Somewhere around her, I have a ZX80 that also worked as a ZX81 by having an EPROM twice the size with one pin bent out and a switch on it. I did quite a few things with that very limited machine. I had a 16K RAM pack that I built attached to it. I even worked out how to do pixel graphics on the thing. Its amazing what you can learn from stuff like that
Brilliant. I still have my ZX81. I think it's amazing looking back just how well programmers were back then to write code that was so efficient with such limited resources
Hi, great review, thanks for that. I'm 62 now and I immediately bought the Sinclair ZX81 in 1981. So learned BASIC. Then came the Sinclair Spectrum, then the C64. Moving on to the Atari ST. ;-) What great experiences those were. It was a nice time.
i got my speccy in 84 but when we opened the box it was scratch to bits. so mum took it back to Rackham's the day after boxing day and they replaced with a spectrum plus. it was worth the extra few days wait
I wish I still had my original Speccy, I have my QL and highly upgraded Amiga A2000 but have no idea what happened to my last Spectrum. My dad (a Snr Systems Engineer) made me learn BASIC and tested me before I was "rewarded" with a 16K ZX Spectrum in 1982 and Planetoids was the first game I got for it, I only played it for a bit of nostalgia using Fuse this Tuesday. He made me learn BASIC to encourage me not to use it just for games and I've been a professional Software Engineer since 1987 working on the code for avionic systems such as the Head-Up Displays (HUDs) for C-17, F-16, F-5, Eurofighter Typhoon and the fly-by-wire (FCC) for Boeing 777, all thanks to my dad and my humble Spectrum. "From little acorns..." as they say, but I never had an Atom, Electron or BBC Micro 😉
Great story! I'm very fortunate to still have my Speccy. It got put away when I finally got my Atari ST. But me being as I am not being able to part with anything, it went back in it's original box, just waiting to be loved again 😊
Marvelous ! I enjoyed you video , made me think of my wonderful Mom too. I still have my Sinclair. I was studying electronics at the time and in order to learn assembler we were given a choice , buy a pcb with Z80 on it called a Micro Professor (looked like a book) or get a ZX Spectrum. The Sinclair made more sense. Went on to learn Basic and the road to programming and code opened up from there .
Thanks for that comment. It's great hearing how this vid brings back your memories 😊. I'm really glad you liked it. Have a wonderful Christmas and new year
Oh the good old days. I cleaned up in school selling cassettes loaded with specy games. Self-taught sinclair basic from mags and books, took for ever then they scrapped it.
In 1984, I was in my twenties and happy about getting a job at a high tech firm that designed and manufactured semi conductor manufacturing equipment. These machines were used to make the IC chips that are in a Spektrum and other computers, along with everything else. Going further back to my childhood, I never received Christmas presents because of my family's financial situation. I can only imagine that as a child it would have been exciting, but I don't really know. I still loved my parents though.
The ZX 48k is still in the basement somewhere. Built a joystick interface myself, played a lot of Jet Pac, many hours. Been working in IT most of my life.
Brilliant 😍. Jet Pac and Manic Miner are my go to games (predictable but who cares 😊) oooh and Chuckie Egg and Robin of the Wood and Star Quake and Turbo Esprit... 😂 Thanks for the comment. Have a great new year
i had my zx spectrum rubberkey in christmas '84 , i later got the 'plus' upgrade keyboard and fitted it in that, still got both, i got an interface 1 and 2 in the 1990s from a car boot sale , the rom games were always expensive and they certainly are more so now! i recently made my own rom cartridge board that uses just a single rom file 27c128, but not yet tried it, , that 27c512 board could be very useful as i was given a load of programmed but never fitted 27c512s some years back
It's great that you still have that Speccy. Good luck with the 27C512 EPROMs. It s a super simple board to throw together 😊. Thanks for the comment and have a great new year
In the early 80's i worked as an elecronic technician (Tea boy for the engineer) designing and building prototype mainframe machines for Burroughs computers now Unisys. One of the engineers came in with the advert for the Speccy we all (about 15 of us) went OOH! AAH! WOW! and more. I bought one about 3 weeks later from, I think,, WH Smiths. That meant we had 3 in the department and I recall not much real work happened for some weeks after this as a lot of reconfiguration was done to our 3. digital video output, to use with our monitors. A very basic floppy disc interface. More memory etc. This might be part of the reason the plant closed! But great memories. The plant closed in 1992 and for the last 6 months our team spent the WHOLE time playing Lemmings on home built PC clones. Sorry about going off the rails here.
