Speccy clone storms back for Christmas without a shred of Sinclair code The Spectrum is an inexpensive home entertainment gadget from Retro Games Ltd (RGL) that's hauntingly similar to a totally unrelated 1980s home entertainment device that was loved by millions. The Spectrum is a very familiar black slab with blue-gray rubber keys. It plugs into your TV set and lets you play a wide variety of …
I've been good. No really. I had a page up only last week and was merely a click away from ordering one for a mere kibblesworth short of sixty quid.
But I didn't. I told myself I absolutely didn't need one.
Setting up a speccy emulator is pretty trivial, so the real appeal of this particular device is that it has the appropriate keyboard.
Click through to the retailer.
For example, in the UK Smyths have them on their website and in stock now.
Though clicking HMV says '"The Spectrum Console" has now been discontinued and is no longer available.'
That could mean HMV have stopped selling them or it could mean the discounted price at Smyths is more a 'reduced to clear' thing?
> I see the "collector's edition" comes in white and has a joystick, but the printer's thermal not a sparky one like in the old days.
I had an Alphacom 32 on mine, which was a thermal printer anyway, so I am fine with that. Replaced with a Panasonic K-XP 1081 on a +D interface.
_Why can I still remember this?!_
...but very slow.
During the Covid lockdown, I succumbed to nostalgia, and bought from ebay a 4-pen Epson Hi-80 plotter, because I had done quite a lot of work with one in the '80s using BBC Micros, and I was at the same time resurrecting one of these systems. Only problem is that the pens are no longer available, and I spent more time bodging up how to use other pens that I never got around to reviving the software I used to drive it with.
The crazy thing is that it had an Epson RX-80 (dot matrix printer) mode, where it understood all of the commands, but emulated them with pen movements. Man, was that ever slow!
Nobody would allow the sparky printer nowadays, especially in America. The EM interference was crazy, and the smell of burning when it was operating was very off-putting.
I'm actually surprised that the high current draw did not crash the Spectrum, but I note that the printer did come with a beefed up power supply.
Although the original was inventive, it was in a Heath-Robinson way (for left-pondians, think Rube Goldberg, but remember Sinclair was English), very crude compared to pretty much any other printer out there.
> They rose in price a bit last year as people were fitting PI Zeros to them
Fitting a new PCB inside, such as a Pi of some form running an emulator, or an improved Spectrum-compatible motherboard, or even an N-Go, is why I highlighted that the membrane connectors for the keyboard are the same as in the original machine -- you can replace RGS's 2 PCBs with your own more easily.
> but now "The Spectrum" has arrived, demand has dropped.
It's a simpler 1-box setup, with better latency and no worries about pairing and so on.
Even if the code is a license-free compatible workalike, wouldn't the case design still be covered by copyright, whether or not they replaced "Sinclair" with "Retro"?
And I assume that the original "The C64" and "The A500" omitted the Commodore and Amiga branding because Commodore's IP and rights (brands, code, etc) have been split and are now a clusterfsck of owners and sublicensees that have to be dealt with and licensed separately, not because they didn't have *any* licensing rights.
So is that really the deal in *this* case?
When it suits them, they licence (e.g. C64 ROM, Amiga ROM, Atari 400). When it doesn't, they work around the licence (TheSpectrum, TheC64, TheAmiga names...). Colleen is the emulator used in The400 Mini, RGL use a fork of it, but it's not distributed.
Then they accumulate licences themselves and when it suits them go after others (Revive Machines and Horace here). I can't see the ZX80/81, QL, Jupiter Ace, or SAM Coupé scenes benefiting from a licence holder, or any particular reason to own Kempston, Quickshot, or Zipstick so why accumulate these licences? Also, registering Sinclair Spectrum as a trademark is sailing close to the wind given Comcast, but why didn't they use it for the name if they were confident in their own trademark?
> Then they accumulate licences themselves and when it suits them go after others (Revive Machines and Horace here).
