A retro classic - Spectrum

[Bill Lange]

Here is a non-Atari but certainly a retro 8-bit article that I read today on the BBC website.

 

How the Spectrum began a revolution

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6572711.stm

 

Regards,

Bill

[Gunstar]

Here is a non-Atari but certainly a retro 8-bit article that I read today on the BBC website.

 

How the Spectrum began a revolution

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6572711.stm

 

Regards,

Bill

 

Seems pretty one-sided and biased as far as this "revolution" is concerned, sure, due to the low cost it got a lot of middle-class people to buy a home computer, but the fact is that the Atari 400&800, Vic20, and numerous others were before it and I'd have to say that makes one of those computers the ones that started any so-called home computer "revolution." I'm not trying to exclude the Spectrum, my first computer was a ZX81, but saying it's the computer that started it all is just FALSE.

[jdh]

 

Seems pretty one-sided and biased as far as this "revolution" is concerned, sure, due to the low cost it got a lot of middle-class people to buy a home computer, but the fact is that the Atari 400&800, Vic20, and numerous others were before it and I'd have to say that makes one of those computers the ones that started any so-called home computer "revolution." I'm not trying to exclude the Spectrum, my first computer was a ZX81, but saying it's the computer that started it all is just FALSE.

 

Yes it's UK biased. I think the revolution aspect, is that it was a computer affordable by the average working class family, I believe in the early 80s in the UK machines like the BBC and Atari 400/800 were considered expensive and out of reach, indeed I only managed to get an Atari (65 XE) when they were being sold off cheap at the end of the 80s.

[Mr.Amiga500]

I think this article is saying that it started a "revolution" in the UK computer industry, not the whole world.

 

Being in Canada, I never even heard of a Spectrum until around 2002 when I stared reading UK forum posters going on about their "Speccies". I then did lots of research on Spectrums and even played with Spectum emulators. I wasn't impressed. (...only 8 colours and damn ugly ones too)

[Ross PK]

I've never been impressed with spectrums either and I'm in the UK. I guess it's just another case of the British always prefering the underdog for some bizarre reason.

[Foebane]

Spectrums suck. The graphics can actually succeed in making me physically sick, but nothing else. Also, the creator, "Sir" Clive Sinclair is an old fraud. He used to buy electronic items, use a soldering iron to take them apart and then sell them on as his own. Fraud.

[jdh]

Spectrums suck. The graphics can actually succeed in making me physically sick, but nothing else. Also, the creator, "Sir" Clive Sinclair is an old fraud. He used to buy electronic items, use a soldering iron to take them apart and then sell them on as his own. Fraud.

 

Not one to "sit on the fence" are you?

[Foebane]

Not one to "sit on the fence" are you?

 

No, not when it comes to a machine which was designed by the man who would later go on to develop such crud as the Sinclair C5. Granted, it may have launched the careers of many of Britain's top games designers, but I bet (even though they never admitted it) that they couldn't wait to move onto a better platform for development as soon as they could, like the Commodore 64 or even still, the Atari 8-Bits.

[Tezz]

I think that's more than a bit unfair with regards to Sir Clive, it is true that he/Sinclair Research ripped product designs off (who didn't back then?) It was more so publicised that it was his inventions that were ripped off and cheaply manufactured in the far east. He was an inventor, credited for a number of inovations. He is regarded in the industry with the typical British trait, good with the inventions, bad with business. Also true the ZX Spectrum was far from a great computer technically, but back then home computers in the UK were beyond the reach of most families due to the cost. The introduction of the Spectrum changed all that.. Revolution I think is the wrong term but certainly started the home computer boom here for the masses.

[Foebane]

The introduction of the Spectrum changed all that.. Revolution I think is the wrong term but certainly started the home computer boom here for the masses.

 

I acknowledged that above with the game designers who made their names with the machine, but I wonder how many of them, and the home users they catered to, moved to better and more sophisticated platforms later on?

Edited April 23, 2007 by Foebane

[Tezz]

...I wonder how many of them, and the home users they catered to, moved to better and more sophisticated platforms later on?