😂 Thanks for sharing. I really appreciate the comments (otherwise it's like talking to a black hole). I hope you enjoyed the vid and it brought back those happy memories. All the best for the new year. Simon
I remember sending off £125 for my Spectrum (16K) in 1982 then later upgrading it myself to 48k. It was known as an Issue 1.5 (rare) meaning it had the Issue 2 Pcb with the original 5C102E ULA and the dead cockroach IC stuck to the top of the Z80.
i liked your video and ypur christmas story about the spectrum and you mom! thats awrsome.!my favorite was1982 mom worked very hard and got me a colecovision!! my favorite christmas ever!! i live with mom to help her out with things. i love mom! and i bet your moms happy she has a good son!merry christmas simon!
I got the new Retro Games Speccy for Christmas, which is awesome, but this is fascinating, nice one! I don't know what happened to my original Speccy I bought as a 17yr old, I moved onto the C64, but having a blast with the new one!
I'm really glad you liked it. Thank you for the comment. I really really wanted one of the new Speccys but in the end just couldn't justify it as I already have so many. I don't know if you saw any of my other vids, but I built a Speccy out of all new bits so I'm still very happy with that for now
HDMI, game saves and USB rom loading are all very nice on the new one, but there's a certain pleasure in getting things to work the old way. I'll be checking more of your videos definitely!
I asked my parents for the Spectrum (1983 I think) told them the price (£129.99 from Goldbergs) and they looked at each other lol. Anyway, something to do with my Dads wages, they had to get it in November. I bitched the whole time about 'Just getting it now' and my dad came up with a compromise. I could have the computer and the big orange book that came with it and that was it! No games, no joystick, nothing else and I get all the games on Christmas day. I agreed to this. I learned how to program it. Making my own little programs etc. Best thing that happened to me. When Christmas day came, all my friends got used to playing football manager and I already knew how to cheat at it by changing the code. lol. I'm now in my 50's and to this day, I'm still programming. Probably because my dad made me that deal on that November day in 1983.
I got my 128+2 speccy with a joystick, Soldier of Fortune and Fire&Forget, just a few months before christmas. At the time, it was being sold here just a few quid short of a minimum wage, and my dad was the only one working due to my mom doing chemotherapy. During that time I hardly saw my dad for almost a year because he was doing overtime in construction even on weekends. I can not even imagine the effort he made to make it possible, having to support a house of 4 and paying for experimental treatments. I don't remember if he got anything for me and my brother on that christmas, but we already had what we wanted, really. I still have it, and just waiting for a full refurbish, which I will do as soon as my workbench is free for a couple of days.
Did anyone here go in to shops back in the day, and type 10 PRINT "(Some obscene message)" 20 GO TO 10 RUN on some of those 8-bit machines on display? When I got my own Commodore 64 in April of 1985, I learned how to use its sound capabilities (which routinely made Speccy owners green with envy! 😎), and did a bit of BASIC code which mimicked the boot-up screen, waited either for a keypress or just a few minutes to give me time to leave the "crime scene", and then made some loud siren noise (don't forget to POKE 808,251 to disable the RUN/STOP key 😛) Later, when I mastered machine code/assembly, I had a little routine which waited for the cursor to leave the leftmost column on the screen, and then sporadically "press" the DELETE key, frustrating the next bloke who came in to do the PRINT "(obscene message)" thing. Nowadays, computers in shops just run an advertising video or slide show, and demand a password if you want to do anything else with them. Today's kids will never have the same kind of fun we had...
Brilliant 😍. Yes I was there myself. There were loads of independent computer shops in the day which I loved to visit, but they were more savvy to that malarkey. However, the big chains like Currys and Comet in the UK were much less clued up. Juvenile but funny 😂
@@stevesgaming7475 Thanks Steve. I hoped it would appeal to Speccy fans. You can never be sure though. I'm really glad you enjoyed it. Have a brilliant Christmas 🎁
Nice. I am way too old to have received a computer for Christmas, but I can imagine the excitement. At the age of 74 I have just bought my first retro computer, a BBC Model B. Had it shipped from the UK to the US. I got to play with it for a little while, but now it’s packed away pending a 2000 mile move from Georgia to Nevada.