This is good research -- well done. TBH I was only interested in the technology behind the thing myself. I approached the company repeatedly for info and although they replied and said they'd be happy to talk, they never did. So this article is based on publicly-available info.
I wasn't terribly interested in the conflicted ownership history myself, any more than I am in the Amiga IP rights. That's why I write about things like new machines, emulators, and OS releases, how they work and so on, while I leave the awkward questions of who owns what to others.
For what it's worth, for instance, on the Amiga stuff, both Cloanto and Hyperion have answered briefly with some materials and things like screenshots, but they mostly won't comment on ownership and so on. That's unhelpful to me as a journo, but it is prudent. Don't say anything then you can't get sued over it!
So, I've written about classic AmigaOS releases, AROS releases, the A1200-NG and its browser, RGL's THEA1200, the Spectrum Next, THE SPECTRUM, PiMiga, EmuTOS, the QL, and so on.
I'm interested in the tech. I'm not interested in the trademarks and I'm not really interested in the games.
I never owned a C64 or an Atari 8-bit so I am less interested in them.
Pretty sure Sinclair Spectrum as a non Sinclair trademark won't stand up to any scrutiny. If granted it's clearly unenforceable as even if Sinclair never registered the combination, both words will be trademarked at the time, and maintained by Sky (the current owners of Sinclair), and actively used in license agreements to this very day, so hardly dormant.
Combining the two to create a "new" trademark to be used to market a modern unlicensed recreation of the original product the trademarks were registered to protect, is, well, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be taken seriously in court, and probably would be wise for them not to test in court, as it might attract attention from the owner of the original trademarks and product IP.
> Pretty sure Sinclair Spectrum as a non Sinclair trademark won't stand up to any scrutiny.
I suspect that it is not a coincidence that this device doesn't say "Sinclair" anywhere on the machine or the packaging. Even if another company run by one of the proprietors has some IP it does not automatically grant it to this company... and this company has several years' practice at both creating and marketing devices which very carefully do not infringe on others' trademarks or their code.
> Sky (the current owners of Sinclair)
Not any more, no. Covered in the article.
The OpenSE ROM is interesting because, as I understand it, it's based on some of the ZX80 and/or ZX81 ROM. Sinclair didn't write the ROM or the BASIC itself: it contracted the work out to Steven Vickers through his company Nine Tiles Ltd. Vickers is alive and well, and Nine Tiles is still trading, and I some kind of a deal was struck to make this now ~45 YO ROM code FOSS... a deal which does _not_ apply to the later Spectrum iteration. Therefore an older ROM was enhanced to bring it up to Spectrum spec and make it compatible.
There's a lot of prior art for this.
The GW ROM by Geoff Wearmouth fixed a lot of bugs in Sinclair's original and that's been circulated for over 2 decades. I've exchanged many emails with Geoff. :-)
https://k1.spdns.de/Vintage/Sinclair/82/Sinclair%20ZX%20Spectrum/ROMs/gw03%20%27gosh%2C%20wonderful%27%20(Geoff%20Wearmouth)/gw03%20info.htm
The Investronica ROM for the pre-Sinclair Spanish version of the 128 is out there, called Derby Plus. It is more like the original and doesn't have the menus or full-screen editor.
https://forum.tlienhard.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=2778
It doesn't have full screen editing, but it sort of does... This (from 1:00 onwards) shows it running a built-in full-screen text editor which is just for editing string variables, which you can save to tape afterwards with the BASIC SAVE command.
> especially as it's not 100% compatible.
There's an option in the setup menus to load real Sinclair ROM images. It is legal to download those so they are easy to find.
Then, it is. Better than: with real ROMs it's closer than even one of the later Amstrad Spectrum models.
I would query the Harlequin, clever as it is. (It's based on RGL founder Chris Smith's reverse-engineering of the ULA but without using a ULA or a modern replacement.
There are smaller better Spectrum clones out there -- the unique thing about the Harlequin is its use of off-the-shelf components which Sinclair could have used at the time -- but then the original Spectrum would have cost as much as a BBC Micro or something (circa £400-£500 1982 pounds.)
