ZX Spectrum - just finish repairing a ZX 48K

[Tiago]

Hi,
some weeks ago i started to repair a ZX 48K. It had no image, sound or whatever.
I Started with a new IC 7805 (tension regulator), and some image appear, but a lot o squares and stripes.
I got some advice, and transistors TR4 and TR5 had to be changed, so i bought ZTX653 (TR4) and
ZRX753 (TR5), desolder the old ones, and solder the new ones, and, howwww, a nice new ZX48k.

Here is a video of the ZX48K, loading a small text that i put in the tape.
http://youtu.be/CPI5BPIT8Jo

Zx is cool, i am now playing around images. i will post a video later of a photo on the screen of the zx.

[Harrison]

Nice one. That brings back memories watching the video. I never owned a Spectrum at the time and instead bought an Amstrad CPC, but my friend had a 48K spectrum and we used to play loads of games on it. He then got the +3 with the disc drive.

[Tiago]

I am reading some stuff. Amaizing how they did in 48K.
I did another video, this one i was able to put the logo from my magazine on a tape in a real ZX.
it was amazing to see it render on screen, it's a 256×192 image with +/- 7kb that i did on pee cee, then
converted to wav and finnely recorded in real tape.


chek it out.
another test i was able to put my photo avatar on it, a lot of noise and wrong pixel colors, but it worked!

[Harrison]

Great. What did you use to make the image to load and render?

I used to love the 8bit tape loading screens as they drew and slowly revealed themselves.

Did you know you don't even need to use a real tape player any more? A lot of people just connect the audio out from a PC and play sampled audio of the tape loaders from the PC to load the software into the Spectrum.

[Tiago]

Yes you can connect a MP3 !!
But the old tape recorder has.... is different, is the real thing.
I did all the stuff in Pee Cee. I did the image in photoshop, converted it to 256×192 then
with some software converted from jpg to *.SCR (zx file).
After i run 2 command prompt programs still in Pee Cee that put the image and the syntax to load it in a one peace in a *.TAP file that you can run on a emulator. Then i converted to WAV sound file that i used to record to the real tape.
But the programs in PC do it all automatically, i didn't understand all the steps, i will try to learn how to do it, all in ZX.

[Harrison]

I'm really tempted to give that a go just to see play around with it under emulation.

I've never kept up with the Spectrum retro scene much, probably because I never owned a real one. I think most people tend to focus on the systems they owned growing up. I do however know there is a large community for the Spectrum, and they are still creating stuff for it. I've seen a few Youtube videos of demoscene productions on the Speccy and they have managed to perform graphical effects far beyond anything considered possible back in the 80's. Same is true for the C64 and CPC computers though. Some of the productions produced in recent years are really impressive.

We must start some threads to explore the demoscene on each of these platforms. Should be interesting.

[Harrison]

The problem with colour clash on the spectrum meant only certain colours could be placed next to each other. Put the wrong colours and you get a third ghost colour between them.

This problem was easily seen in sprite based games when the player sprite moved over background graphics and would change colour. Quite annoying.

One thing that was nice owning an Amstrad CPC was that most Spectrum games were directly ported. They looked very similar but didn't have the colour issues. The only annoying thing was that developers got lazy and tended to just do Spectrum ports for the CPC. It meant the CPC abilities never looked much better than the Spectrum's, whereas then developed natively it could do much more.

I never know the Spectrum was so popular in Portugal. What were the best selling games?

[Tiago]

yes it was popular, there was even a model produced here: the Timex Sinclair 2068 (TS2068)
We had a factory that produced them here. The model was also sold in Poland.

Zx spectrum 48k was the most common computer model in the 80s in Portugal. Much more then C64.
The selling of C64 was bigger in UK, in 1985 C64 start to sell much then spectrum, but not here.
Computers were expensive, much more then the rest of europe, so the ZX was the only that had a resonable price, well there were others, but the 48k was much more popular around.

Quite difficult to say the best selling games here, but i can tell you that games that were in the arcades, tend to sell quite well. I remember that outrun was a crazy thing! But there are classics that everyone had like:
jet set willy; jetpack; glu-glu; arkanoid; pacman; enduro racer (boy, this one was popular), formula 1 (another hit), match day, and so one, i think the best selling games here were not much different from Uk.