The Wonderful World of the Speccy.

Before there was Britney Spears, there was 1982.

1982 will be memorable to different people for different reasons. There was World Cup where Scotland were once again gallant losers (needing to beat New Zealand by 4 clear goals to qualify for round 2, they contrive to win, and yet still lose, 5-2) and if memory serves, England did a bit better. But surely the most momentous occasion has to be the introduction of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum to the world.

Upon launch, £99 would get you the 16k version. An extra 30 sheets would get you a staggering 48k of memory. And it was everything any schoolkid wanted.

Although the legacy of the Spectrum is still with us and explains why we will always be more computer competent than our dad’s, perhaps the reason for its success in Britain was the exact reason for its failure in the US - it was all a bit **** really, wasn’t it? Well, we liked it that way.

It had a rubbery keypad for a start. On reflection, had we been a bit older at the time we may have realised that this was a godsend. Thanks to its bathmat like qualities, the Speccy’s keypad made it the world’s only computer completely impervious to spilt beer, fag ash and, in extreme cases, urine. On the downside though, the key’s shelf life was fairly short, especially if you used them to play Daley Thomson’s Decathalon. The first key to go was usually Symbol Shift, which was a pity seeing as you needed it to type LOAD “”, a function referred to by the masses as, “load, dit, dit,” and necessary if you wanted to play any games.

Then there was the tape loading system. This system seemingly worked fine on the Commodore 64, but for some reason the Speccy didn’t like it too much. The sound had to be at just the right level otherwise you’d get a “R - Tape Loading Error” or the bugger would just crash. The plus point of all this was that it gave every kid in the country an insight into what it’s like to be a safe cracker, as they poised themselves over their cassette recorder and made minute adjustments to the machine’s volume control. This is a skill we have taken with us into later life when we’re trying to get the shower temperature somewhere between scalding hot and f**king freezing.

The colours were a joke as well. You had 8 to chose from - 2 of which being black and white, and they clashed with each other when two were too close together. This pretty much determined that no game on the Speccy, of which there were about 50,000,000, would look anywhere near as good as their counterpart on any other machine. Again, this had its benefits as it taught us that looks aren’t everything, thus explaining why you asked that ginger lass to the Primary 7 party. It also taught us that playability is paramount and this is a lesson that every bloke in the country is thankful for and is why we have a “special sock”.

Every key had at least four functions, which had us confused for the first six months of ownership. For example, typing in LOAD “” CODE, require you to hit J, Symbol Shift and P twice, hold down caps lock and symbol shift then U. It soon became second nature and by age 10, we probably could all have got a job at NASA. This taught us the rudimentaries of programming. How many people went up to the display model in Boots the Chemist and typed in:

10 PRINT “BOB’S A POOF”
20 GOTO 10

Before High School age, we all knew a continuous loop routine. We also knew how much better it was if you put a semi-colon after the second dit.

It heated up after periods of use extending beyond 30 minutes. If you had it on a desk, there’d be a burn mark on it before long. If you just had it on your lap, your jeans would weld onto your leg. Either way, the heat would be enough to force your next door’s tortoise out of hibernation.

There was more. The sample programs in magazines never, ever, worked - unless 5 pages of hexadecimal dump had the sole purpose of making your border flash between red and black for five seconds before resetting your machine. The 9v adaptor Power Pack developed a “dodgy connection” again causing a reset when the even the merest of motions disturbed the cable (a particular annoyance for lap users considering everyone’s leg kicked out a little bit when they jumped on Manic Miner).

But for all those grievances, there’s a list that’ll make everything sunny again:

Match Day 2 - Perhaps the first game to come in fancy packaging, this was the archetypal footie game, unsurpassed until Sensible Soccer on the Amiga. 7 a side action with identical looking players, the ability to score direct from a throw-in and a little counter on the loading screen telling you how long you had to go before the game would fail to load properly. And it played a Rolf Harris stylophone version to the theme to Match of the Day. F**king quality.

Commando - Actually quite a good representation of the arcade game. Although despite only having two colours - yellow for the sand and black for the little soldiers - they still managed to clash. A Quickshot 2 joystick with AutoFire saw you massacre your way through the levels.

DeathChase 2000 - A total rip off from the forest chase scene in Return of the Jedi, it gave you a first person perspective on hurtling around a heavily wooded area on a motorbike. Also, due to some major design oversight, the front of the bike between the handlebars looked remarkably akin to a “german helmet”, thus rendering it with the nickname, “DeathNob 2000”.