I would say a lot of people certainly progressed into bigger and better things once they had the taste of computing and they had become a part of everyday life. Perhaps that could be thought of as a kind of revolution. It wasn't the case that Brits didn't know any better than the world of Sinclair, it was really just a successful product that capured the market at the right time and right price and became enormously popular. The other machines which were popular here, C64, MSX and lesser so the CPC amongst others. It was certainly the case that the Spectrum and C64 were in the majority here. Atari did have a smaller share of the market and those of us in the know regarded them highly. The problem with Atari in the UK was the price of the hardware and also one thing I witnessed was that all of the everyday Atari owners that I knew (that is regular home users and not real enthusiasts) only ever had a 1010 recorder. Long loading times were one of the issues that I heard critised the most. 1050 drives were a way too expensive option, more than a whole Sinclair or C64 set-up back then so out of the question. Add in the fact that most of the big name titles/arcade convertions were not released for the Atari, it really left Atari out in the cold as far as regular people were concered. We enthusiasts knew just how great these machines were but regular consumers of course need to be lead by the masses to be shown what is THE machine they should own.. and the largest market was Sinclair and Commodore. Consumers are to the greater extent simply sheep. I good example of that today would be with a product such as the Ipod, there are many mp3 players out there but that is THE successful must have item for consumers, any other product whether it has umpteen better features will never see as many sales because of Apple's marketing success. I guess you can't blame consumers for buying products they are told are the only thing to buy. Edited April 23, 2007 by Tezz

[Goochman]

My neighbor got a ZX-81 and it was the only affordable computer back then - it sparked alot of interest in me (as did the Pet we had at school) so I was determined to talk my parents into buying me a computer. We went through a wild process before ending up with an 800 and 810.

 

I wanted an Apple which was too expensive. I looked into the Orange (remember those ) and Franklin, but the 98% compatiblity didnt sit well with my Dad.

 

I then looked at the C64 - but it was really new and the only shop that sold them was a Mattress store!!!!

 

I seriously considered the Spectrum since due to the ZX-81 it got some pub. Looked decent, good price, etc...However my parents knew Atari and it was sold at a real computer store that was cheaper than the Apple.

 

$1000 for my original 800 and 810 - I wouldnt trade that experience for the world - I can understand how so many folks in the UK got into the Speccy since it was so affordable and computers in those days had so many unknowns - If you missed this time period you have no idea the fun we had

[Foebane]

Funny, but even though I too started with a ZX81, my dad got me the more expensive Atari 600XL (then 800XL) because he didn't want me playing games all day!

 

I made a lot of programs myself on the Atari, in fact I started a whole lot more projects than I finished, but even then I also played games when I found a fellow Atari user, and we started swapping them. Much to my dad's irritation.

[TMR]

I think the revolution aspect, is that it was a computer affordable by the average working class family, I believe in the early 80s in the UK machines like the BBC and Atari 400/800 were considered expensive and out of reach...

 

Very true, the Atari, Apple and Commodore machines were all priced higher over here because the kit was, to start with at least, imported; Commodore later set up production lines in the UK and Germany (amongst others) to serve Europe but at the time of launch the C64 was about double the price of a Spectrum and everybody was tape-based to start with because a 1541 was about the same price again. Atari hardware and software was specialist stuff, some companies like Maplin offered hardcore support but, if you lived in a part of the UK that Maplin didn't cover, the odds are you didn't see anything of the hardware; in fact, the first 800XL i saw was a friend's that he'd got in London, the second was a few years later and part of a stock dumping exercise to clear the stores for the XE series (my own 800XL was one of those, i had to return the first unit because it, like a lot of those machines, failed).

 

To the UK market the Spectrum was a boon, cheap, a good library of games that could be copied (a huge influence on buyers who could only just afford the computer, let alone a starter library of games) and they even pitched in a decent manual; i remember the one i got with my 800XL being pretty pitiful and the C64 manual wasn't much cop either but the Spectrum came with a good grounding in Sinclair BASIC to the point where simple games could be written.

 

Oh, just to correct a little fact; the Spectrum has fifteen colours and not eight, there are six hues, black and white but two luminance levels for each (black is always black, although it's possible to tell them apart on some models). Appreciation of them is down to personal taste, but the attribute system made it possible to throw colour around like a loony. =-)

 

I acknowledged that above with the game designers who made their names with the machine, but I wonder how many of them, and the home users they catered to, moved to better and more sophisticated platforms later on?

 

Surprisingly few, i used to follow the comp.sys.sinclair newsgroup myself and a lot of people either held on to their Spectrums until everyone moved to 16-bit or even held out until the PC was mainstream. Yes, there were people who traded in and moved to a C64 or an Amstrad CPC, but similarly there were those going the other way to the Spectrum because of the huge user and software bases. You have to remember that these machines had a longer commercial lifespan in the UK than anything 8-bit bar the C64 as well, with commercial releases and magazine support well past their discontinuation in the early 1990s and licenses like Street Fighter 2 still being considered worth the development outlay around 1993. The Spectrum was one of the first machines to be successfully emulated as well if memory serves, that says huge amounts about the users' feelings for it; they liked it so much they made their Amigas and PCs pretend to be one!

