Happy Birthday ZX Spectrum

[Nathan]

Apparently it's 25 years old this month.

Anyone any memories of the finest home computer ever made?

http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

[Rob McCow]

I was a ZX Spec-chum!

It taught me to play computer games compulsively and haw to get addicted to them. Hurrah!

My fave games were Dizzy (or any of its sequels) Knight Tyme, the outstanding 128k only Robocop, Flying Shark, Castle Master (a 3D game in 48k!) and probably a thousand others. I remember the pointlessness of SimCity on the Spectrum, a game that entirely revolves around saving your city to come back to it on a medium where saving a game involved wrestling with cassette tapes.

Oh and Batman The Movie. That was cool. And Rainbow Islands. (Rainbows? On a SPECTRUM? Good god man!)

[Nathan]

I remember the pointlessness of SimCity on the Spectrum, a game that entirely revolves around saving your city to come back to it on a medium where saving a game involved wrestling with cassette tapes.

Little Computer People was the same. 128K took hours to load and all the little bugger ever wanted to do was play hangman!

[SiHart]

Even I had a ZX Spectrum! I loved the rubber keys which made it kind of unique. I can remember playing a game called Clever Clogs, where the compuetr used to cheat and answer the questions wrong! I beat it more than a few times though.

My friend Phillip at primary school used to program his really well and we used to play loads of the games he'd written or copied from Sinclair User.

Si xx

[Matthew T]

A Spectrum was far too modern for us...we had a BBC Electron. We got a big carrier bag full of second hand games off a family friend too, ones on cassette that you had to wait about 20 minutes for them to load up!

Repton Around the World was my favourite.

[Larry]

can certainly remember the Spectrum computers though I never had one the only ones I ever used were the Commadors 16 & 64 and boy did I have a stack of problems with the 64 version.

[Dirk Gently]

I had a Sinclair Spectrum ZX128 +2.
You had the 128, just the keyboard/base unit then the +2 with built in cassette & then the +3 with the built in diskette drive.

I even got a proper dust cover for mine...actually I might still have mine in the loft. How much would a museum give for one of these?

I got mine in 1987. Robocop was probably the best game I had, but I used to really enjoy Bruce Lee platform game & a ninja game.

[Larry]

one think I do remember about the computers of this period is how painfully slow it took to load the games .....

[Milky Tears]

Speccy's were for gimps. We had an Atari 800XL!

[Captain Tancredi]

I started out with a 16k Spectrum at Christmas 1982 (I think). Weird to think that I've probably written pieces for Lissa which work out at more than 16k... A few years later I was given the 32k RAM pack which you plugged in to the back to play 48k games, and then (following a burglary and insurance claim) the 128k versiona few years later.

Ah, the joys of taking over the television for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon to type in a program which then didn't work...

[Andrew Curnow]

My brother saved up most of the money, and got one for Christmas 1983. At that time, at least at our school, the 'computer room' was still just a glorified cupboard that had been quickly cleaned out and had a BBC Micro shoved in it, and was regarded either as a very scary way forward, or way too geeky, depending on who you asked.

Part of the charm in those days was that each game was like Russian Roulette, in that you could never be sure whether it would load or not! And that noise that the games would make as they tried to load will stay with me forever! Our favourite game was Jet Set Willy, even though after about three or four plays it would always go wrong and we'd have to reload it. Mind you, I never did finish it - what was the point of that game again?

Our generation really were around for what was actually a major revolution, wasn't it - when my brother got his Spectrum it was a real Event, a bit like having a TV for the Coronation. Now, just under a quarter of a century later, I don't think I know anybody (apart from my Gran!) who doesn't have a home PC.

[Larry]

My brother saved up most of the money, and got one for Christmas 1983. At that time, at least at our school, the 'computer room' was still just a glorified cupboard that had been quickly cleaned out and had a BBC Micro shoved in it, and was regarded either as a very scary way forward, or way too geeky, depending on who you asked.

Part of the charm in those days was that each game was like Russian Roulette, in that you could never be sure whether it would load or not! And that noise that the games would make as they tried to load will stay with me forever! Our favourite game was Jet Set Willy, even though after about three or four plays it would always go wrong and we'd have to reload it. Mind you, I never did finish it - what was the point of that game again?

