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25th Anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Apr 23, 2007 07:43 AM
from the never-even-seen-one dept.
from the never-even-seen-one dept.
Alioth writes "Twenty five years ago today, Sinclair Research launched Britain's most popular home computer of the 1980s — the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Costing about one third of the price of its rivals such as the Commodore 64 while having a faster CPU and a better BASIC interpreter, the machine sold well in many guises throughout the 1980s and had more than a staggering 9,000 software titles. The machine may well have done well in the US too, had Timex — the company building the machine under license in the US — not already been in financial trouble and about to fold. The machine was also extremely successful in Russia, although not for Sinclair Research — because the Russians made dozens of different clones of the machine, and did so right into the mid 1990s. The machine still has a healthy retro scene, including the development of new commercial software by Cronosoft, and new hardware such as the DivIDE, which allows a standard PC hard disc or compact flash card to be connected to the machine."
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And, as we all know... (Score:5, Insightful)
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My absolute favorite though was the Kim-I. ran off of battery power easily and made the best robotics platform.
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Re:And, as we all know... (Score:4, Interesting)
A 48K Spectrum was my second computer after a ZX81. I don't think I ever got so much pleasure out of any other possession I had as a child (and I didn't even have Sam Fox Strip Poker [props to those who actually remember her, and double to those who remember the game]).
The Spectrum just went to show how limited hardware resources would force game developers to write creative, original and addictive games. Knight Lore, RedHawk, Manic Miner, Heavy on the Magick, Spellbound, Knight Tyme, Skooldaze, Sweevo's World and above all Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge were among the best games I have played on any platform. Shame on game developers for the formulaic crap they spew these days.
Does anyone else remember CRASH magazine? Whatever happened to those guys? It was almost worth being a spectrum owner just for that mag. Best and funniest game reviews ever, and Oliver Frey's covers were fantastic. For years I wanted to meet a girl like the one on this cover he did.
ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/magazi
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Specifically, Jetpac, Knight Lore, 3D Deathchase and Quazatron along with better versions of Elite, Head Over Heels, Spindizzy and R-Type mean C64 LOSES.
Re:And, as we all know... (Score:4, Informative)
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What you should do is set your love for the little rubber-keyed monster to music...
Oh wait, it's happened already!
Hey Hey 16K [b3ta.com] - which might explain some of the peculiar British affection for these machines...
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Your problem is caused by the "keyword" system (Score:5, Informative)
I think that your problem with Spectrum programming is due to Sinclair's "keyword" system. This first appeared on the ZX80 [wikipedia.org]. A single touch of a ZX80 key gave you a whole BASIC keyword (e.g. PRINT, GOTO). This was fast and simple. Symbols were accessed with SHIFT, and you could still type single letters when it was required.
A similar system was used on the ZX81 [wikipedia.org] , but because it was more powerful, there were more keywords to squeeze onto the keyboard. Thus, some keywords required the user to type SHIFT+NEWLINE *then* hit the key.
Sinclair retained the "keyword" system for the ZX Spectrum. Unfortunately, this was *much* more complicated, and there were lots of keywords to fit in. This made the system complicated. Even at its release, the Spectrum was criticised for this. From "Your Computer" magazine:-
Of course, at that time, I didn't realise that many BASIC keywords on my Atari 800XL could be abbreviated; for example "PRINT" could be "?", "LIST" could be "L.", and so on. Sinclair should have done that on the Spectrum instead.
Incidentally, when the enhanced 128K Spectrum was released, the new BASIC abandoned the keyword system.
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Why not emulate? fun for all bored students! (Score:4, Informative)
Why is this in 'Games'? (Score:4, Insightful)
argh.. apostrophe gremlin strikes (Score:2)
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Hurrah for sinclair!
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The Speccy was also
Z80s all around us (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently they are common in dishwashers, washing machines and other programmable appliances. (Can your dishwasher run Linux?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z80 [wikipedia.org]
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My childhood in a nutshell (Score:3, Interesting)
I started with a Sinclair ZX81, 1Kb of RAM expanded to 16Kb with a "RAM pack" that had an edge connector to the main PCB inside. It got hot (as did the power supply) and was often unstable. You could suddenly lose everything you were working on because the system just froze.
Along came the ZX Spectrum, 48Kb (and later 128Kb) with 8 colours (the ZX81 was black & white), sprites (the ZX81 was limited to the built in character set which included blocks & things until someone worked out how to hack that) and rubber keys (the ZX81 had touch sensitive membrane things).
It was a revolution, at my school we swapped tapes which didn't always load, had multiface cartridges to enter POKEs (changing a value at a particular memory address) for cheats and in order to create backups... and a big magazine scene.