180 - A sublime £1.99 Mastertronics darts effort that boasted “digitised speech sound effects.” In reality, this transpired to sound like the garbled white noise you get when you’re not quite tuned into a radio station and it only happened when you got three treble twenties. Still impressed the pants of us.

Hypersports - A Decathalon clone featuring great events such as swimming, archery and triple jump. Everyone’s dad could do the swimming in under 20 seconds while it took yourself and the CPU operated opponents around 40. Those extra years joystick waggling obviously paying of.

Plus the many number of C-90 audio tapes we had called “Games” all the way up to “Games XXXIV”, featuring games you’d pirated from your mate that were seldom seen in shops; “Urban Upstart”, “Skool Daze”, “The Hobbit”, “Bruce Lee”, “Scuba Dive” and at least three copies of “Samantha Fox’s Strip Poker”.

Names like US Gold, Ocean, Imagine, Epyx, Melbourne House and Ultimate meant more to you than members of your own family, especially your gran who you never saw when she visited because you were always upstairs trying to find the copy of “Strip Poker” that actually worked.

Ah, such sweet melancholy memories, forever etched on to the stained glass window of the mind.

For those of you interested in rekindling your love affair with ZX Spectrum the Internet boasts the opportunity to download emulation programs and you can also get all your favourite games for free. Seeing as their all less that 48k in size, they download quicker than that jpeg of Pamela and Tommy. Obviously as a professional outfit we wouldn't dream of linking to a web site which has pirate emulators, but go to AltaVista and type in "+spectrum +x128 +emulator" and you might find one for yourself. But beware. Sometimes the fond memories of childhood should be left alone. Unless you want your recollections to be soiled forevermore, perhaps you should forget all about it and just have another quick go on Duke Nukem instead.

For those of you who have never known a Snickers bar to be called anything other than a Snickers bar, the past few minutes reading this has been a bit confusing. Hasn’t it?

I snapped a Cheetah 125 joystick on Daily Thompson :D

started with the zx81 with the 16k ram pack then progressed to the rolls royce of machine at the time the BBC Model B. feck me i luved that thing, progessed to twin 5 1/4 inch 80 track disc drives and a shed load of software. who remembers solidisk sideways rom, where you could change the dfs and add other rom images. feck me those was the days.

cheers

big sinky

Three words......Jet Pack Willy.

Mine got so hot the glue melted and the metal cover over the rubber keyboard started to peel up. It is entirely the Spectrums fault that I got into I.T.

I always wanted an Acorn Electron which has a proepr keyboard and there were always the rich kiddies with the BBC B Micros.

Daley Thomsan has a LOT to asnwer for :D Still got my Specy somewhere :)

Yup, my Speccy +2 resides in the loft somewhere :D

Whats Jet Pac Willy?? Do you mean Jet Pac or Jet Set Willy...

If after reading this you start to feel all nostalgic and want to download a Speccy emulator and a few games can I recommend you don't. You might remember the game as being the best thing ever and how you played it for the entire school summer holidays but if you play it now you are going to be in for a massive shock.

They are actually absolute rubbish and you will play it for about 30 seconds before all your childhood memories will be destroyed and you just turn it off.

Oh and everyone knows the Commodore 64 was better anyway....

Jodster - think you mean Jet Set Willy :D

Sorry, but i was a C64 man - didnt do the Spectrum thing :)

What goes around comes around :) All those years ago I never imagined I would end up with a mobile phone running a spectrum emulator! Keyboard is almost as good too...

And to relive some of those memories:

http://www.emuunlim.com/hob/
http://www.chaos.dk/~tron/zx/

A Java spectrum emulator!

Steve.

ah yes fond memories, as been mentioned sometimes better to leave them intact rather than re-visit now and be disappointed!

I had a humble zx81 with a non-sinclair 16k ram pack (3d monster maze was *the* game of the time - that rocked) then moved onto the wonderful Vic20 which boasted a staggering 3.5k ram as standard, some pretty good cartridge based games for it though and then onto the hugely popular C64. Then for some strange reason migrated to an Atari ST not the Amiga which I loved as well (remember playing wizball a very strange game for hours on end)

For anyone interested do a search and you can find PC versions of Manic Miner and JSW which are way cool!

Gary

Yep,mines somewhere around..The decathalon one was the best but it was a pain moving that joystick about to get the speed up!!

I must have atleast 50+ games on cassette and a couple of joysticks in the attic...Must have a look one day.

So my memory seems a lot worse than I thought!