@Colin_Ames hi Colin. Thanks for the comment. Well done on getting yourself a BBC Micro. It's still one of my all time favourites. Good luck with the move, and have a great Christmas and new year
What a lovely Christmas video - thank you for sharing it.. need to get my speccy up to scratch - that said, we never had one when I was growing up.. I'm making up for it now 😃
My mum was actually angry that i bought a silly stupid computer, which was the zx spectrum. I learned basic but also assembler. Together we wrote a printer driver in assembler which was residing in the spectrum printer buffer memory space (not an easy task due to the small printer buffer size) It used the beeper with a transistor at the output to create a unidirectional serial interface. We hooked up an HP line printer which we bought from a scrapyard for almost nothing and yes it worked ! We also hooked up a real computer monitor and a real keyboard. The speccy was housed inside the computer monitor housing. Everything was looking super professional 😂😂😂 (fortunately we had a computer scrapyard nearby who sold old computer equipment y weight) I am now an electronics engineer, still passionate about small computers and microcontrollers.
Been hardware hacker for as long as I can remember. I began by adding a 8255 PPI to my Spectrum and then adding some circuitry to that to provide me with the capability to program EPROMS. What I would have given for the capabilities we have in microcontrollers these days back in those days.
@@RetroComputingReboot it is a peripheral chip which creates extra IO lines. You also had the 6845 which was a crt controller chip. And there were a bunch of different chips out :).
Like you I got my Speccy at xmas '84 (although I knew it was coming). Don't think xmas has been surpassed since! Also I glad to see you've got Lords of Midnight (along with Psystron and other Magnetic Scroll games) displayed in your office, as I still think its the best speccy (and possible of all time) game ever made...
Thanks Rob, I appreciate the comment. It's a hard one to explain how awesome it was unwrapping a Speccy back then, unless you've been there yourself. I'm glad you liked the little display of the games too 😀
@@RetroComputingReboot Oh I know with absolute precision how special/awesome/amazing it was. The excitement and anticipation was incomparable (ok, collecting your first brand new car from the dealership has a very similar excitement but I digress) so I am right with you there. I purchased tLoM on the day after Boxing Day with xmas money (along with Underwurlde and Knightlore) Needless to say I didn't have any money left after then (but it was all worth it) 🙂
@Rob-vf6sl 😁. Omg I remember that feeling of the Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket and heading off to catch the bus into town. There were so many independent computer shops back then. I'd spend hours in them just looking at the shelves full of software, looking at the screenshots on the covers, before finally finally pulling the trigger and dashing home. I have a lot of consoles, old an new. Obviously now you can just download a title without leaving the house. I think convenience has a hidden price, and I miss all that but at the same time, consider myself fortunate to have experienced it all the same
We got our Speccy some time around July 1984, we couldn't wait until Christmas. LOL. That's a different version of Planetoids to mine. It all looks and sounds the same apart from when you get hit. My version just has a magenta (sort of) polygon where your ship was. Odd.
@@RetroComputingReboot I never stopped programing the ZX81 or the Speccy. About 6 years ago I upgraded my original ZX81 to 32K internal RAM. About 3 years ago I installed an SD card and joystick expansion PCB, soldered to the expansion port. LOL. (I had to instal a new ROM in the 81 to use the SD card functions) A happy new year to you too.
With those rom carts, a cheap interface 2 remake would be interesting. It should not be hard or expensive, as there shouldn't be many components needed.
I suspect you're right there. I'm not completely sure. However, you can get modern recreated rim images from tape files such as Jet Set Willy which must be over 16K. Perhaps someone else knows? Good comment though, thanks. Have a great Christmas and new year
@@RetroComputingReboot yeh you are limited to 16k images as if you tried to to access a higher memory address with the cart it would cause problems / corruption . but there are more ROMS available that have been adjusted to run as 16k and there are other options of using bank switching and altered snapshot files to load a 16k bank into ram then switch bank and load another 16k but needs a little hardware + coding. i did try it on a breadboard manually switching the ROM page which to my surprise worked .. some boards use a resistor /capacitor delay to switch the bank page after a short time ..
