Did you get your Spectrum at the right time?

[catmeows]

I didn't have to mess about with separate tape decks and the extra cables needed for that. I maintain the 128K +2 is the best model there ever was. (Now there's a forum hand grenade that's just been lobbed!)

I wonder, was Amstrad's approach with built-in tape deck good deal ?

[Swainy]

I didn't have to mess about with separate tape decks and the extra cables needed for that. I maintain the 128K +2 is the best model there ever was. (Now there's a forum hand grenade that's just been lobbed!)

I wonder, was Amstrad's approach with built-in tape deck good deal ?

I think that it was a good deal, although I really wish that it had a tape counter on it

[PeteProdge]

I didn't have to mess about with separate tape decks and the extra cables needed for that. I maintain the 128K +2 is the best model there ever was. (Now there's a forum hand grenade that's just been lobbed!)

I wonder, was Amstrad's approach with built-in tape deck good deal ?

For me at that time, absolutely ideal. I was VERY bad with peripherals.

I haven't mentioned it, but on my first day of Spectrum ownership I plugged a joystick interface in while the Speccy was on (yes, I know NOW), nothing bad happened (yes, very very lucky). And tried to remove it while the Spectrum was on (I know, I know). Extremely stupid and in any case, it wouldn't budge. Every member of the family tried to detach it, it was like Excalibur. Eventually the local milkman did it, and I'm not sure if the machine was on or off at that point.

But amazingly, still nothing bad happened. The next week at school, someone educated me as to how stupid that was.

I'm surely not the only Spectrum user who has done this and luckily got away with it?

The local milkman is now legally king of Mercia by the way.

[+3code]

I haven't mentioned it, but on my first day of Spectrum ownership I plugged a joystick interface in while the Speccy was on (yes, I know NOW), nothing bad happened (yes, very very lucky). And tried to remove it while the Spectrum was on (I know, I know).

Oh, sh*t, bad memories. My first +2A died when my sister turned off the TV while the computer was on. After it, R.I.P.

[1024MAK]

The local milkman is now legally king of Mercia by the way.

All I can think of after reading this, is this https://youtu.be/Rwa0vaR7slQ

[Nitrowing]

Mum bought the rubber key for me in 1983 (definitely before Sabre Wulf was released), along with a couple of type-in magazines and no tape recorder (she didn't want me 'just playing games'). I was 10 years old.
It died about 6 years later and wasn't repaired, it was replaced with a Yamaha RD200, beer and girls

I didn't touch computers again until 1993 - everything had changed to 486 PC's

[stupidget]

We got a Dragon 32 first in about '82 but after 18 months of multiple repairs and replacements my Dad went back to Boots and insisted on a full refund. After much deliberation by the manager we left said chemists with a wedge of cash and made our way to WH Smiths and purchased a Speccy, which I presume would be about '84.

The Dragon was a great computer and had some great games and with my Mum working at the office of our local newspaper, the Express & Star, she actually enjoyed typing in games because it had a proper keyboard. My mum, dad and me used spend ages huddled around the beige beast playing various adventure games and trying to get a better score on Donkey King (easily one of the best Donkey Kong conversions), Cuthbert Goes Walkabout or MinedOut. Once we got the Speecy my couldn't get her head around the fleshy keyboard and I was the sole user of it.

For me, having a speccy from 1984 to 1989 was the perfect time and introduced me to a bigger groups of friends when I started going to the after school computer club. It got me the job I have now and it gave me some fantastic memories of happy days of playing some truly ground breaking and amazing games.

[Cosmium]

Yeah, I couldn't get it soon enough!

I had the ZX81 and enjoyed learning to program it and make basic games, but once I saw that incredibly alluring Sinclair brochure for the Spectrum - in all its glossy full colour glory - I was immediately sold and quickly mail ordered one as soon as I could afford it.

Being an 'early adopter' meant many agonising weeks awaiting delivery rather than easily picking one up in the shops, as you could later on. But I used the time to prepare for my 16K's arrival, and wrote out game programs on paper, meticulously designing UDGs ready to type into the machine upon arrival.

Experiencing this in 1982 meant being there to dabble with the machine right from the early days, when computers and games were seen as (more) geeky and the industry was just forming, and I think this timing also helped put me on the path to game programming.

[cha05e90]

For the me answer is: Yes!

After a short time with my first computer (ZX81 1k model) from summer to winter 1983 I soon got my ZX Spectrum 16k (Issue 2). It was a time here in Germany when the Commodore 64 had not yet reached the popularity it would have later. Sales wise the Speccy were 2nd place after the Commodore bunch (VIC-20, C64) then. So even the "mainstream" computer magazines like "Happy Computer" or "Computer Kontakt" had a lot of stuff for Sinclair computers back then. And there were quite some mail order companies selling Sinclair hard- and software.

Sadly the ZX Spectrum lost it's track here and were overrun completely by Commodore 64 and some time later by the Schneider (!) CPC 464.