I even ran an emulator on my PC to play one game in particular: the game that everyone tried to beat, and still fiendishly hard (and created by a mysterious genius who "disappeared", Matthew Smith [emuunlim.com]) : Manic Miner [xmixdrix.com] (link to a Windows version).
Those were the days [caperet.com]. The UK 8 bit scene was dominated by this machine.
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Yes now you mention it, you're right. But I still thought of them as sprites, I used to think of "sprite" clashing. What's the difference, in the end? Character placeholders are "virtual" 8x8 sprites, if you mess around in your code anyway, no?
I think they mean hardware sprite support. "Sprites" on the Spectrum were all generated by "manual" software manipulation of pixels on the screen. The C64 and Atari 400/800/XL/XE included hardware support for sprites. For example, on the Atari 800, you could superimpose differently-coloured PMGs (hardware sprites) onto a monochromatic background; actually, PMGs were the height of the screen, so by changing their position on different scan lines, you could generate multiple sprites from one hardware PMG and
Thank you Sir Clive (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also worth noting Amstrad's healthy attitude to the retro scene (they bought Sinclair Research in 1986, and many of those million Brits will think of Spectra every time they watch The Apprentice...). Anyway, the Spectrum ROM was cracked & emulated before permission was sought. When someone decided to approach Amstrad to seek permission, one Cliff Wilson [worldofspectrum.org] stepped forward with a simple reply: "Yes, do what you like with the Spectrum ROM, just don't charge money for it and don't remove our copyright message." Such an open attitude towards the scene in 1999 means that it's still thriving today.
Nice little Speccy tribute in flash (Score:4, Funny)
First and Most Significant For Me (Score:3, Informative)
I remember learning BASIC and assembly (Z80), playing Elite all through one night, playing games and learning lots of stuff.
And that little silver-paper thermal printer!
I've still got the 1981 ZX-Spectrum 48K in a box somewhere, with tapes of many games and that printer (and some spare 'paper'). The keyboard membrane has pretty much had it, making the computer almost useless, but one day I'll get a replacement, just for the nostalgia.
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http://www.rwapservices.co.uk/ [rwapservices.co.uk]
Also rubber keyboard mats if yours has worn out.
I still frequently use my Spectrum (well, ahem, one of my FOUR Spectrums - a rubber keyed 48K, a Spectrum+, a toast rack 128, and a bare board I use for testing hardware) because they are still a lot of fun. These days, you can download most of the software from World of Spectrum. On a rainy day, it's good fun to pull out the Speccy, dow
Market vs "good products" (Score:2)
Sr Clive also gifted us with the Sinclair QL [wikipedia.org], another product the market largely ignored despite its potentials.
The Acorn Archimedes [wikipedia.org] was meant to be a powerful innovative PC. But the "market" was aimed to IBM PCs and to Amigas
That was the history: the market can esily ignore techinical advances against fancy worse products!
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Sr Clive also gifted us with the Sinclair QL, another product the market largely ignored despite its potentials.
From what I've heard, the problem with the QL was that it was marketed to businesses, not the enthusiast market. I've also read that the QL was quite flakey when it launched (i.e. lots of bugs) and that the Microdrives were unproven; much as I hate to say it, I would not have entrusted my business to such a machine, even if it was technologically brilliant.
The Acorn Archimedes was meant to be a powerful innovative PC. But the "market" was aimed to IBM PCs and to Amigas
The Amiga was a fantastic and cutting-edge machine when it came out. Don't compare it against the PC which (even at its launch) was conservative and
THATS NOTHING (Score:5, Funny)
trum 48k to c
onnect to the
internet and
work with sla
shdot.
REM disconnec
t
As a 25th anniversary tribute (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Spectrum-Diag [alioth.net]
It uses LEDs to display the test progress and status, so even if you can't get a picture out of the Spectrum, you can at least find out if the CPU and memory is working, and a good idea whether the ULA is servicable.
I'm a woman with blunt, square-tipped fingers... (Score:3, Funny)
Thanks a lot, you bastards.
Commonly repeated incorrect factiod alert! (Score:3, Informative)
It did not have a faster CPU. It had a CPU running at a higher external bus clock. You'd think that after all these years that people would realize that MHz != performance, but I guess not.
The 6502 ran on a bus multiplier, meaning it ran faster internally than it did externally. This is true of practically any modern CPU, but was not so common back in the day. In general terms the 1MHz 6502 and 4MHz Z80 ran at the same internal speeds. That said, the 6502 was much more efficient and RISC-like. In practically any benchmark that scales for speed, the 6502 comes out ahead.
