วีดีโอ

As an 80’s UK kid, I had and loved my 48k Speccy. I could never have dreamed, back then, that in 2024 there would be a Spectrum Next, a ZX Touch and so many emulators. And an international Speccy community, producing awesome homebrew software.

I remember this from Sinclair Programs. Definitely one of the Very best they published. And well structured code. Perhaps Mr. McTavish could come up with w sequel to Mark the 40th anniversary.

En nu werkt alles goed ?????

Brilliant 😃

My brother had 3 games published in mags, and he got 50 quid for each one too. They weren’t anywhere near as cool that kangaroo game unfortunately! I should try to dig them out from the PDFs. Anyway, fascinating story and looking forward to your upcoming vids. You have a sub from me. 😅

Such a honest and wonderful video!

It’s a great game! The Wall Street Journal recently had a story about older people playing Drop7. When I couldn’t find that game, I found yours. And it is fun to play! Love the music too, and how ads aren’t intrusive. Thank you.

Great video! I also had the Dutch experience. Me and my brother chipped in for Sinterklaas present to buy the speccy 48k in 1984. I discovered the Your Sinclair and Sinclair User magazines in a German store on summer vacation in 1989, with Indiana Jones last crusade as cover tape! A few years ago I reverse engineered that demo and Space Raiders, using Skoolkit, made by a Canadian, so lots of history outside the UK 🙂! Thanks for a well made trip down memory lane!

I've managed to convert an ati vga demo to the sam I'm looking for someone who can help me convert a video of galaxians to sam using a program called bmp2scrdo you have any spare time?

Do you know edwin blink?

Hey, I‘m one those 8x8 pixel ladies. Remember me, wanna go out for a lunch?

I will never forgive Zynga for what they did to OMGPOP, and now I learn that they killed another great game as well. Wow, they really wrote the book on how to be a shitty company.

En kunt je nu wel alleen op je zonnepanelen laden ???? .En is de Zappi geen betere lader

Wow, I checked Ian's channel, he has a good taste in music, and you can tell that he was a fellow raver back in the days :)

Very interesting, even though I'm not Dutch (I'm British). We had an Amstrad 6128, but the same nostalgia. I knew the Speccy sold overseas but didn't realise it was so popular, thanks for informing me!

I programmed on the spectrum back in the day. I made a few games, with battleships being a really professional game, but I didn't ever believe that people like me ever made games that anyone would ever buy. It was the college peeps who got to join software companies and al that after all. So I never sold a single one of them and it never went anywhere. I ended up making full screen art instead, and that transferred into digital art as time went by, though I'm not a programmer any more. I do wish I'd met anyone who wanted to make games with me back then. I still want to make games and am involved in indie projects every now and again, but haven't managed anything as it's all very different now-a-days.

The Spectrum was very popular in Spain in the 80s, too. Magazines, games, learning programming, game swapping...

Is your reprogrammed Kangaroo code also concise, comprehensible and playable?

.. hotdog soup1? lol ok subscribed.. why not.

Wasn’t mctavish the name of the character from COD,

I would be really interested about the ZX Spectrum destiny in Belgium. If there ever was any. Found some Dutch software you're mentioning in the video but that's all. Noticed Aackosoft in my childhood but back then I didn't know it's Dutch. And maybe worth to mention, the Netherlands also might be the cradle of the ZX Spectrum demoscene by the group The Lords which is a big thing. And btw. in the 01:06 of the video, there's Didaktik Gama displayed but told it's Soviet, which isn't correect. It's from Czechoslovakia ;)

wait ? captain mactavish ?

omg, i remember typing this one out and really liking it more than the others. sadly i never became a programmer. thanks ian.

i'm too young to be using ZX Spectrum at any point in my life, but i was playing elite (the original '84 version) on an emulator and it left an impression on me, not because it was mind blowing to me by itself (it was late 10s so we already had portal 2 and my most played game at the time, FSX, because i (was? am?) a sim nerd and that's how i found elite) but because it was otherwordly different from the games of its time first i thought "it's about david braben isn't it" then i remember watching Alexander the ok's video about elite (by the way, he has a spectacular channel and i recommend everyone who's interested in space and human achievements in general a watch, my fav video of his is about space shuttle program) where he told that elite was developed for BBC Micro (and ofc it was written in assembly, have you seen the thang (both BBCM and the game itself) it's too huge for basic) then i watched 2 seconds more and you said the name lol so anyway, funny video and i don't know why but from the first couple of seconds, without seeing anything else, without checking the channel description, i felt that you're dutch i don't know if it's the accent, or the similarity to Posy or the love for the color orange or the cadence of the speech but it's not like i thought "they seem dutch", it just clicked in my brain and i think that's pretty funny great channel tho, i like it when people just can upload stuff and not worry about youtube being youtube have fun :3

Die advertentie voor de 128k bij Kwantum (0:25), daar heb ik hem toen gekocht voor 400 gulden.