@gdutfulkbhh7537 Yeh, it's a shame really as it's soooo much better than loading from tape. But if it wasn't for being 'cheap' I guess the Speccy would never have had the success it had. It's strange though to launch the Interface 2 a year and a half after the Speccy launched. Hope you enjoyed the vid. Have a good Christmas and new year
Somewhere around her, I have a ZX80 that also worked as a ZX81 by having an EPROM twice the size with one pin bent out and a switch on it. I did quite a few things with that very limited machine. I had a 16K RAM pack that I built attached to it. I even worked out how to do pixel graphics on the thing. Its amazing what you can learn from stuff like that
Brilliant. I still have my ZX81.
I think it's amazing looking back just how well programmers were back then to write code that was so efficient with such limited resources
Hi, great review, thanks for that.
I'm 62 now and I immediately bought the Sinclair ZX81 in 1981. So learned BASIC.
Then came the Sinclair Spectrum, then the C64.
Moving on to the Atari ST. ;-)
What great experiences those were.
It was a nice time.
Thank you for taking the time to comment. I'm really glad you enjoyed the vid.
Have a great new year
Thumbs up just for the jetpac memories ! hit all the buttons to
Thank you for taking the time to comment. I'm glad you enjoyed it 😊
All the best for the new year
i got my speccy in 84 but when we opened the box it was scratch to bits. so mum took it back to Rackham's the day after boxing day and they replaced with a spectrum plus. it was worth the extra few days wait
Rackham's! Now that's a name I've not heard in a while 😊.
Hope you enjoyed the vid. Have a fab new year
I wish I still had my original Speccy, I have my QL and highly upgraded Amiga A2000 but have no idea what happened to my last Spectrum. My dad (a Snr Systems Engineer) made me learn BASIC and tested me before I was "rewarded" with a 16K ZX Spectrum in 1982 and Planetoids was the first game I got for it, I only played it for a bit of nostalgia using Fuse this Tuesday.
He made me learn BASIC to encourage me not to use it just for games and I've been a professional Software Engineer since 1987 working on the code for avionic systems such as the Head-Up Displays (HUDs) for C-17, F-16, F-5, Eurofighter Typhoon and the fly-by-wire (FCC) for Boeing 777, all thanks to my dad and my humble Spectrum. "From little acorns..." as they say, but I never had an Atom, Electron or BBC Micro 😉
Great story!
I'm very fortunate to still have my Speccy. It got put away when I finally got my Atari ST. But me being as I am not being able to part with anything, it went back in it's original box, just waiting to be loved again 😊
Marvelous ! I enjoyed you video , made me think of my wonderful Mom too. I still have my Sinclair. I was studying electronics at the time and in order to learn assembler we were given a choice , buy a pcb with Z80 on it called a Micro Professor (looked like a book) or get a ZX Spectrum. The Sinclair made more sense. Went on to learn Basic and the road to programming and code opened up from there .
Thank you for that. I'm really glad you took the time to comment and enjoyed the video 😊
To be able to use that socket and running a game from cartridge like that on the Speccy is quite something! 40 years in the making! :)
Thanks for the comment. Glad you liked it.
Happy Christmas ⛄
My cousin had one and that was the best Christmas day ever, I think he had Manic Miner. Great trip back in time :) thank you
Thanks for that comment. It's great hearing how this vid brings back your memories 😊.
I'm really glad you liked it. Have a wonderful Christmas and new year
Oh the good old days. I cleaned up in school selling cassettes loaded with specy games. Self-taught sinclair basic from mags and books, took for ever then they scrapped it.
Yeh, those C15 tapes were really quite popular for some reason 😂
In 1984, I was in my twenties and happy about getting a job at a high tech firm that designed and manufactured semi conductor manufacturing equipment. These machines were used to make the IC chips that are in a Spektrum and other computers, along with everything else. Going further back to my childhood, I never received Christmas presents because of my family's financial situation. I can only imagine that as a child it would have been exciting, but I don't really know. I still loved my parents though.
Thanks for that. I hope you still enjoyed the vid 😊
40 years ago ! I was 13 (14 in January 1985) and I got my Commodore 64. Happy memories and thanks to mum and dad who are both no longer with us
Thank you for that. I'm so glad the video brought back your own happy memories.
A very happy Christmas and new year
Commodore 64, those be fighting words in these parts.
@axelBr1 😂
The ZX 48k is still in the basement somewhere. Built a joystick interface myself, played a lot of Jet Pac, many hours. Been working in IT most of my life.