The Sizif-512 is a clever modern half-size recreation:
https://github.com/UzixLS/zx-sizif-512
The most desirable is probably the N-Go, which gives you all the abilities of a Spectrum Next: 28 MHz speed, more RAM, more colours, etc. and the ability to load cores so it can become a QL or a Beeb or whatever you fancy.
> "[ Harlequin uses ] off-the-shelf components which Sinclair could have used at the time -- but then the original Spectrum would have cost [..](circa £400-£500 1982 pounds.)"
Interestingly, that's the main difference between the ZX80 and ZX81 at a hardware level. The 80 used off-the-shelf chips.
The 81 circuitry was functionally almost identical- with minor changes to support the continuous display- but reduced costs by reimplementing the design to replace 18 of the 21 chips with a single custom ULA.
The ZX81 also had a new, improved ROM, but one could upgrade existing 80s by installing it, such were the similarities.
The most desirable is the Sinclair Spectrum Next, which is fully licensed and legal and officially a Sinclair licensed by the original company (made by SpecNext Ltd.).
The Next is the most compatible of all Spectrum platforms, being able to switch mode between all the various official Spectrum releases and most clones, to give an authentic experience with near perfect timing. And it can do so with output to HDMI which with regard to border effects designed for CRT technology with different timings than modern screens is a mighty feat (and of course it does support CRT with original timings).
It also has a bunch of peripherals baked into the core, providing 512 colours, 3 (or arguably more) layers, sprites, 4 AYs, multi-face type functionality, 2MB of bankable RAM, modern display output, SD storage (a Spectrum with a hard drive!), Wi-Fi (download and play almost any game in a few seconds), hardware compatibility via classic edge connector, and the nicest keyboard known to man (modern membrane with modern performance), although some may prefer the mechanical keyboard of the N-Go. This might not interest those who just want to play manic miner forever, but if you like to tinker or have unfulfilled childhood dreams, it's really, really, great, and even as a game player, there are now hundreds of titles to explore created both commercially and as passion projects by newbies and established giants of the era. It's an active place for innovation in an accessible bare metal environment. I genuinely haven't turned my Xbox on for at least 6 months.
The N-Go is a clone of the first release of the Spectrum Next (with a couple of fixes) and 2MB RAM. The original Next only had 1MB with sockets for the £10 RAM to upgrade it to 2MB which most people did.
The second release has 2MB and a larger FPGA than the N-GO so although both can run the QL and other cores, the KS2 can run a better version with sprites etc. Although there many community cores for the KS1 or NGO which have not yet been ported to the new larger FPGA.
The third release (KS3), due to deliver in the next couple of months, has an even larger FPGA, allowing for a full featured Amiga implementation, and 4MB of RAM for alternative cores (the original Spectrum Next core specification is 2MB and will remain so for compatibility, now there's hundreds of titles taking advantage of the new capabilities). This third release includes official cores for the C64 and Amstrad CPC. All official cores aspire to provide full VGA and HDMI output and SD support, although community cores tend to be much more MiSTer like with varying implementations. The official cores will include key combos for platform unique keys not easily mappable to Next keys.
There is an emulator for cross development, but the only real way to experience it properly is to get a Next, N-go, or XBerry Pie (£100 cheapest hw option).
Or the alternative Lego version:
beta.ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/1113841c-596d-4f28-be4a-367cc83e8ed1
Interesting turn of phrase even after realizing it was "dead flesh" not "dead fish" which would be too Pythonesque.
In AU I don't recall the ZX80 etc being too thick on the ground—possibly the tariffs, sales tax and other imposts made such low cost machines a less attractive proposiition compared with the alternatives. A local product: the Applied Technology MicroBee might have filled that niche.
It is such a long time ago and now even the Z80 isn't produced. I can understand the graybeards wanting to recapture those times but I wonder why someone born 20 years later would be attracted—but then the revival of vinyl audio discs is equally puzzling.
> Interesting turn of phrase
It was a *very* common description back in the day.
