30th birthday of the ZX spectrum today.

Oh, bless them, check Google’s front page today.

30 years! jeysus!

had a Texas Instruments Ti99/4A then a ZX spectrum 48k+ then a C64 then an Amiga A500, happy days! had the speccy wired up to my grandads old tape player piece of junk, god knows how many times I’ve gone batshit when “tape loading error” came up right at the end of loading.
kempston interface and atari joystick FTW!

kids these days and there “instantly available to play” games consoles.dont know there born!

Now this was a great game !
anyone else remember ??

I had an Oric 1. There were fewer games, but it was better than a spectrum. It had good sound, and it was better to program on.

Go on, you know you want to:

Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.

10 Print “You Are Gay”
20 Goto 10
Run

Hours of fun

I was the weird one in the geek club and my folks got me one of these instead of the spectrum (or a BBC).

A Texas Instruments ti-99/4a. Kevevs, you and me must have been about the only people in the country – although the biggest seller in the states.

Just googled them – $525 – assume the same in the UK. **** me, my parent’s must have loved me!

Easy to forget the VIC 20 – they didn’t really do very much, there were hardly any games for it, and hardly anyone had one. Just you.

And errm, me.

Ah. Me too. At some point we got an ST, then it was PC’s all the way. I think I just used mates’ computers…

Now a software developer 🙂

C64 > Spectrum, better keyboard and the tape player hooked in directly, so no loading errors.

Easy to forget the VIC 20 – they didn’t really do very much, there were hardly any games for it, and hardly anyone had one. Just you.

And errm, me.

And me , infact i still have a working one in the box ! twas my first computer .. very shamefully after an early interest i stopped coding and just started playing games & therefore missed out on earning big bucks as some kind of Asp.Net C# Super coder ..still had fun playing the games !

I played Lords of Midnight so many times on the Spectrum, I reckon i could sing the loading tape noises into a mic and have it run.

Aww Skool Daze on the zx was brilliant!!

After building up a sweat playing Galaxians your fingers used to slip off the rubber keys on the old 48k!!

30 years old?

Congratulationt! 😉

Convert -dunno why I got the Texas Instruments,think it was cheap/reduced, cos I wanted the speccy. I think like most kids at the time I was banging on at my parents about doing “homework” on it, and it had a proper keyboard for “typing stuff” or whatever and great for my parents to do “bills n stuff” on it. and it had that cartridge port like on my Atari 2600. I don’t remember actually doing much with it. It’s like kids now persuading their parents they “need” a smartphone!
WHOA!

Spectrum here.

ZX81 (with obligatory wobbly 16k RAM pack)
Spectrum 48K (with obligatory Kempston joystick)
Atari 800XL
Amstrad 464
Windows PC
Linux PC

Always had mates with C64, ST, Amiga etc. so also got to play most of the good stuff on those regularly too.

Spectrum games were great but never sure whether that’s rose-tinted-specs or because they had no choice but to focus on gameplay since the graphics and sound were so poor). Still got a heap of tape images sat on my HD here to play under FUSE.

Would add Dark Star, 3d Ant Attack, TLL, Combat Lynx, Chaos, Tau Ceti and Shadowfire to the list ofawesome Speccy games.

Anyone running a spectrum emulator should try Buzzsaw if they haven’t already – new speccy release – kind of a jumped up tetris but very good.

slainte 8) rob

Underwurlde was my favourite.

LOL at BoardinBob,then think you`re a top programmer!!
Unfond memories of buying a magazine and spending 3 days typing a program in, press run and the dreaded syntax error and nothing else, lost count of the times I did this!!!

haha, I remember typing in programs from crash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_(magazine) and them never working. or was it C&VG?

whatever happened to Oliver Frey?

colournoise – Member
Windows PC

Should have added

(3.1 > 95 > 98 > Me > XP > Vista – spent too long in thrall to uncle Bill)

slainte 😳 rob

3d Deathchase was rated the best ever Speccy Game in it’s final days. I liked Psytron and probably would have liked Ant Attack except I was terrible at it.

As for other home computers of the time – anyone have a Colour Genie?

I remember typing in programs from crash

I was talking to Julian Rignall on Twitter a couple of days ago.

whatever happened to Oliver Frey?

I’ve got a book here along the lines of ‘the artwork of oli frey’ – it’s very, very good.

3d Deathchase was rated the best ever Speccy Game in it’s final days.

… Yep. Which is odd, cos it’s one of the oldest.

has Julian Rignall still got that mad haircut lol! oh man I’m going back now.. re-wind.. I think I was enthralled by his reviews when I was a youngster and some other bloke I can’t remember that was on zzap64

I had an Oric 1. There were fewer games, but it was better than a spectrum. It had good sound, and it was better to program on.

Tht’s what aaaaaaaall the kids (both of them) who had an Oric said – whilst the rest of us were talking about high scores and new games 😀 I do remember the keyboard being ‘different’ and the sound being slightly less crppy than a Spectrum. That was a niche fatbike of an 80s computer.

My first computer was a +3. Paperboy and Nomad where were it was at!

A Texas Instruments ti-99/4a. Kevevs, you and me must have been about the only people in the country – although the biggest seller in the states.

We had a Texas. I didn’t want it, but my dad bought it anyway. It was shite.
Then we had a BBC Master (Ooooooohhh!!) but my dad INSISTED on buying a proper computer monitor for it….. A green screen one…..!! FFS!!!! Would he buy a 16in portable colour TV? No. Would he heck. 🙁

Knight Lore has to be one of the best games on the spectrum, and just a landmark game in general. If you were writing a book on the history of computer gaming, 1950-2000, it would merit a page or two.

Did anyone ever play Swords and sorcery by PSS? Wasn’t super popular (can’t find much about it on the net other than the WoS page) but again ahead of it’s time. Unlike Knight Lore, though, it was too ambitious a game engine and full of bugs – couldn’t be completed IIRC.

Yay – someone else recognises the genius that was Knight Lore!

I remember trying to play 3D Monster Maze on a ZX81. Never knew what was happening until a t-rex shaped bunch of blobs would kill me.

Yep same here. ZX81 with a mega wobbly 16k RAM pack before the speccy.

Also fond memories of the JetPac series, Chucky Egg, the Manic / Jet Set and this gem

Written by the same guy who did The Hobbit (‘Kill Thorin’ seemed to be everyone’s opening gambit!) and had the ace feature of being able to design your own levels

Tht’s what aaaaaaaall the kids (both of them) who had an Oric said

True though.. and I actually spent more time programming mine than I did playing games.

I still have an Oric and a stack of games although sadly it’s not my original one. I also have my Atari ST, complete with 16MB hard drive and high res mono monitor that I bought much later from eBay for buttons.

Pyjamarama and Matchday were my favourite wastes of time.

Oh and Gauntlet!! Me and a pal started playing it at about 10am on Christmas Day and didnt stop until about 3am next morning. Not even for Christmas Dinner. Loved the seemingly endless killing and magic….

And funnily enough my wife has never really accepted my overtures about getting an Xbox/PS3 etc

Edit – The only “programming” I ever bothered with/managed was the faff where you could print your name over and over again on the screen…

Knight Lore has to be one of the best games on the spectrum

Legend has it that Knight Lore was completed a couple of years before it was released. Ultimate held it back so that it didn’t harm sales of their other games.

And funnily enough my wife has never really accepted my overtures about getting an Xbox/PS3 etc

You’d only be disappointed mate. They’re not as good as the 48K spectrum.