Our generation really were around for what was actually a major revolution, wasn't it - when my brother got his Spectrum it was a real Event, a bit like having a TV for the Coronation. Now, just under a quarter of a century later, I don't think I know anybody (apart from my Gran!) who doesn't have a home PC.

oh i remember those BBC Micro computers big cluncky things they were.

[WhiteCrow]

I used to not only write my own games, I used to make mathematical models of mathematics and physics problems on the computer.

And yes, I didn't have many friends, got beat up a lot, and thought Adric was way cool ...

[Pip Madeley]

I had a Spectrum once, till our house was broken into back in the early 1990s. It was great too, I remember the daft way you had to load the cassettes, and the great games like Trap Door and Ruff N' Ready.

I've downloaded a Mega Drive/Master System emulator this weekend, so I'm currently reliving my childhood, playing all the games I used to play - Fifa Soccer '96 holds particularly happy memories... it's a pain trying to play with the keyboard though... shame there's no PC input for one of my old controllers...

[Lord President]

How come nobody has mentioned Hungry Horace? The finest Spectrum game there ever was, closely followed by Horrace goes Skiing and Horace and the Spiders!

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Because all three of them were rubbish perhaps?

[Rob McCow]

At the time though, Horace ruled the computer game scene with a mighty fist.

When I say 'mighty', I mean 'Badly animated' and when I say 'Fist' I mean 'pixel'

[Thasc]

My favourite games were Spectres and BC Bill

[stephenhannan]

I still have my Speccy 128+2 complete with box. light gun and about 250 games. The thing reappears every now and again and I have a few nights playing some of the stratergy war games. Anzio is especially a good challenge.

[Dino]

Horace Goes Skiing! Schizoids! 80's flashback! AAARRGGGHHH!!! Happy Birthday ZX Spectrum. Because I wore glasses, people asked if I still had my speccy! Geddit? Oh how I laughed... Upgraded to the 128+. Bit out of touch with technology now. Ghosts 'n' Goblins...The Great Escape! Skool Daze! Aliens! It's all coming back to me... make it stop! The Graphic Adventure Creator! Survival! (you survived for 12 days) Jet Set Willy! And all this without looking at the link in the first post!

[enzo1701]

I had a Spectrum (had a 48k rubber keyboard, and later switched to a +2b)... in fact, I still have a Spectrum! It looks weird set up next to my Xbox 360 though. Just kidding, it's bagged up somewhere. But I still play Spectrum games - I got a CD-rom full of emulator games for my PC. Plus I visit World of Spectrum's website quite a bit too (you can play emulated games on there). My Facebook even has a Spectrum emulator on it too. Loved the Codemasters games, Dizzy, Seymour, etc.

Useless bit of info for you, do you know that Activision (now the world's biggest video game company), along with Capcom, Codemasters and Ultimate (now Rare) do not allow their games to be emulated? Not even 20-25 year old Spectrum games! Why?

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Oh and Batman The Movie. That was cool. And Rainbow Islands. (Rainbows? On a SPECTRUM? Good god man!)

They didn't call it a spectrum for nothing you know 8 colours is a lot when you only had 2 before.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Useless bit of info for you, do you know that Activision (now the world's biggest video game company), along with Capcom, Codemasters and Ultimate (now Rare) do not allow their games to be emulated? Not even 20-25 year old Spectrum games! Why?

Because they're evil. I emailed Codemasters ages ago asking why they didn't just put the old spectrum games on their website to download for a few pence or something, or a few quid for the whole lot. At least that way they would actually make a bit of money out of them instead of just hoarding them for no apparent reason. And I'm sure a lot of people would happily pay a couple of quid to have all the Dizzy games or whatever instead of trawling through newsgroups or whatever trying to find them illegally. They declined to respond.

[enzo1701]

Didn't Codemasters recently put BMX Simulator on their website as a free download?

But yeah it's weird - all these fab games in their back catalogue (Dizzy, Seymour, etc) and they probably won't get to see the light of day any more.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Well they will because you can get them FAIRLY easily by rooting around, it's just there's no quick and easy reliable source for them like World of Spectrum. So they will see the light of day, just in an annoying and fiddly way that there's no real reason for.