Arguably the fastest, in theory, 8-bit machine was the Atari series. They ran a 2 MHz 6502 (declocked to sync with video), which was twice as fast as any of the other 6502 machines and effectively the same as an 8MHz Z80. But again, these machines always finished at the bottom of the heap in BASIC benchmarks, which again demonstrates the point at the top.
Maury
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Machines like the BBC Micro got better performance than the Spectrum not from the 6502, but because they had more hardware support which meant the CPU didn't have to do everything. But a BBC Model B, while undoubtedly
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Many 6502 instructions completed in only 2 cycles, although I believe the decode phase of the instruction was executed in parallel with the register write phase of the previous instruction, so in some circumstances it may have taken 3 cycles to execute the same instruction.
Re 16 bit add, and assuming one memor
Homage post (Score:3, Interesting)
My very first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48k. I still remember the beautiful banner: "(c) 1982 Sinclair Research, Ltd. Chuckie Egg II was my very first game, and BASIC the very first programming language I tried. The ZX Spectrum and the Timex had an almost monopoly here in Portugal in the '80's, to the extent that I never really saw a C64. The Timex plant in Portugal continued making them after the main branch closed its doors, and exported the machine to several countries (Poland was one of the main markets IIRC).
To Sir Clive: Hip! Hip! Hurrah!
Nostalgia time (Score:3, Interesting)
Damn I can still hear the staticky 'eeeeeee-ktsch' of the tape drive now.
Modern computing seems so flat, routine and devoid of character by comparison. What happened?
Memories (Score:3, Interesting)
It was popular in Eastern Europe too (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was 7, my father built a 48K Spectrum from scratch using smuggled components (the Z80 processor, the EEPROMs), parts from other computers (the case and keyboard); he made the PCB by himself as well as copying and programming the ROMs. I still remember the hardware debugging sessions.
Later we managed to make the Interface II (I think that was its name) addon board and get a floppy drive to work. It was an East-German Robotron 5.25" drive; we were using 360Kb Bulgarian floppies (sorry, can't remember the brand).
It was a wonderful machine and it's the way I got into computers and learn assembler (Zeus ruled). At 12 I was busy cracking the games' copy protection to be able to copy them from tape to disks. Oh, btw, games had to be smuggled in too - one network used airline pilots, some of the few kind of people who could travel outside the country with ease. Don't get me started with books, it was hard even to photocopy one, as access to photocopiers was restricted.
Sinclair story (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, he didn't get it. Actually, I imagine he's a lot more into computers these days. Finally got what he wanted, twenty years later.
Speccys in the US (Score:3, Informative)
There were 3 big barriers (at the time) to stop British machines taking off in the US:
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The Birthplace of the Megahertz wars (Score:5, Informative)
The Z-80 was essentially an 8080 with twice as many registers but no significant changes to the instruction set. the Z-80's. (well DMA but it was hard to use). I/O was a separate operation than memory access. And most instructions took 4 clock cycles but some took more and a few took 3.
The 6502 had a much leaner but more powerful instruction set with some very sophisticated computed branch offset instructions. It had fewer registered but mapped all of the first 256 bytes to behave like registers. (At that time It did not pay a significant speed penalty for accessing main memory over register memory.) All I/O was memory mapped. This allowed a simpler bus structure.
it ran at 1Mhz but most instructions were 1 cycle so it was faster than the Z-80.
These design features allowed for the two greatest innovations in modern computing history. Dynamic memory and Graphical displays
1) Dynamic memory.
Prior to the pet and apple, nearly all computers used Static memory which was not dense and used lots of power. Many bankrupt companies had tries to use Dynamic memory with the 8080. They all failed because no one successfully mastered the problem of robustly refreshing the memory without severely compromising the machine. The problem was that irregulat 3,4,5,6 cycle instructions set length. one could not predict easily when and how much of the time the memory bus would be in use by the CPU. As a result the refresh controller had to just opportunstically try to refresh the memory. This resulted in complex logic that sometimes failed to get through the whole row-address space in the required time. As a result, the only viable approach was to insert wait states into the process to give the refresh a guarenteed access. This slowed the CPU and also had complex logic. It even messed up timing loops like those used in I/O for baud rates and such.
The 6502 had a regular heart beat. The second half of the cycle was gaurenteed not to access memory. So the refersh sould be poot on the back side of the cycle. no special logic was needed. No wait states.
Of course eventually refresh controllers got better and that did allow the intels to work with dynamic memory. But the 6502 got their first.
2) Graphics.