Brilliant 😍. Jet Pac and Manic Miner are my go to games (predictable but who cares 😊) oooh and Chuckie Egg and Robin of the Wood and Star Quake and Turbo Esprit... 😂
Thanks for the comment. Have a great new year
I'm gonna have to demand that you clean the gunk out of your joystick ports. Am I the only one?
@@michaelcloutier2225 😂 yes fair comment
i had my zx spectrum rubberkey in christmas '84 , i later got the 'plus' upgrade keyboard and fitted it in that, still got both, i got an interface 1 and 2 in the 1990s from a car boot sale , the rom games were always expensive and they certainly are more so now! i recently made my own rom cartridge board that uses just a single rom file 27c128, but not yet tried it, , that 27c512 board could be very useful as i was given a load of programmed but never fitted 27c512s some years back
It's great that you still have that Speccy. Good luck with the 27C512 EPROMs. It s a super simple board to throw together 😊.
Thanks for the comment and have a great new year
In the early 80's i worked as an elecronic technician (Tea boy for the engineer) designing and building prototype mainframe machines for Burroughs computers now Unisys. One of the engineers came in with the advert for the Speccy we all (about 15 of us) went OOH! AAH! WOW! and more. I bought one about 3 weeks later from, I think,, WH Smiths. That meant we had 3 in the department and I recall not much real work happened for some weeks after this as a lot of reconfiguration was done to our 3. digital video output, to use with our monitors. A very basic floppy disc interface. More memory etc. This might be part of the reason the plant closed! But great memories. The plant closed in 1992 and for the last 6 months our team spent the WHOLE time playing Lemmings on home built PC clones. Sorry about going off the rails here.
😂 Thanks for sharing. I really appreciate the comments (otherwise it's like talking to a black hole). I hope you enjoyed the vid and it brought back those happy memories.
All the best for the new year. Simon
@@RetroComputingReboot Ta1
I remember sending off £125 for my Spectrum (16K) in 1982 then later upgrading it myself to 48k. It was known as an Issue 1.5 (rare) meaning it had the Issue 2 Pcb with the original 5C102E ULA and the dead cockroach IC stuck to the top of the Z80.
I wonder how many of the 16K models stayed as 16K. Not many I suspect 🤔
Thanks for the comment and have a great Christmas and new year
@@RetroComputingReboot I've got a 16K Spectrum, and a 32K Cheetah ram pack for it!
@trance_trousers I forgot you could upgrade the 16K with a RAM pack
i liked your video and ypur christmas story about the spectrum and you mom! thats awrsome.!my favorite was1982 mom worked very hard and got me a colecovision!! my favorite christmas ever!! i live with mom to help her out with things. i love mom! and i bet your moms happy she has a good son!merry christmas simon!
Hi Mike, I really liked your story. A very merry Christmas to you 🎄
I bought a couple of carts for 99p each back in the day. Still work today, they were Hungary Horace and Planetoids.
What a bargain that is. I wish I'd had the opportunity to pick up a few at that price 😁
I got the new Retro Games Speccy for Christmas, which is awesome, but this is fascinating, nice one! I don't know what happened to my original Speccy I bought as a 17yr old, I moved onto the C64, but having a blast with the new one!
I'm really glad you liked it. Thank you for the comment.
I really really wanted one of the new Speccys but in the end just couldn't justify it as I already have so many. I don't know if you saw any of my other vids, but I built a Speccy out of all new bits so I'm still very happy with that for now
HDMI, game saves and USB rom loading are all very nice on the new one, but there's a certain pleasure in getting things to work the old way. I'll be checking more of your videos definitely!
I asked my parents for the Spectrum (1983 I think) told them the price (£129.99 from Goldbergs) and they looked at each other lol. Anyway, something to do with my Dads wages, they had to get it in November. I bitched the whole time about 'Just getting it now' and my dad came up with a compromise. I could have the computer and the big orange book that came with it and that was it! No games, no joystick, nothing else and I get all the games on Christmas day. I agreed to this. I learned how to program it. Making my own little programs etc. Best thing that happened to me. When Christmas day came, all my friends got used to playing football manager and I already knew how to cheat at it by changing the code. lol. I'm now in my 50's and to this day, I'm still programming. Probably because my dad made me that deal on that November day in 1983.
Really nice story. Thank you 😊
I got my 128+2 speccy with a joystick, Soldier of Fortune and Fire&Forget, just a few months before christmas. At the time, it was being sold here just a few quid short of a minimum wage, and my dad was the only one working due to my mom doing chemotherapy.
