Any former Spectrum users on this board?

[Ghost]

Hello all,

Years ago when my brother still lived at my parents' home he used to have a Spectrum computer with several games.
Once in a while I was allowed to play on it, one of my favorite games was Jet Pac, which I had been searching for since I myself went into games.

Fortunate thanks to the fine people at Retrospec I was able to enjoy the game in a new form as well as play several games I never had the fortune to play in their original incarnations on the Spectrum.

As there are many British members on this forum I take it some of you have also played with or owned a Spectrum at one time in your lives.

So what was it like, and what games do you remember the most?

[Demon Cleaner]

I did never have a Spectrum at the time, now I have a Spectrum+, but never used it, as I don't have any software or the knowledge to run it.

The only game I remember playing on a Spectrum was Attic Attac, that was in 1982 when I was in Brentford near London.

I now emulate the Spectrum on my barebone emulation system, I have the complete TOSEC set, which is quite big.

A good Spectrum site I know is www.worldofspectrum.org

[Tiago]

I Still have my ZXSpectrum 48k and same cassetes.
I play out-run, same weeks ago!!!

[Harrison]

I never owned my own Sinclair Spectrum, but a friend was really into them at the time. I had a 48K Spectrum and a lot of games. We used to spend hours playing through them all, and I would usually buy the Amstrad CPC versions after first playing them on the Spctrum.

His 48K Spectrum died when one day a pair of scissors lying on the floor near the back of the computer made contact with something in the back and shorted the system out.

He then saved up and purchased a +3 and continued to play around with that for years.

As with DC, I now play Speccy games via emulation, and World of Spectrum is a great site to visit if you are looking for anything as they have a huge archive of over 6000 games for download.

[TiredOfLife]

More invaders to repel.
Not that long ago, we had someone on here asking a similar question only that time about atari machines.
Heretics.
I wouldn't have sullied my fingers om either those or the cursed speccy machines.
The mighty CBM 64 all the way for us true believers.

[Ghost]

Hello guys,

Harrison,

Yeah, I know about the World of Spectrum site, that is how I came up with this topic.
While waiting for new game releases I sometimes get nostalgic so I start looking up info about the great machines of yesterday.

I have never played many games on it, the first 'home computer' I got to own was a Philips MSX2 (on hindsight I would have preferred the sony one) and after that I pretty much went into consoles like the Sega Master System.

Still it is nice some times to look at these old games, a lot of modern gamers look down upon them but they fail to realise that without these games they never had their Halo or Gears of War.

I sometimes think gaming has become too mainstream, almost everyone and their dog is into gaming these days.


Though the Spectrum has less colours it seems to me that its graphics are sharper than those of the Commodore 64.

[Ghost]

Something really weird happened while I was going through the top hundred of games at World of Spectrum.

I had opened several links, going through them and closing them after I was finished when I suddenly get a white screen with the text "mirroring denied".

I have no idea what that means but as far as I know I have done nothing to violate the site.
Anyone here who can explain it to me?

[Harrison]

Maybe they only allow a certain number of simultaneous connections to their server from one connection. To try and prevent leeching of their content and bandwidth.

You mention Halo and Gears of War as two examples of modern gaming, but I personally don't think either of those hold up as good examples. While GoW set new graphical standards on release to show what the Xbox 360 could do, and the original Halo pushed the first person shooting genre forward, showing that much more was possible compared to similar games before it, they are both at their hearts just shoot 'em ups, and if you get right down to the nuts and bolts, they owe everything to games like space invaders and galaga. Take away the graphics for both and you are left with little more than shooting moving targets.

In contrast games on all retro platforms had to do more than rely on shiny graphics immerse the player and get them hooked. The Spectrum is one of the greatest examples of this as it was the most underpowered and graphically inferior 8-bit system on the market, but managed to see some amazing games that are still as playable today as they were on release. I don't think the same will be try when looking back at Halo or GoW in 20 years time.

[TiredOfLife]

I can't belive you think the graphics on the speccy were better than the 64.
Off the top of my head, remembering Way of the Exploding Fist.
The graphics were truly awful on the speccy.

[Sharingan]

Haven't owned a Spectrum myself, but my cousin did, and I remember always wanting to sneak into his room everytime we visited just to have a go at it.

[v85rawdeal]

I didn't own a Spectrum, had a CPC instead, but I loved the little machine. I was always happy to play on a Speccy, especially if the option was that or a C64, because at the time it seemed to me that all the C64 owners were smug little tykes who needed a smacked bottom and a good telling off for being snotty-nosed. I am a lot older now, thankfully, as are we all, and we no longer indulge in such pettiness...