Know about the "ruining your childhood memories" thing. Bought a Muppet Show DVD recently, the one with Mark Hamill on it, and it sucked so bad. Gutted.

As sad as I am, I had a regression into childhood a couple of years back and bought a 128K +2 and a 48K (rubber key :cool:)

Got shot of the cassette deck - I copied (a seriously time-consuming effort) all the games onto Minidisc!!!:D:D:D:D:D

Still play it now.....those WERE the days :)

Dan

Jat pack and jet set willy where my fav games.

SD555,

No these *ARE* the days, Retro is rocking at the moment, old machines (zx81, spectrum etc.), old bikes (Raleigh choppers!)

Just waiting for space hoppers to be cool again :)

Gary

Ram pack wobble!!!

I've got a Speccy emulator on my Ipaq:

http://pocketclive.emuunlim.com/index.html

with games from:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/

Many an hour spent at work with people thinking I am working really hard.

Also got quite a good NES one as well. Much better than the rip-off games they try and charge you for on your handheld.

Posh

Go here for all your emu memories:

www.retrochat.com

Ben

My dad made me a kempston interface for it ,wheelie i can remember and a dart game where you got slowly pi**ed, That printer was crazy on the zx81 ,didnt it burn the siler paper or something(stunk),I remember seeing my first C5, that was a laugh as well,the bloke was pedeling like hell!! lol...:)

Man that takes me back,my mate had a speccy with the obligatory 1 million games on c-15 cassettes.
However i was the same as Dreamweaver,Commodore Vic-20 then the c-64 ,always remember taking about 5 hours typing in magazine programs,then half the time they didn't work.

Anyone remember a micro called the Zeta, a fat kid at school had one, never heard of it beofre or since !

Fond memories indeed - I remember saving up for the 16K version and my Mum 'treated' me to the upgraded 48K version - fantastic. I even remember using the Speccy to control a robot I built for a technology project at school - it worked as well - bleeding miracle :)

Chris

Ive still got mine :D but its hidden in a big box along with an atari 400 and an 800 up in the loft somewhere..... (i may even have another atari up there too!)

Tony:D

I remember my old Secondary School had a 16k one up on the wall, mounted in the "Technology" labs (Wood/metalwork to everyone else). Never found out why, but I did wonder whether they ever used any design programs on it (it was right above an Archimedes, again not that new).

My Speccy +2 arrived a bit before Christmaas one year when I'd been begging my mum and dad for it for ages (and probably really getting on their nerves). My Dad arrived home with it one evening after work as a complete surprise. Then had to go out and buy a cheap TV to use it with... So frustrating, having it sitting there and no TV - they didn't want me using it on the main one downstairs.

Came with 6 really crap games which (a.s.a.p.) got replaced with some from the local computer shop, then things like Operation Wolf (great game if a little repetitive once you get to later levels but plenty of action, gameplay and addictiveness to make up for it). Chase HQ - great driving game (for-runner of Need for Speed type, with sampled speech that didn't sound thaaaat bad)... Oooh, memories.....

And I promised to use it for education and programming, not just games. And did.

Anyone remember a game where you rode a flying bike through forests, kind of like that scene in Return of the Jedi. It wasn't an official Lucasarts game but was near enough. I loved it. Can't remember the name though but I'm sure one of you do.

jodster,

I think you are referring to deathchase? http://www.80snostalgia.com/computer...eathchase.html

Gary

Got mine mail order. What a great piece of machinery. Paid the £30 for the upgrade.

Me and my mate used to go to games fairs. At one he completed a game and they gave him a prerelease of their latest game. We were in game heaven.

Football Manager was the best ever management game. Written in Basic with stick insect figures.

Graphics have improved but gameplay seems to stay still. We used to have almost as much fun writing programs.

A fave of the day was to go into Lasky's in Brighton and type:

cls poke(1024)

This had the effect of clearing the screen and crashing the machine. Then we'd wait for a member of the public to try and type their name (as they all did in those days). Of course nothing would happen, and we'd pi55 ourselves laughing is the look of horror appeared on their faces, they checked that no one was watching them before sneaking away.

Dave

Dave,

aha memories! God I remember being about 13yrs old putting a delay in before a humble vic-20 in debenhams displayed f**k off in white letters on a black background and Id put a couple of pokes in to disable all the esc/clr keys. Hadnt left enough of a delay and some guy ran down the street and grabbed me and prepared to lecture me on how he didnt want his wife and kids to see crap like that....ooops!

Gary

GaryK, that's the one! oh dear, it looks so sh1te now :(