talkmagic.co.uk

Classic!
http://www.bitterwallet.com/clash-of-th ... trum/16177

That's a thing of beauty!

Absolutely awesome! I used to spend hours glued to my Spectrum.

Grimshaw wrote:Absolutely awesome! I used to spend hours glued to my Spectrum.

Me too. I still remember waiting 6 minutes for Flight Simulator to load

I usaed to set mine loading in the morning and go to school, so that it'd be ready when I came home. I seem to remember that Arcadia took about half an hour to load!

My last PC, before it died, had one of those Spectrum Emulators on there. I think you've got to pay for it now, but it made me quite misty eyed to play all those old games again. I don't play games anymore on computers, but it did make me think how much they had to rely on playability because the graphics were so basic. Very BASIC in fact.

And the best bit was the web site i got the emulator from let you have all the games for free. The only ones who didnt muck in with relinquishing programs were Code Masters. Remember them? With all their BMX Simulator chicanery? And Ollie & Lisa.

Ahhhh good times.

You can still get any number of emulators to play the old games on. A number of the original copyright owners have now given permission for their games to be released for free.

A current list is maintained here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/permits/publishers.html

Wishmaster wrote:You can still get any number of emulators to play the old games on. A number of the original copyright owners have now given permission for their games to be released for free.

A current list is maintained here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/permits/publishers.html

I have a feeling I know what I'm doing in my hotel tonight!

Grimshaw wrote:Absolutely awesome! I used to spend hours glued to my Spectrum.

Me, too! And that was just waiting for the games to load.

I had a +2 and I remember on numerous occasions waiting twenty minutes for Elite to load, only for it to crash. I then had to rewind the tape and patiently wait for it to load again (and hope it didn't crash yet again). Those were the days. Kids these days don't know how good they've got it.

I never had a spectrum, though my dad had some games lying around. I went straight to the Comodore 64 and I can't remember a single game that took less than half an hour to load from a tape, but I did have one game on a cartridge; that was special!

I had a ZX81 (in fact, I've got one here now, just over there...) I didn't have a spectum, but I did get heavily into emulators in the 90s and have pretty much every one available at the time.

Back when games were games

Take care, Ian

lords of midnight
deatchase 2000
way of the exploding fist
barry mcguigan's boxing
daley thompson's decathlon
knightlore
attic attack
match of the day
the hobbit
rock n roll wrestling

they were probably my faves...

And weren't we chuffed when we could tell others when the title screen was loading due to the different sound.... and didn't Daley's Decathlon quickly wreck the joystick with all that frantic waggling?

For our US members, you might know this beastie under the Timex brand name as Sinclair couldn't get a market in the US under their own name for some reason.

I never had a Spectrum, although a friend of mine did.

I was posh and had a Texas Instruments 99/4. State of the art, mate. 16K RAM! Sixteen colours! Sound effects AND musical tones!

This page shows the TI with all the optional "sidecar" attachments. Luckily, I did have a large desk. The floppy disk drive (the black shoebox-sized thing on the end) was connected by a cable, so it didn't have to daisy-chain in a straight line like the other modules. I had it on an upper shelf of the desk. When I got a printer, it sat on a small table beside the desk because there was just no more room.

The official demo. Gosh, that takes me back...

It's strange, but the microcontrollers I'm working with to create electronic effects run at 16MHz and have at most 32K of on board non-volatile memory. And yet, 30 years have passed. They use and the latest chip technology and are programmed not in BASIC but in C/C++ using state of the art integrated project support environments. You can even interface them to USB pen drives for massive, instant storage. It would be so cool to use them to create an 80's home computer with an old telly for output.

Oh god, what have I done? The dread word "interesting" has entered my mind! PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME DO IT!