*looks up*:doh2:

[TiredOfLife]

You have got me thinking about C64 games now.
I want to play Exploding Fist II but one of my thumbs and one of my fingers is red raw.
Bugger.

[Ghost]

I can't believe you think the graphics on the speccy were better than the 64.
Off the top of my head, remembering Way of the Exploding Fist.
The graphics were truly awful on the speccy.

Hello TiredOfLife,

I haven't said that the graphics of the Spectrum are better, just that they seem a little more detailed.
While the Commodore 64 to me seems to be capable more regarding graphics, somehow the details gets lost.


Hello Harrison,

Its not as much that Halo and Gears of War are the best games for me on the moment, but these are two titles that are mentioned a lot in the current gaming crowd.

I do agree that gameplay wise they aren't that impressive or that standard setting.
However a lot of modern day gamers don't know about the machines of yesterday or simply judge them on their graphics and capacities.

[Harrison]

This is very true. Most young people of today just look at the graphics and instantly dismiss a whole system based on one image, because it doesn't live up to their expectations to grab their short attention spans.

[Demon Cleaner]

all the C64 owners were smug little tykes who needed a smacked bottom and a good telling off for being snotty-nosedWould be cool if you could write that sentence in english for me :lol:

[Tiago]

Well i still have my Spectrum 48k working, and i remember the C64, i think the old commodore was better then spectrum, graphics and sound, but i never own one, just the Spectrum

[Demon Cleaner]

i think the old commodore was better then spectrum, graphics and soundThat depends on the games, some were better (whether graphics, sound, playability...) on the C64, some one the Spectrum and others even on the CPC. At Retro Gamer forums they have a comparison thread, where they compare several games on these 3 platforms.

[Harrison]

It was always down to the coding abilities. In an ideal world Spectrum games would have looked and sounded the worst out of the three platforms in all games, but this wasn't the case due to good speccy coders, and bad ports to the other platforms.

The C64 when coded correctly could produce some great graphics, but many times things got rushed and the resulting games looked horrible. But worst hit for this was the CPC as so many games were just ported across from the Spectrum and looked identical, except for the colour clash being removed. But when a game was coded directly for the CPC they could look amazing. Look at Gryzor for a great example of this.

I do get the comments regarding spectrum graphics. Due to the sprites being single colour they did look quite crisp and stood out well. And when games were coded in black and white they looked really good on the spectrum. But they were far from a match for the other 8-bit machines at the time when they were coded correctly.

[Tiago]

I trade:
ZXSpecrtrum 48K
tape loader
monitor
cassetes
+ extra cash

for 1 Amiga

anyone?

[FOL]

Just so you guys know (those who have a psp). I have setup a new site for PSPectrum, we are going to be helping with development of it.

url = http://pspectrum.pspuae.com

[Harrison]

Don't let it's development effect the ongoing work on PSPUAE though. That wouldn't be good. I will definitely be trying out the Speccy emulator though. Always great to have a new emulator to play around with.

[Demon Cleaner]

I recently tried another Spectrum emulator on the PC. I usually use EmuZWin, but I got the emulator Spectaculator, which is very good, but is not for free. I got it together with a serial drom UG. If you want to try it out, grab it from there, or if you want, I can post it here, it's not that big.

[Harrison]

I tried that one a while back and it seemed good. I don't actually have any Spectrum emulators installed at the moment so do need a new one to try.

[Demon Cleaner]

Here's (http://www.underground-gamer.com/details.php?id=20577) the link to UG.

[Harrison]

Cheers, I will grab that later. :)

[FOL]

Don't let it's development effect the ongoing work on PSPUAE though. That wouldn't be good. I will definitely be trying out the Speccy emulator though. Always great to have a new emulator to play around with.

Well, im stuck on PSPUAE, seems the other devs have vanished. I have tried to update to the new E-UAE, but its bugged. So for now, ill play around with PSPectrum.

[J T]

We had a Speccy, it was a 128K I think. I never really used it loads, as at the time I was just that tiny bit too young and it seemed to be a bit complicated at times. I remember playing games such as Saboteur (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=^Saboteur$&pub=^Durell+Software+Ltd$&loadpics=on) and Turbo Esprit (not the racing game by Gremlin) (http://http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=^Turbo+Esprit$&pub=^Durell+Software+Ltd$&loadpics=on).

It got lent to a friend and came back not-working.

It hung around in a box for a bit and then we smashed it up. Bt of a daft thing to do really, would've been better to try and fix it but at the time there didn't seem much worth to that.