I am on the wrong side of the pond to have owned a ZX, and while looking at videos of the games it seems SO LIMITED even compared to a C64... GAWD I wish I'd had one

I think the best BASIC programmer on the ZX Spectrum nowadays might be @busy128x, try finding some of his demos like Balik or Boota. th-cam.com/video/JdLxHCpWwdg/w-d-xo.html

I started programming on the ZX81 (BASIC), then assembly on the ZX Spectrum, and then C64... you guys (the Dutch) absolutely owned the C64 scene. Us Brits did own the ZX scene. Jeroen Tel is without doubt a genius of his time, and someone I was lucky enough to have compose music for some of my games, and had as a friend back in the late 80's and early 90's. Then take the likes of Hawkeye and Flimbo's etc, again Dutch, the demo scene The Judges, the list goes on and on. I remember going over to Venlo for a copy party. Great times. I had inspiration as a kid by knowing personally Mike Singleton and Mathew Smith amongst others, as I grew up in the area and went to the same computer shop as them. Absolutely amazing times. I loved both machines, and each play their respective roles in my childhood and career. Watching your videos on the Spectrum scene in NL is very cool. God bless the Dutch... a great nation.

Oh, and 'Mooniron'. Awesome.

I always remember the program i typed in called 'Pixy The Microdot'. Such genius really. I recommend you check that out.

awesome, greets to all speccy users.

Great story!

My guy was Jim Butterfield because Commodore but I really appreciate Ian McTavish - that is quite a work of art - a very fun game in one page of Basic.

Dotty the Kangaroo? You mean N++? No? Oh, okay. I guess they took "inspiration" from another source then 😝😝

It's nice to see some kudos for someone and something that had so much impact and influence on you. I loved those tedious type ins as a youngster, I don't think I would be retro programming now if it wasn't for them and the great spectrum games of the eighties. Good video, keep it up.

LOL Apple people are kinda weird, you could have just compiled a mildly modified version of the original source code with freeBASIC instead of recreating the game from scratch.. ^^"

Hi, greatest QBASIC Programmer of all times here, though I switched to C99 many years ago..🖐

Wish this was still a thing. It would be great for kids to have magazines with some simple python tkinter games. Most learning material for kids is block code and concepts. I loved how basic programs had you programming before you knew what programming even was. I have been teaching my kids how to make click based games. We have been finding text based adventure rpg games we like. It's to hard for my eyes to read walls of text so we use tkinter to give everything buttons and dialogue boxes. You can create a dark mode as well so that helps a lot.

I think there's a difference in between the terms 'App's', 'applications' and 'programs'. -'Apps', as the new world term, primarily used for the software people use on mobile devices using a runtime environment, like Android's ART or Microsoft's NET. It's inferior software, as programmers make their job easier by using the access to a huge amount of premade functions at the cost of performance, resource usage, complexity, and often overall software usability and quality, which comes at cost for the users. Opposed to real software which always is native. Yes: Apps suck! -Programs are anything that anyone programmed ever. -Applications are all programs that neither are games nor 'Apps' as described above.

We meet probably 1000 people thay we touch in some way. Likely much more than 1000. We are in fact 2 persons away from touching a billion. Crazy, isn't it?

Well, that’s a fun little game. It’s amazing how after a short time, a person’s brain adapts to the jump controls. At first, had a hard time getting up in the second test on the block before turn around towards the red block. Now I breeze past. I appreciate your work in sharing and of course I appreciate Ian:) I’m glad he’s receiving the proper recognition now.

Entered programs from 80 Micro and read articles in Byte, but don't remember a single influence in programming was just having fun as a young adult.

I got my start in programming with QBasic in MS-DOS. At one point I wrote a crude 3D wireframe engine in it. It wasn't fast, it wasn't great, but stupid little projects like that just to see how far Basic can go really helped pass the time and keep me from dying of boredom in high school.

Hoi landgenoot! Is het mogelijk om de basic listing te zien van deze game? Ik ben na 40 jaar weer in basic aan het programmeren en deze game zou een goede leerstoel kunnen zijn.

The most successful ZX Spectrum game written in Basic was Football Manager, given that it started a genre in which its namesake Football Manager XX (Add the year of your choice) is still being made and sold in the millions.

Oh, man, what a nostalgia blast! I was not aware of your iOS conversion (although I will grab a copy for my iPad ASAP) or your earlier video that I have now added to my watch list. But the video thumbnail with its _Dotty_ screenshot grabbed me by the memberberries like I've never been grabbed before. _Dotty,_ with its genius always-bouncing mechanic, inspired so many of my Spectrum BASIC dabblings back in the day it's unreal. I had C-15s full of bouncing ball games, bouncing spring games, bouncing robot games... all based around what I learned by typing in and debugging _Dotty._ I'm so glad to see so many similar stories emerging in these comments. Something else that occurred to me (and I suspect this may have already been mentioned in comments elsewhere) is that _Dotty_ takes place in a series of chambers, with cubes and door switches and gridded walls, each labelled with a Test number, at the end of which the entity in charge denies the protagonist's freedom and sends them back to re-do the whole thing. Did Ian not only create one of the greatest BASIC games ever, but actually pre-empt some aspects of _Portal_ by nearly a quarter century?

Where can I find the original source code? Looks like nice little program to practice for making ports.

even got the soy face emoji in the intro. love it!

Rockin'! I used to really enjoy the 1982 arcade game "Kangaroo" th-cam.com/video/zNJ8KiYGxzA/w-d-xo.html I'd say the closest similar game to Dotty was 1983 "Jumpman" th-cam.com/video/AcyBlxTzhYs/w-d-xo.html The game I most enjoyed was 1995 "Jumping Flash" with Robbit th-cam.com/video/WRD5whY9Hs0/w-d-xo.html

Ik heb "Wegwijs op de ZX Spectrum" en "De Prijsvraag" op cassette