 

For the developers, the consensus is that they owe their careers to the Spectrum and most of the ones who have been located and spoken to remember the machine very fondly; some like Jonathan "Joffa" Smith are even considering a return, talk is that Cronosoft will soon have a new Spectrum game from a programmer who was writing them twenty-something years ago. Yes, there will have been some who only saw the Spectrum as a part of their career but that is true of all the platforms, 8-bit or otherwise.

Edited April 24, 2007 by TMR

[Fretwobbler]

The colour thing was a problem. As well as only having 15 colours, only two could be used in each character cell at any one time, making anything other than monochrome graphics really difficult.

 

But some games did a reasonable job of getting around that issue, Rainbow Islands springs to mind.

[TMR]

The colour thing was a problem. As well as only having 15 colours, only two could be used in each character cell at any one time...

 

Not strictly true, y'see the colours in each 8x8 pixel attribute cell have to be the same brightness so you can't, for example, have the two shades of cyan together in a cell.

 

...making anything other than monochrome graphics really difficult.

 

It's like anything on the 8-bits, each machine makes some concessions and it's more a matter of designing the code and graphics around those concessions rather than simply letting them get in the way; Spectrum games are less likely to be mono than most people make out, the problem with throwing a lot of colour about is that sprites tend to "clash" when they met other sprites or the background but it's possible to design a game that allows for that a lot of the time and looks incredible for it, like at Cybernoid 2 for example. Granted, some of the older titles weren't as colourful (although some were like Jetpac or Sabre Wulf to name just a couple of Ultimate titles) but as the machine was learnt, so were the ways to work around the limitations until things like R-Type were released.

[Fretwobbler]

Are you sure about that colour thing, you are contradicting my Marshell Cavendish Input course!

 

To be sure - your saying you can define 3 or more different colours (all the same brightness) within an 8x8 character cell, and get these to display without quickly displaying a colour and then showing a different colour elsewhere in the cell during the next fraction of a second to give the overall appearance to the viewer that there are more than 2 colours in the cell?

 

 

Myth: History in the Making were brilliant game graphics, especially compared to the other platformers on the system.

Edited April 24, 2007 by Fretwobbler

[Pengwin]

Just to throw in my 2 penny worth, I agree that the colour clash was a problem for some developers, but the fact that you could display all the Spectrums colours in it's highest resolution was a real bonus. It allowed some games to actually look better on the Spectrum than other computers, including the atari 8-bit. A couple of examples I can think of are Head Over Heels and Gauntlet. HoH, originally written on the Spectrum and then ported to Atari, benefited from the ability to have extra colours in the highest resolution, although the improvement is only minimal. Gauntlet was always one of the games that disappointed me on the atari, however, due to the higher resolution of the Spectrum, whilst retaining the full set of colours, looks much better than the blocky affair that was released on A8. Even when not directly comparing the same games, but rather the same types, some of the Spectrum games still outshine the A8 versions. One example of this is Miner 2049 and Manic miner. I know Matthew smiths game was originally influenced by Miner 2049, but the graphics have the edge over its predecessor.

This is not to say that the Spectrum wasn't without faults, I just don't think it should be dismissed. Plus, as has been said before, the price tag allowed a lot of people to experience computers outside of school for the first time.

[Fretwobbler]

Absolutely it shouldnt be dismissed, we may never have seen a realtime solid 3D graphics engine on the 8 bit machines where it not for the Speccy.

[Foebane]

To be sure - your saying you can define 3 or more different colours (all the same brightness) within an 8x8 character cell, and get these to display without quickly displaying a colour and then showing a different colour elsewhere in the cell during the next fraction of a second to give the overall appearance to the viewer that there are more than 2 colours in the cell?

 

I've seen this under emulation, done with a game which I think was called Black Angel, but ONLY on the title screen, and even then, only every couple of scan lines. Think of it as the rainbow effect you see often on A8's.

 

But no, as was mentioned above, only two colours were ever allowed every 8x8 pixel boundary, AND of the same brightness.

 

Imagine my disappointment when I wrote a program in Spectrum BASIC to fill the screen with different coloured pixels next to each other and I get a whole bunch of pixels which are the same two colours, every 8x8 blocks apart. I really grew to dislike Speccy graphics then.

[TMR]

To be sure - your saying you can define 3 or more different colours (all the same brightness) within an 8x8 character cell, and get these to display without quickly displaying a colour and then showing a different colour elsewhere in the cell during the next fraction of a second to give the overall appearance to the viewer that there are more than 2 colours in the cell?

 

No, i'm saying that you get two colours a cell but they must be the same brightness; in other words, although you have fifteen colours you can only use eight in a cell and the cell itself has an overall brightness. So two brightnesses of blue, for example, can't exist in the same place and it's actually pretty limiting to work with to be honest, i struggled a bit getting something i was keen on for Reaxion ZX.