The keyboard was a compromise -- much better than the ZX81's flat membrane, but much cheaper than a full-travel keyboard as found on things like the BBC Micro or Dragon 32. The single-keyword-entry system for Sinclair BASIC pretty much stopped you typing very quickly anyway, and it was not a machine for word-processing. Gamers didn't care so much, or bought an interface and plugged in a joystick.
I must confess, I am puzzled by people's nostalgia for the rubber-keyed Spectrum, but it's undeniable. A previous remake of just the keyboard was the Recreated Spectrum:
https://recreatedzxspectrum.com/
I put mine in an improved keyboard as soon as I could afford one, and I still have it. It's adapted for a Raspberry Pi now, but I might re-fit it back to stock and put a Sizif-512 or something in it.
"I am puzzled by people's nostalgia for the rubber-keyed Spectrum"
Perhaps because, aside from all the obvious reasons to have nostalgia for it - maybe it was your first ever computer, maybe it had the games you really loved to play as a kid etc - despite all the scorn heaped upon the keyboard, it really wasn't all that bad when compared against the outwardly far better looking keyboards on its rivals.
As a pre-teen computer geek with correspondingly pre-teen sized hands, spending too much time typing on something like a BBC or C64 keyboard felt like a chore - initially yes, a very much nicer tactile sensation, but after a while increasingly tiring due to the extra effort needed not only to move my fingers into the correct positions, but then the amount of movement and pressure required to activate the keys. In contrast, the Speccy, with its rather more compact and bijou keyboard arrangement that was a better fit to my hand size, and with keys requiring rather less exertion to depress far enough to elicit a response, was quite nice to use over extended coding sessions. And then there was the incessant clatter those other keyboards generated - typing on the Speccy was a somewhat more serene and peaceful affair, which also meant it was easier to get away with in the small hours when you were supposed to be fast asleep...
Would I have wanted to use one for serious word-bashing? No. But honestly, I'd say exactly the same about those other keyboards from that era - until the 16/32-bit machines started to make inroads into the home computing scene here in the UK, I don't remember there being *any* machines I had access to where I'd consider the keyboard to be truly decent and worthy of praise, and even after that point there was still some notable variation in keyboard quality - I loved the Amiga and Archimedes keyboards, was so-so on the Mac ones (Mac II being a bit better than the Classic, IIRC), never got on with the ST one, and found the whole PC/Unix/other OS workstation experience I had in my early university years to be utterly inconsistent to the point of sheer frustration.
And don't even get me started on the ergonomic disasters that were some of those similarly early-era mice...
... keyboard to be truly decent and worthy of praise,
I had an Oric Atmos, still have it somewhere, that had a fantastic keyboard for its day.
Real keys with a lovely feedback, they were a decent size too.
A much better effort than the Oric 1 and if it had come to market sooner it would have given the Spectrum a run for its money.
As an original speccy owner, I would point out that the full-travel keyboards on other 8 bit micros were rarely that pleasant. Easier for word processing, but quite a bit worse than the modern keyboard you can buy for a tenner for your PC. Even the Beeb's keyboard was some way off modern ones. If the Speccy hadn't made compromises, many of us would never have been able to afford it and would not be on here now. Always amuses me when a high end laptop nowadays has less travel in its keyboards than the old rubber keys.
There's something very nostalgic about the BBC keyboard though.
I picked up an Electron a few years ago, and I assume it's the same mechanism used. A casual press of a few keys has the same sound and tactile feedback as the BBC, and I'm instantly transported back to high school where there were a fair few BBC computers around.
I worked in a training centre back then and used variety of micros of the time from pre-BBC era kit right through to the era of 386 PCs. The Beeb k/b was probably the best to repair on the rare occasions a key failed. Being not only separate key switches, the solder pins were the screws that held the body oh the switch together and so a doddle to clean the switch contacts while most other keyboards were membranes, rubber with carbon infused studs or foam pads with tin foil, all more likely to fail in irreparable or difficult to repair ways, I like stuff that can be repaired :-)
The most common version of the BBC keyboard I saw was very good, to the extent it helped define what I wanted in a mechanical PC keyboard 20+ years later.