During that time I hardly saw my dad for almost a year because he was doing overtime in construction even on weekends. I can not even imagine the effort he made to make it possible, having to support a house of 4 and paying for experimental treatments. I don't remember if he got anything for me and my brother on that christmas, but we already had what we wanted, really.
I still have it, and just waiting for a full refurbish, which I will do as soon as my workbench is free for a couple of days.
What an awesome story. Thanks for sharing that 😊
Have a wonderful Christmas and new year
Did anyone here go in to shops back in the day, and type
10 PRINT "(Some obscene message)"
20 GO TO 10
RUN
on some of those 8-bit machines on display?
When I got my own Commodore 64 in April of 1985, I learned how to use its sound capabilities (which routinely made Speccy owners green with envy! 😎), and did a bit of BASIC code which mimicked the boot-up screen, waited either for a keypress or just a few minutes to give me time to leave the "crime scene", and then made some loud siren noise (don't forget to POKE 808,251 to disable the RUN/STOP key 😛)
Later, when I mastered machine code/assembly, I had a little routine which waited for the cursor to leave the leftmost column on the screen, and then sporadically "press" the DELETE key, frustrating the next bloke who came in to do the PRINT "(obscene message)" thing.
Nowadays, computers in shops just run an advertising video or slide show, and demand a password if you want to do anything else with them. Today's kids will never have the same kind of fun we had...
Brilliant 😍. Yes I was there myself. There were loads of independent computer shops in the day which I loved to visit, but they were more savvy to that malarkey. However, the big chains like Currys and Comet in the UK were much less clued up. Juvenile but funny 😂
No. I added the necessary POKE 23692,0 before the GOTO to stop the "scroll?" message appearing. Neither was I ever green with envy over C64 owners.
Superb video! as a huge Spectrum owner and fan, I had to sub!
@@stevesgaming7475 Thanks Steve. I hoped it would appeal to Speccy fans. You can never be sure though.
I'm really glad you enjoyed it. Have a brilliant Christmas 🎁
@@RetroComputingReboot Thanks, you too!
Cool build. I do need a ZX Interface 2 now 😉 Merry Christmas !!!
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I'm really glad you liked it 😊.
Merry Christmas ⛄
Nice. I am way too old to have received a computer for Christmas, but I can imagine the excitement. At the age of 74 I have just bought my first retro computer, a BBC Model B. Had it shipped from the UK to the US. I got to play with it for a little while, but now it’s packed away pending a 2000 mile move from Georgia to Nevada.
@Colin_Ames hi Colin. Thanks for the comment. Well done on getting yourself a BBC Micro. It's still one of my all time favourites.
Good luck with the move, and have a great Christmas and new year
@@Colin_Ames Hope the move goes well!
What a lovely Christmas video - thank you for sharing it.. need to get my speccy up to scratch - that said, we never had one when I was growing up.. I'm making up for it now 😃
My mum was actually angry that i bought a silly stupid computer, which was the zx spectrum. I learned basic but also assembler. Together we wrote a printer driver in assembler which was residing in the spectrum printer buffer memory space (not an easy task due to the small printer buffer size) It used the beeper with a transistor at the output to create a unidirectional serial interface. We hooked up an HP line printer which we bought from a scrapyard for almost nothing and yes it worked ! We also hooked up a real computer monitor and a real keyboard. The speccy was housed inside the computer monitor housing. Everything was looking super professional 😂😂😂 (fortunately we had a computer scrapyard nearby who sold old computer equipment y weight) I am now an electronics engineer, still passionate about small computers and microcontrollers.
You put me to shame. I can load games and swap capacitors but that's about as advanced as I've ever got 😂
Been hardware hacker for as long as I can remember. I began by adding a 8255 PPI to my Spectrum and then adding some circuitry to that to provide me with the capability to program EPROMS. What I would have given for the capabilities we have in microcontrollers these days back in those days.
@@SpeccyMan the 8255 was a really handy and easy to add circuit. if i remember correctly it had 24 IO pins ?
@francisverhelst9375 I'm going to have to educate myself now as to what the 8255 is 😊
@@RetroComputingReboot it is a peripheral chip which creates extra IO lines. You also had the 6845 which was a crt controller chip. And there were a bunch of different chips out :).