 

As has been mentioned it's possible to increase the colour control in software; the technique is called "rainbow processing" and basically involves writing the colour attribute data each scanline, converting the attribute cells to 8x1 pixels in size rather than 8x8 (for reference, the C64 can do this too, the mode is called AFLI). Since the Spectrum only has the one colour RAM (for the 48K models, the 128K hardware is different and has the option to double buffer both video and colour RAM but i don't know if it's flexible enought to work like the C64 doing AFLI) that means writing as many bytes as possible during a scanline, so it's not possible to do it full screen width and it's got one hell of a CPU overhead! The Timex Sinclair Spectrum variants and if memory serves the SAM Coupe machines (the SAM was released late in the Spectrum's lifespan, it's a sort of Super Spectrum from a third party, MGT) both have a mode that does the same 8x1 pixel attributes in hardware and the Russian clones like the Pentagon and Scorpion have a lot more CPU grunt lying around to rainbow process with but i only remember a couple of games using anything like these techniques for actual ingame action - timing this sort of gig is, apparently, a bit of a bugger and varies between models of Spectrum.

[Rybags]

It's fair to say it caused a revolution in the UK, but really it didn't do much outside Europe.

 

I can remember Atari (and even Commodore) machines going for nearly the same price Pound/Dollar as in the US - so effectively they were almost twice as expensive in the early 1980s. For the Spectrum to have launched at not much over a hundred quid would have guaranteed it huge success, especially considering you would have been paying over twice that just for an Atari 400.

 

I don't think I've ever seen a working Spectrum. Over here in Oz, it was the Vic-20 then C-64 that grabbed most of the attention and sales.

 

It was sad as an Atari fan seeing a vastly inferior machine that was the Vic-20 stealing sales and limelight.

 

It was also amusing reading about the C-64 vs Spectrum battle in the UK. Even though I'd never seen one, it was plainly obvious that the Spec wasn't even in the same class.

[Foebane]

It was also amusing reading about the C-64 vs Spectrum battle in the UK. Even though I'd never seen one, it was plainly obvious that the Spec wasn't even in the same class.

 

Oh MAN it wasn't. I felt like preaching that at the time in the 80s in the UK, but I feared for my life as a result.

[Mr.Amiga500]

Oh, just to correct a little fact; the Spectrum has fifteen colours and not eight, there are six hues, black and white but two luminance levels for each (black is always black, although it's possible to tell them apart on some models). Appreciation of them is down to personal taste, but the attribute system made it possible to throw colour around like a loony. =-)

 

The Spectrum palette looks like the old EGA(CGA?) palette - 8 (ugly) colours with another 8 of the same hue but half luminance. Oh God, how I hate that palette. I remember when I first started MS-DOS assembler and those were the only colours available. That was many years after I already knew of the glory of 4096 Amiga colours.

 

You can still see that sick palette today in many Windows programs. I remember in 2005 being disgusted when I tried to select a label colour, the Office program (can't remember which) still only allowed selection from that disgusting 16-colour palette.

[TMR]

It was also amusing reading about the C-64 vs Spectrum battle in the UK. Even though I'd never seen one, it was plainly obvious that the Spec wasn't even in the same class.

 

On a technical level, the C64 was superior for 2D stuff yes, but the extra CPU power of the Spectrum (it's about twice as fast when cycle times of commands are taken into consideration, so just a bit faster than the 6502 in the A8) combined with it's smaller screen memory meant that it can move vector and filled vector objects and, with a good programmer, moving lots of software sprites or soft scrolling large blocks of the screen is possible too. Watch Mercenary on both machines or the Freescape games like Driller and the Spectrum version is noticeably faster.

 

In the UK, the Spectrum won the battle to be honest; there were more units shifted here than of any other 8-bit computer, it was a major reason behind the spawning the mainstream U.K. leisure software industry and where a lot of talented games designers cut their teeth and, along with the loyal following of "Spec chums" (their term, not mine!) it won the hearts and minds of a lot of people who weren't hardcore gamers; i've noticed that when i talk about my interest in these machines with people who aren't into games but are of the same sort of age as me, they always know the Spectrum, sometimes the C64 and CPC and are rarely aware of any other 8-bit hardware.

 

Oh MAN it wasn't. I felt like preaching that at the time in the 80s in the UK, but I feared for my life as a result.

 

Nah, i used to get involved in those playground battles all the time - it was part of owning an 8-bit computer for me, i suspect that's why the comp.sys.sinclair crowd like to relive those memories from time to time!