The nonstandard layout (by modern standards) would probably put me off nowadays, but what was back then?
I agree that even other mechanical (or semi-mechanical) keyboards from back then often don't hold up today. I was never that impressed by the C64's (too *much* travel), but my Atari 800XL's wasn't great when I reused it years later. (*)
Conversely, while some modern membrane keyboards can feel awful, I've come across some surprisingly good ones, including a dirt-cheap "Octigen" that is sadly out of production.
Also, low-travel doesn't necessarily mean bad- my old Compaq laptop's is rather nice. I draw the line at may-as-well-be-a-ZX81-for-all-the-movement ones designed for tablets though.... bleurgh!
(*) To be fair, this varied- I found a site with five or six variants listed, all with different caps and switches and I identified my old one as the lowest-rated version.
> quite a bit worse than the modern keyboard you can buy for a tenner for your PC.
That take surprised me.
> Even the Beeb's keyboard was some way off modern ones.
(!) I never owned one, but I liked the BBC's feel a lot. Not found any modern version that lives up to it. One of my favourite non-clicky keyboards, along with the DEC VT200.
> If the Speccy hadn't made compromises, many of us would never have been able to afford it and would not be on here now.
Exactly so.
> Always amuses me when a high end laptop nowadays has less travel in its keyboards than the old rubber keys.
Exactly so! Modern laptop keyboards are rapidly regressing and are down near Original Spectrum level, and if they get much thinner they will be down to ZX81 levels.
> "if they get much thinner [the travel] will be down to ZX81 levels."
You joke, but we have a godawful Windows tablet keyboard at work that I *have* already said may as well be a ZX81 given its worthlessly negligible level of travel and feedback (barely even at "token gesture" levels).
I think it was this one or something similar.
What's worse is that, while it's obviously designed that way for portability, it's being used here as a regular PC terminal and a full-travel compact keyboard would take up no more space. (I think my boss bought that tablet and keyboard because he thought it would impress customers, but he's not the one having to use it.)
How can you compare the BEEBs keyboard to an LK201, as seen on the VT220 et. al. (there was no VT200 terminal, just 220, 240 and 241).
The LK201 was a low profile, short-travel, almost zero tactile feedback keyboard, with really, really strange profile keys and no way to change the shallow angle of the keyboard. The VT100 keyboard was much better feel wise, and I believe that the later LK keyboards for the VT420 and later went back to more chunky keyboards.
I was already using mini-computers with ASCII terminals when the micro revolution was happening. I am also an enthusiastic BBC Micro owner, and have been since I got my first Model B in 1982.
What I can say is that the BBC Micro's keyboard was about as good a keyboard as you could get at the time. I admit that it wasn't up to the standards of IBM 3278 beam spring keyboards, but compared with the likes of DEC keyboards, and the many other terminal manufacturers around at the time (I was using Newbury Laboratories terminals, and a brand called Elite which I've never been able to find any info about), as well as Tektronix storage terminals, the BEEBs keyboard was good. This is mainly because they used the same key switches as were used in professional terminals. You have to be a bit careful, however, as there were apparently three different types of key switches used for the BEEB. Mine was an early generation issue 3 machine made by ICL. The biggest issue with this was the keys were only held in by the solder traces on the keyboard circuit board, and mine kept breaking the traces, needing solder bridges to repair them.
But in comparison with modern keyboards, the feel is very different. In the years following me getting my BEEB, I came across IBM Model F and Model M keyboards, which have a particular feel that I really, really like. But other keyboards, particularly those made using rubber dome on membrane or direct bridging traces on a board are a lot worse than the BEEB. I know that some people like the short travel and soft keypress of cheap modern keyboards, but IMHO, they are much poorer than the BBC Micro's keyboard.
It is very much a matter of taste. I've done quite a lot of programming and documentation on a BBC Micro in the past, even using them as terminals, and I never noticed particular fatigue.
