Sinclair Spectrum owners...

gameboy

This little song sums us all up...

h**p://custurd.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

Only he who does nothing, does nothing wrong.

zanders

I still have my Spectrum 48k in the loft gathering dust.

those were the days.

You can lead a Horse to Water but who said it wanted to drink?

DreamBox 7000s, Triax 88cm dish
Strong Diseqc H-H Motor SRT dm2100
Sharp BS1R6EL100W 0.3 DB LNB
Gemini Image

BGonaSTICK

Mine is right here next to me. I never let it out of my sight. Even fired it up the other day. Video chips are all shot. Colour bleed everywhere!

Thanks for that Gameboy. It actually made me cry. Daft Bar-steward I am.
Those really were the days. I still have virtually ALL those games. Some are even original!

I think it's really sad that virtually no PC/Mac user can code a line of diddly today.

Cut my teeth coding Z80a assembler on the Spectrum. Still have my dis-assembler as well. Reverse Engineering hasn't come very far you know. The Speccy was a massive advance on the punchcards and paper-tape I was used to using...

Brilliant link. Just about to send it to my brother (and partner in crime back then).

Old Bloke (Very)

Channel Hopper

I started (and gave up ) on machine code using a Motorola 6800, and then went onto a BBC micro (6512) ?

Somethings are best left alone

There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness"

gameboy

What is sad now is that developers just throw code at anything, the 16k specy was expected to move a blob or print a list but the chaps at Ultimate - now Rare managed to code it to do lots of stuff even Sir Clive never thought possible.

No more spending days copying code from Mags and then finding a full stop in the wrong place and it didn't work. I loved writing basic with the three shift modes for each key.

You had to write tight code to get it into 16k now applications come on 4gig DVDs! Bloated is the word - even games consols last only a few years then the next generation come along and the developers start again.

When Sony and Nintendo were looking at a CD drive for the SNES then fell out (Sony then produced the PlayStation) Nintendo annouced the Donkey Kong series of games from Rare. This was at E3 - the developers though they had the new N64 ready for launch. What Rare had done was totally amazing code on the SNES. I am sure if developers had to stick with the PlayStation the games would amaze. I remember the first racing game 'Ridge Racer' if you compare that to 'Gran Turismo' you will see what I mean.

Must stop this rant... Sorry guys - Have a great New Year and a super 2005

Only he who does nothing, does nothing wrong.

td03-5

Well it's like this chaps - you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours said the modern programmer to the hardware maker. So the programmers write ever more bloated code so the hardware makers can sell ever faster machines with bigger memory and hard drives! And the salesmen can persuade the users they need the latest gizmo in their software but it needs a more powerful machine to run it.

I remember the delight I felt when I produced a Z80 machine code version of a program written originally in compiled pascal. It was for cp/m 2.2 and the program produces a printed or text file calendar for the entered year. It does not use the system calendar (there wasn't one on cp/m 2.2!) it uses an algorithm I got from Dragon user magazine (yes, had one of those). Don't know what the pascal program used, all I did was mimic its output using my own code. The pascal program was not big at 16K but mine was only 2K. I used a Z80 macro assembler (and later transferred it to MS-DOS using an excellent shareware Assembler called A86) and learnt to code macros from an equally excellent book the title and author I've forgotten.

Sorry none of this has anything to do with the DB. Probably helps to explain why I enjoy playing with it though.

Never had a spectrum. Started with the practical electronics EduKit using the RCA 1802 micro. Kit was designed by the same man who did the Compukit UK 101 the rather unfortunately named Dr A Burk.

73 & drappy heaming.

RedDevil_UK

i had a speccy too

and yes i played all them games aswell, mine is still in the loft also...
my 48k speccy had a modem too and i used Prestel and micronet800 to browse the net and send emails.... all this in 1983/4... cool or what!!!

i also remember sitting in my bedroom for over a month every night making a graphics demo... 2 boxers fighting in a boxing ring. when i finished it, i was totally chuffed with it... i shouted my brother and my dad to show it off..
they both said "is that it?"....... i thought it was the mutts nuts, old codgers didnt know what they was talking about

BGonaSTICK

Right, that's it. I'm off to write an IP stack and a cardserver for the Speccy...

You lot can just blimin' well get up in the loft. We're gonna start a revival, and we're gonna need to join together all the save/load phono leads we can get for our new network.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!

gameboy

The membrane has cracked on the bend between keyboard and circuit board on my Specy - you can get a new one from Germany but they are expensive.

Still have loads of orignial games and lots of code I wrote myself - I thought it was good until Ultimate came along!

Lots of emulators online with hundreds of games - shame Rare won't let them have KnightLore, JetPac, etc.

Someone will have them somewhere ;-)

Only he who does nothing, does nothing wrong.

Llew

I've only recently pensioned off my BBC Micro. Even I could program with BBC Basic.
Main use after Prestel (1200 Baud in, 75 out!) was radio comms -
Fax, Packet Radio, RTTY, Morse, SSTV, UoSAT,Amtor.
Needed to screen the BBC with tinfoil though - it was a great hash generator.

Llew

BGonaSTICK

LOL, my Commodore 128D had to wear a tinfoil-spacesuit as well!

djlemur

Back in '82 (?) I built a Cortex PC kit by Powertran; no RF issues from that - the case was 1/4" mild steel all round...
Took hours to solder in/all the chips :-)
The joys of TMS9000 assembly language - it still makes the intel instruction set look crap...

Whose been saying I'm paranoid?

haveagoade

Hey I got a sinclair zx 80 gatering dust in the loft .......cost £99 new wonder whats its worth now???????

gameboy

Ebay item number 8158376373 current has 11 bids and is at £155 with 5 days to go.

Get up in that loft.....

Only he who does nothing, does nothing wrong.

damhy

Dunno if you guys have seen:
http://worldofspectrum.org/

Been around for years with just about every game to download (in the archive section), obviously only if you own them already! I prefer the warajevo emulator as it seems to work well when you get the hang of it, buts that more of a legacy app for me cos it worked back on my old 200Mhz PC. Just try a few out and see whats best.

As for my spectrum +3 my dad destroyed it to try and fix the disc drive in his amstrad pcw, though I got a new amiga 600 out of it! Just a bit of an upgrade.

gameboy

All the best 'Ultimate Play The Game' now 'Rare' games have 'distribution denied' - sad really.

Only he who does nothing, does nothing wrong.

damhy

Yeah I dunno why people like codemasters have stopped people from getting classics like Dizzy from the site, its mean really they made such money out of it, and its not like they are gonna make a mint selling games of that graphical quality, these days.

BGonaSTICK

Yeah, but who thought that we'd see Noddy, Basil Brush and 'the arched window' from Playschool making a reappearance on our screens!

They'll want to sell the rights on to the next retro-developer!

gameboy

Only a matter of time before JetPac, etc appears on mobile phones - unless they already do....

Only he who does nothing, does nothing wrong.