Any former Spectrum users on this board?

[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*

[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.