If someone made a modern layout keyboard, or maybe a TKL keyboard with Model F capacitive switches (the original layout of the Model F was, well, eccentric), that would probably be my ultimate keyboard, although it would be pricey. Holy shit! Model F Labs. do! $349 though. I guess my circa 1996 Model M will suffice for now for bulk entry, and the cheap MX Blue knock-off TKL keyboards will do for daily work.
Absolute nostalgia bliss, and I'm certainly not ashamed to acknowledge it!
I'll admit that I looped through the rather spiffy 3D roll-around animation on the website quite a number of times, it really did bring back memories (and I'd completely forgotten how the Spectrum rainbow stripes actually wrapped around the side of the case, a very nice design feature then and now!).
> "In AU I don't recall the ZX80 etc being too thick on the ground"
As far as I'm aware, Sinclair wasn't even able to meet demand for the ZX80 in the UK, so I'm not sure whether they bothered attempting to officially distribute it in Australia. (Apparently it *was* sold in the United States, though).
Though interestingly, the MicroAce- a clone of the ZX80- *was* apparently sold in Australia via the Dick Smith electronics chain.
Sinclair himself publicly commented that the ZX80 would be a "nine month wonder" and given that he would already have known they were working on a cost-reduced and improved version that was likely to be an even bigger hit (i.e. the ZX81), I suspect it probably made sense to get that ready first, instead of trying to market the soon-to-be-replaced ZX80 elsewhere.
> If only the QL had had a proper drive.
As I wrote a year and a bit back...
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/where_computing_went_wrong_feature_part_2/
... I think the Atari ST turned out to be the machine that the QL should have been.
The ST was a lovely design for an inexpensive affordable mass-market 68000 home computer. And by putting most of the OS in ROM, an ST with a single floppy was quite usable. A single-floppy Amiga was a nightmare of constant disk swapping. (Like a single-floppy Mac.) Because hard disks were so expensive, I knew of people with _triple_ floppy drives and I heard tell of quadruple floppy drive setups.
The Amiga was amazing, but the ST was good enough.
Sinclair Research believed its own hype and thought that two Microdrives offset the small capacity, low speed, and iffy reliability. It was wrong. Two drives was good, but a multitasking 16-bit machine with two ~100kB drives was not enough.
Not to forget the micro handheld TV which used a very clever sideways scanning CRT just before LED screens appeared.
The QL never was finished before it was available and should have used a 68000 rather than 68008 as well as a proper drive. But we can thank the QL for contributing to the birth of Linux.
I've posted this before, but The Register's own 30th anniversary article for the QL touched upon this:-
"[Chief Design Engineer David Karlin] chose the 68008 [which] was built for backwards compatibility, so it featured an external 8-bit data bus and 20-bit addressing. The 68000 [had] a 16-bit data bus and 24-bit addressing. [..]
“I don’t know how robust the decision was,” David admits now, “but it seemed fairly clear that the the 68000 series would be a great platform [..] The problem with the 68000 was basically a pin-count issue. Motorola was pricing it gigantically higher than the 68008, double or treble the price. It was sufficiently high I didn’t even argue about it.”
Rivals’ use of the full 68000 would later come as something of a surprise. If Sinclair couldn’t afford the 68000, how could they? Today, David blames Sinclair’s negotiating skills, not just for the CPU but for a whole variety of logic chips and add-ons: “I question how good we were at purchasing, because people like Amstrad, certainly the Japanese, certainly Apple, who did not have gigantically higher volumes than us at the time, got massively lower prices.”
During 1983, it has been claimed, Motorola cut the price of the 68000 to below what Sinclair had agreed to pay for the 68008. Renegotiating the purchase contract might not have been costly, but adding in the architecture the full 68000 required [..] would have been, so it was decided to stick with the 68008. [..] It’s easy to say Sinclair would have well been better off going with the 68000 after all, but only with the benefit of hindsight."
Pedant alert- Amstrad didn't buy Sinclair Research itself, just the existing computer lines and the rights to the 'Sinclair' brand.
