved" Spectrum that addressed these issues circa 1983/84), and had dated badly by the late 1980s. Its incredible popularity even then demonstrates the power of an installed software base.
I think that your problem with Spectrum programming is due to Sinclair's "keyword" system. This first appeared on the ZX80. A single touch of a ZX80 key gave you a whole BASIC keyword (e.g. PRINT, GOTO). This was fast and simple. Symbols were accessed with SHIFT, and you could still type single letters when it was required.
A similar system was used on the ZX81 , but because it was more powerful, there were more keywords to squeeze onto the keyboard. Thus, some keywords required the user to type SHIFT+NEWLINE *then* hit the key.
Sinclair retained the "keyword" system for the ZX Spectrum. Unfortunately, this was *much* more complicated, and there were lots of keywords to fit in. This made the system complicated. Even at its release, the Spectrum was criticised for this. From "Your Computer" magazine:- Sinclair invented the "one-touch key" system for the ZX-80, which ensured that the computer knew that the first key pressed after a line number, or after the word Then, would produce a keyword, such as Let, Print, Poke or Goto. This meant that programming was fast and positive. The ZX-81 demanded a sequence of key presses - such as Shift, then Function, then a key - to get the results you wanted. Sinclair is obviously wedded to the one-touch entry system, but it is really not suited to the Spectrum. The sequence of key presses required for Ink and Atn, for example, requires the same number of key presses as would be needed to type the word in directly. [..] The one-touch entry system, retained from the ZX-81, is not suitable for the Spectrum and leads to complicated multi-shift operations when keying some functions. It should have been discarded. I also found the Spectrum's keyword system too complicated. I remember having an argument in the school playground where a Spectrum owner said that he could type "RANDOMIZE" in less key presses than my machine.
Of course, at that time, I didn't realise that many BASIC keywords on my Atari 800XL could be abbreviated; for example "PRINT" could be "?", "LIST" could be "L.", and so on. Sinclair should have done that on the Spectrum instead.
Incidentally, when the enhanced 128K Spectrum was released, the new BASIC abandoned the keyword system.
Even if I got that money returned, I'd assume that someone willing to spend that amount of money would have spent more money on, or be receiving more income from the site which they *wouldn't* get back.
I'm sufficiently paranoid that I use MD5 for some stuff as you suggest; if you're doing each disc/whatever at once and have no intention of adding to it at a future date, doing a single MD5 for all the files on the disc is fine. However, if you intend adding to the archive later, it's a bit of a nuisance keeping a single/multiple MD5 file(s) up-to-date.
Unfortunately, if you have more than a small amount of partisanship, no meta-moderation and no transparency, it doesn't work that way.
If Digg were giving away enough free *real* money, I'd still be using it.
However, the explanation I heard is (IIRC) that although Byte was well-respected and had a decent readership of people who should (theoretically) be leading Computer Science and IT types, it was hard to sell to advertisers, because the demographic was unclear. And, as we know (or ought to know) magazines and newspapers make most of their profit from advertising.