Like you I got my Speccy at xmas '84 (although I knew it was coming). Don't think xmas has been surpassed since! Also I glad to see you've got Lords of Midnight (along with Psystron and other Magnetic Scroll games) displayed in your office, as I still think its the best speccy (and possible of all time) game ever made...
Thanks Rob, I appreciate the comment. It's a hard one to explain how awesome it was unwrapping a Speccy back then, unless you've been there yourself.
I'm glad you liked the little display of the games too 😀
@@RetroComputingReboot Oh I know with absolute precision how special/awesome/amazing it was. The excitement and anticipation was incomparable (ok, collecting your first brand new car from the dealership has a very similar excitement but I digress) so I am right with you there. I purchased tLoM on the day after Boxing Day with xmas money (along with Underwurlde and Knightlore) Needless to say I didn't have any money left after then (but it was all worth it) 🙂
oh one other thing - get yourself on Bluesky as there is starting to be a nice retro gaming community there instead of that other cesspit...
@Rob-vf6sl 😁. Omg I remember that feeling of the Christmas money burning a hole in my pocket and heading off to catch the bus into town. There were so many independent computer shops back then. I'd spend hours in them just looking at the shelves full of software, looking at the screenshots on the covers, before finally finally pulling the trigger and dashing home.
I have a lot of consoles, old an new. Obviously now you can just download a title without leaving the house. I think convenience has a hidden price, and I miss all that but at the same time, consider myself fortunate to have experienced it all the same
The compression on that muzak.....aaaaargh !
Apologies for that
We got our Speccy some time around July 1984, we couldn't wait until Christmas. LOL.
That's a different version of Planetoids to mine. It all looks and sounds the same apart from when you get hit. My version just has a magenta (sort of) polygon where your ship was. Odd.
Thanks for the comment. I hope it brought back some good memories.
All the best for the new year
@@RetroComputingReboot I never stopped programing the ZX81 or the Speccy. About 6 years ago I upgraded my original ZX81 to 32K internal RAM. About 3 years ago I installed an SD card and joystick expansion PCB, soldered to the expansion port. LOL. (I had to instal a new ROM in the 81 to use the SD card functions)
A happy new year to you too.
@frankowalker4662 Sounds like some good mods there. I still need to fix one of my ZX81's. I broke one of them in my early days learning to solder 😢
@@RetroComputingReboot Oops. Luckily, they are easy to work on.
@frankowalker4662 Yes big oops 😄. Some of the best ways to learn are from mistakes though 😊
MathS dear boy, remember where you are old chap.
What ho. That's a cryptic comment 😁
You seem to have had your moneysworth out of that system!
😂 thanks for the comment.
Have a great Christmas 🎁
With those rom carts, a cheap interface 2 remake would be interesting. It should not be hard or expensive, as there shouldn't be many components needed.
That's for the comment. I hadn't considered that 😁
Hope you enjoyed the vid. Merry Christmas 🎁
I have a speccky original in the loft with joystick port any offers
Send it my way. I've only got 9 😂
@RetroComputingReboot I'll have to ebay it it still works even have tape deck and games
@philipbirchall54 Glad it still works. They are temperamental things when it comes to how they are stored
I guess that device only works with 16k games? I've never seen a 48k game on rom.
I suspect you're right there. I'm not completely sure. However, you can get modern recreated rim images from tape files such as Jet Set Willy which must be over 16K. Perhaps someone else knows?
Good comment though, thanks. Have a great Christmas and new year
@@RetroComputingReboot yeh you are limited to 16k images as if you tried to to access a higher memory address with the cart it would cause problems / corruption . but there are more ROMS available that have been adjusted to run as 16k and there are other options of using bank switching and altered snapshot files to load a 16k bank into ram then switch bank and load another 16k but needs a little hardware + coding. i did try it on a breadboard manually switching the ROM page which to my surprise worked .. some boards use a resistor /capacitor delay to switch the bank page after a short time ..
Yeah, as in everything he made, Clive Sinclair cheaped out on it. The ROM slot was basically obsolete before the first Interface 2 shipped.
@gdutfulkbhh7537 Yeh, it's a shame really as it's soooo much better than loading from tape.
But if it wasn't for being 'cheap' I guess the Speccy would never have had the success it had.
It's strange though to launch the Interface 2 a year and a half after the Speccy launched.
Hope you enjoyed the vid. Have a good Christmas and new year