SR continued in increasingly diminished form, its most notable subsequent release being the mildly successful Z88 portable via the Cambridge Computers subsidiary.
It sporadically released a few other Sinclair inventions, such as the unsuccessful Zike electric bike and a portable earphone radio, but it never came close to its former peak and shrunk until it had just one employee (Sinclair himself).
As fast as I know, it was still technically in existence- though effectively dormant- when Sinclair died.
> Amstrad didn't buy Sinclair Research itself,
Conceded.
> the mildly successful Z88 portable
Indeed. I have one. Bought while researching this:
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/11/10/portable_writing_tool/
Sir Clive's nephew now sells a handheld console:
https://www.grantsinclair.com/gamercard
> Buy the real thing.
Easy to say, harder to do.
For a real original Spectrum these days, you will need at least a DivMMC EnJoy if you want instant game snapshot loading and joysticks. Few people's nostalgia includes loading from tape. _Especially_ 128k titles.
Now you have a machine with a fragile expansion on the back. You can't use it on your lap or on carpet. So you need a desk, a µSD card, put games on it, and... oh dear, it won't plug into a modern TV. Right, so you need a ZX-HD as well, and some form of expansion multiplexer, and you've spent £200 and it absolutely needs to live on a desk and be handled with great care as a piece of >40 year old budget consumer electronics.
Or, £60 and 5min after it's out of the box you're playing Skool Daze.
I am not a gamer, and even for me, it's no contest.
Hate to say it but 100% agree - I spent untold hours playing Lords of Midnight (and it's sequel Doomdark's Revenge) on my speccy back in the day (great shout out by the way Liam - RIP Mike...) - I still own several versions, but beyond occasionally getting out my Interface 2 and slotting in a ROM - usually Jetpac, I just can't be bothered as it's such a faff - Retropie is a much quicker "fix" these days!...
For me it's the simplicity of retro games that I enjoy. Modern games (in some cases) are far too complicated for me. I play games for relaxation and I used to enjoy games such as Galaxians, Frogger, Pac Man and Elite as a wind-down afte work in the evening.
I'd like the Spectrum but with a decent keyboard.
Now if someone could just produce a replica BBC Master 128 ....
Yeah, their choice of bundled games is pretty good, a fair number of well-chosen classics there!
(Although, on the other hand, about a quarter of them I have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever - or are some of those ones maybe later fan creations (yes, such things do exist!)?)
Treat yourself! 43 years living in the shadows of Commodore users cant have been easy. You deserve a break after all the hardship you've suffered.
Go on. I'll allow it. You have my permission. Go and buy yourself one.
(obviously the C64 one is better - but you should be accustomed to second best by now).
Chin up!
Indeed, let's go through the top ten list of advantages that the 8-bit Commodores have over the humble ZX Spectrum:
- Load data at nearly the same speed as ZX Spectrum tapes, but in a more storage-friendly flat format known as "discs".
- 16 colours, at least 5 of which are brown. Because the team who designed the C64 "picked colors that we liked", such as brown.
- Disc drive controller was designed to be like a second computer connected to the C64 with a serial cable. For those people who wanted to pay computer prices to be able to read discs and do no other computer tasks.
- Next-level tokenised BASIC, replaces long unwieldy commands with user-friendly Egyptian hieroglyphics and POKE commands.
- The energy used by the Commodore was not wasted, as it doubled as a room heater for those cold winter evenings.
- The 64K version had 64K of RAM, and it would generously let the user use 38K of it.
- The 128K version added another CPU, more memory, and a second screen display, which no software used out of consideration for C64 users.
- The Plus 4 range of computers were incompatible and useless and marketed to the unwary and unworthy to stop them getting their filthy hands on a C64.
- Hot-swappable joysticks (were "hot" means hot enough fry a chip).
- 1MHz CPU. Probably why the C64's mascot was an elephant.
> So 480K?
I couldn't find hard confirmation when I was writing it. I should have added a couple more zeros, obviously.
I believe it's less than you might expect -- under a gig in total -- but then, it is an inexpensive device and has no desktop or anything.
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