Most graphics on the 8080/z-80 used I/O ports. Think CGI graphics. There were of course exceptions. But the reason for the lack of memory mapping was How was the video card supposed to access the main memory. It would have had to use wait states. lots of them. and would have halved the CPU rate.
Memory mapped graphics were of course natural for 6502. Wozniak went one better. He used that backside clock cycle to access the memory for the video output. Now wait you say, how can he use the backside clock cycle to video access if it's already in use for the refresh? That's the genius part. He used the video access as the refresh. The video was just incrementing over the entire row-addrress space in a very regular cycle. Refresh was assured and no circuits was needed.
the Dynamic ram and overall lower chip counts, simpler bus logic, video, refresh all meant smaller power supplies too. the expansion cards required less logic to decode the complex bus signals so the expansion cards on the apple were literally 1/4 the size of the ones on the s-100 bus that was standard in the 8080 world.
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Re:The Birthplace of the Megahertz wars (Score:5, Informative)
The fastest 6502 instructions were not one cycle, but two cycles.
The fastest Z80 instructions were four cycles.
A very good 6502 programmer could write a program for the 1MHz 6502 in Commodore machines run as quickly as a run-of-the-mill Z80 programmer could on the Spectrum.
While the slowest 6502 cycles instructions were around 7 clock cycles, and the slowest Z80 instructions (the index register instructions) were real dogs, one or two of them taking up to 20 cycles to complete, this was more than made up by register pairing. A Z80 could do a 16 bit add in 11 cycles, where the 6502 would take on the order of 20 (and use more memory).
There was a lot more to the Z80 than a slight improvement over the 8080 - it had not a few but many more instructions (all the DD and ED prefixes), including the addition of extra registers such as the index registers. The Z80 also had more interrupt modes than the 8080, including the very useful IM 2 which meant you could trivially wrest interrupt control from the ROM program (which simply wouldn't be possible with an 8080 based machine). It not only had the block move instructions (LDIR and LDDR) but also block I/O transfer instructions and block search instructions which helped keep the memory footprint of many programs down.
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DRAM refresh was also not a problem for the Z80 - the Z80 actually had built in DRAM refresh circuitry - this is one reason it was so popular,
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While this is true, you obviously don't know _why_ they were built this way, otherwise you wouldn't be spouting tripe about it being due to a limitation in the Z80 (then again, it's hardly surprising that what amounts to a computer salesman is pretending to know far more about technical details that is in fact the case). Remember something called CP/M 2.2? CP/M itself took up 7K from the Z80's 64K maximum ad
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Interesting)
While the Z80 had more registers, the 6502 had "page 0" addresses that allowed offset-only access to the first 256 bytes of RAM, which in a way made up for it. The 6502 instruction set was very minimal, and in fact was the inspiration for the ARM RISC processor designed by Acorn (originall ARM = Acorn RISC Machine, later re-acronymed as Advanced RISC machine).
The trick with getting performance out of the 6502 (or any of the early 8 bitters) was to execute as few instructions as possible - things like the BBC Basic and Acorns's ISO Pascal (I was 1/2 of the team that wrote the latter) were written in extremely hand optimized assember. You would never do JSR sub; RET - always JMP sub instead. Never do LD A, 0 (two bytes), always XOR A, A (one byte, same effect) instead. Never JMP addr, when you knew the state of the CPU flags and could do JRZ addr (jump relative on zero flag vs jump absolute) instead.
These are only a few examples, but it was surprising how much fucntionality you could fit into a tiny space by using efficient code like this. The Acorn ISO Pascal implementation fitted into 2 16KB EPROMS, yet packed in a full ISO compliant Pascal compiler (written in Pascal, and self-compiling to an internal pseudo-code - 16KB), the pseudo-code interpreter, run-time library (floating point, heap, I/O, etc), full screen editor (in 4KB of code) with regular expression search/replace, block move etc, and a command line interpreter.. The pseudo-code interpreter, etc, comprised the other 16KB and were all written in super-tight assembler... and the interpreter had to self-relocate itself out of EPROM into RAM to be able to run the compiler since the two 16K EPROMS (1 = compiler in pseudo-code, 2 = p-code interpreter, etc) occupied the same address space in the BBC micro.
Computing was generally a hell of a lot more fun back then, partly because it was new but also partly because of the challenge of getting stuff like this to run given the limitied CPU/memory resources. I hate to think how big a modern ISO Pascal implementation with all the extras (interpreter, library, screen editor, etc) would be - maybe a factor of 1000 times bigger (32MB vs 32K) or thereabouts?!
Those really were the good old days, although it's also exciting what's possible given the speed/memory available today.
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Re:Web browsing on 48k ZX Spectrum (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showthread.
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