Imspeccable

Technology correspondent Hal Berstram rediscovers an old friend...


It's 25 years since Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum.



It was, for sure, the home computer of the early 80s. It cost £175 for the 48k version, which was a lot more money then than it is now (I could put you together a (very low spec) new PC for not much more than that nowadays), but that was an absolute price breakthrough for 48k, 'high resolution' graphics and a colour screen back in the day. Somehow, in the summer of '83, my parents managed to scrape the necessary readies for a Speccy and I was in business. I think after buying a couple of lame Space Invaders and Frogger clones (Hungry Horace anyone?) I bought Jetpac and never looked back. Thank f*** my dad didn't do his normal money-savin' trick and go for the 16k model - only about 2 games ever ran on it as I recall.

The Spectrum was severely compromised in many ways:

• the keyboard. I mean, it was better than the ZX81 membrane keyboard, but not by much. I wonder if anyone ever learnt to touch type on it. Actually it would be great to sell a laptop with a retro 'Spectrum-style' keyboard and see if anyone bought it. I'd probably get rid of the diagonal rainbow stripe across the bottom left though.
  
• It did have 8-colour capability, but to cut costs the screen mapping allowed each 8x8 character square to be one of two colours - a foreground and a background. This meant that in a game like Manic Miner for example, Willy (who I think was white) would turn the green hedge he was walking past white - and then it would go green again once he'd gone past it. This 'colour bleed' was annoying but was helped by the fact that most of the TVs we had were so crap that you couldn't actually see what colour the aliens, or whatever, were anyway. A plus side to this was that not much of the RAM was needed to hold the screen memory - unlike the BBC micro where screen mapping could take up to 14k (depending on which screen mode was used).
  
• the sound. It was about as good as the PC's internal loudspeaker. Amazingly, a few of the games I had for it featured (8-bit) speech synthesis.
  
• no disk drive capability (at least not until Amstrad took over Sinclair in the mid 80s, but by then I'd moved on to the Amiga anyway). There was a thing called a microdrive which I think was a high-speed tape interface, but it was complete bollox. But that was Clive Sinclair for you. He was - we are told, and I've no reason not to believe it - a genius, but his basic schtick was to design consumer products that were weedy and flimsy looking enough to get you laughed off the street unless they were so cheap that everybody bought them anyway and there was safety in numbers. I once saw someone commuting into Chelmsford on a C5. But only once.
  
• the thermal printer. One guy at school once handed in his homework on one of these. I think the teacher said something like, "I don't normally accept a till roll as homework".
  

But all of this was more than outweighed by the pluses. It was the best games machine of the time, bar none (well I'd have to make one exception - Elite was better on the BBC micro than the Speccy. But other than that...) It had 48k of RAM, which was more than the BBC Micro (although not as much as the Commodore 64). Them was the days.

To sign off, here are my 5 top games picks on the Spectrum (in no real order):

• Halls of the Things (an early classic from Design Design software, the guy behind which has a page here.)
• Jetpac (once played non-stop for about 36 hours)
• Elite (still great, even though the Spectrum version had a lot of the ships taken out of it)
• Splat (this sure was a weird one. Hard to describe)
• Psyclapse/Bandersnatch (these never actually came out, but acquired iconic status, and hence have been included for sheer comedy value. They caused the collapse of Imagine Software, which had been running an advertising campaign for them for about 6 months in the computer press before they went under. The games were going to feature specially designed hardware and would, we were reliably informed, be the Best Games Ever. It was a sad end for a great company!)

In a few years it'll be the next great milestone - 25 years since the Commodore Amiga. Time marches on...