News Sinclair ZX Spectrum celebrates 30 years

I got my ZX Speccy 48k for my 13th birthday in 1983. Some of my greatest gaming moments were had on this little machine. Later I bought a C64, then an Amiga 500, and upgrade that to the 1200. Great days indeed.

 

Lenslok was a nightmare, I still have Elite on Cassette and can never get the bloody thing to work properly!.

Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge took up loads of my time as a kid (I have Sorderon's Shadow on tape but haven't played that yet).

 

Lol, yer thats it lenslok, only had 3 goes (i think) then had to start over again lol, went from this to an atari st (cousins) and the commadore amiga (mine) mysels and cousin couldnt figure which was better, the st or amiga lol, used to play super sprint on his atari st (killed loads of joysticks with that game)...i used to play bloody donkey kong on my amiga lmao.....fun times

 

see... games being crippled by copy protection is hardly a new thing

 

Still got my 16k speccy. It needs a ztx650 transistor, but it will still work.
If only I had a tape player/microdrive...

 

I had a 128K.

I wish I still had it. I should never have given it away to a neighbour (my Mum made me!)

Thinking back I'd be quite excited when I took it downstairs to hook up to the "big" tv. I wonder what it would look like on my 42" plasma?

Awesome I expect.

 

Happy birthday ZX Spectrum - you were slightly before my time - but I do remember playing on one at a friend's house. This video seems relevant and always makes me think of that time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts96J7HhO28 (Hey Hey 16K)

 

Good days indeed. I had a ZX Spectrum 128k. The day my dad brought one home, my life changed forever. My favourite games were Rainbow Islands and Target Renegade.

It was such a treat to play on the colour TV, as I had a small black and white TV in my room.

 

Colour clash in hd

Sent from Bittech Android app

 

It's all about the chiptunes these days...

 

There's still a loyal following on the Speccy, and lots of addons both software and hardware.

IDE storage, CD Rom capability, compact flash storage, pc-spectrum interconnect (handy to download games and load/play them on an original speccy).

 

New games are being released for the Spectrum, which for a 30 year old machine is outstanding.

Using a PC to load games rather than a tape deck (not for the +2 though) is a bonus, although it still takes over 10 minutes to load Robocop 2 on the 128

 

I loved my spectrum and spent many hours learning to program on it. At one point I became quite obsessed with dimensional arrays and databases and used it to record all sorts of meaningless information (such as every single and album I owned). It was so frustrating when it would run out of ram.

The spectrum was also my first 'upgraded' machine. I remember buying a ram upgrade kit, taking the spectrum apart and swapping over the ram chips. It has a lot to answer for.

I never really spent that much time gaming on it, I preferred to write my own stuff, but I did lose many, many hours playing Jetpac. I also have a strange recollection of a Frankie Goes To Hollywood game, though I can't remember too much about it now.

 

I remember the FGtH game, I never bought it but I do recall that it got brilliant reviews in Crash (THE Speccy mag at the time, the others were just irrtiating) for being actually quite good and very different from what you would expect from a tie in game. I'm sure there must be mag scans on line somewhere if you need to look up any reviews.

 

Found it!

http://www.crashonline.org.uk/19/frankie.htm

 

Nice find. Takes me back, god knows how many hours I spent trying to get to the pleasuredome.

 

I still have FGtH on a C64 emulator on my PC. Its one of my all-time favorites.

Good times, good times...

 

and c64 paled to the atari 800xl and later 130xe.. you guys had the slowest disk drives known to man- you could watch 2 bruce lee movies in the time it took to load up one game

 

My mate had an Atari but had trouble getting games he had to order them from a specialist shop.

The speccy wasn't the best but you could get games for it anywhere, I remember my cousin lending me 2 cassette cases full of games..... and I taped most of them, lol.

 

I disagree. I had a C64 but really liked the Speccy too. It was no worse or better --just different, and had some really good games that the C64 did not have. I would have bought both if I had had the money.