[Turtle_Quality]

I ordered mine on the day it was announced, so got it pretty early, before many software houses. I had a little Basic experience on the Acorn Atom and ZX81 before, and it probably helped I didn't have commercial games to distract me to start with (or make my own games look disappointing in comparison)

Then there were a few games that just made your jaw drop the first time you saw them - Jetpac, Invasion of the Body Snatchas, DeathChase, Ant Attack, Manic Miner ; games like that were raising the bar for what was possible on the Spectrum. I don't think I would have appreciated that joining the Spectrum scene in say 1987 when these games were already around.

Then again, with the tools available now for developing, and Google for research, I could have produced so much more with the free time that I had when I was young free and single. Looking back I'm amazed I got anything at all into commercial use before I had an assembler or a disk drive

[spider]

I'm not sure. I think I did. 10/10/84 , I remember the date quite well.

The first one did not load any tapes was completely deaf, shop initially (iirc) said it was our new tape player at fault until they tried our Speccy with both the supplied tape lead and their own and player, guess what "deaf as a post" , anyway it was changed, second one if I recall looked like it had been opened but it was flawless no issues with it itself.

Back then no 3 pin plug either if I remember, had to supply your own!

It came with the 'Sinclair Six Pack' , Scrabble / Make-A-Chip / Survival / Horace Goes Skiing / Chequered Flag / Chess , this pack (not my pic) , and obviously Horizons.



Fun times I guess as although I missed a lot of early stuff which I caught up on later, there were some very good games out in 84 and earlier, and I used to enjoy some of the type-ins from Sinclair Programs too, when I had enough pocket money to get a copy.

I can't recall the first game I purchased, it may of been Space Raiders or a Mastertronic title.

[MarkRJones1970]

I got mine in April 1984. My birthday was in June so it was an early birthday present. I think I got mine at the PERFECT time. There was already a backlog of amazing (for the time) looking games out like Jet Pac, Ant Attack, Atic Atac, Escape from Krakatoa, Chuckie Egg, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Deathchase, Time Gate, Pogo, Moon Alert, Eskimo Eddie, The Snowman, Codename Mat and The Hobbit. These were all on the couple of tapes I got off my mates just as I got my Spectrum. I was then there, ready, to witness the rapid increase in quality that occured over the next couple of years firsthand. So, we then got titles like Dark Star, Full Throttle, Sabre Wulf (which was the 1st Spectrum game by Ultimate that I played as a new release), Tir Na Nog, Legend of Avalon, Turmoil, Zombie Zombie, 3D Starstrike 1 and 2, Trashman, Underwurlde and Knight Lore. It really was such an exciting time to have a Spectrum, you never knew what was going to come out next. The speed at how fast things were advancing was amazing. It got so a game that was 3 months old already looked out of date and old fashioned. I lost count of the amount of times me and my school mates were "Wowed" by a new release back then, every few weeks some game would come out that contained some feature, graphic technique or sound routine we'd never seen or heard before on a Spectrum. Those were great days.

Some of the stand outs for me were:
1) Seeing Knight Lore for the 1st time. You really had to be there at the time to realise what an advance it was. We really hadn't seen graphics like that before on a Spectrum. We had no idea it was even capable of it.
2) Hearing the 1st game to ever have simulated 2 channel sound, Zombie Zombie. It sounded amazing coming out of a tape recorder, which we used to amplify the sound. "This is coming out of the beeper?! Is it witch craft?"
3) Seeing the animation on Heartland and Nodes of Yesod. Again, that fluidity had never been seen before.
4) Playing titles like 'Avalon' & 'Tir Na Nog'. They really did feel like we had access to a mystical and secret world from the past that had been uncovered in our Spectrums.
5) Hearing Tim Follin's amazing music routine, heard for the 1st time (IIRC) on Agent X. Amplified it sounded like a symphony. We had no idea that could be done with a 1 channel beeper!
6) Seeing FILLED IN 3D graphics for the vert first time in Starstrike 2. Another milestone reached. We didn't care if it was a tad slow. We were used to wireframe, see through graphics in these sorts of games. Now we had full, solid shapes zooming and spinning about that we could blast into smithereens. Gobsmacking.
7) Seeing Dark Star played in a darkended room on a big TV. If you stared right at the screen you felt the vertigo as if you were actually flying through space.
8) Seeing the 1st budget games come out. At first they were crappy titles by Mastertronic that cost £1.99. Yeah, they were cheap but most of that first batch (Adventures of a St. Bernard, Voyage into the Unknown and Rifle Range for example) were pretty crappy and we refered to the company as MasterCHRONIC. After a while though they released the 1st really good budget game, FInders Keepers. The standards started to improve and then Firebird released Booty which was the 1st budget game to ever get a Crash Smash. Then the general quality of budget titles started to improve so much that some of them could easily be compared to some of full price titles. Then you got things like Zub, 180 and Amourote that included 128 extras like extra graphics and PROPER music. Sometimes it was exciting enough just to see what the music was like on a game, even if the game itself wasn't much cop.

For me, my most exciting times of having a Spectrum were from when I got mine In April 1984 up to the end of 1986. I started at Ocean in Feb 1987 and while that was exciting as flip, I learned how the games were made and that took away a lot of the mystery and magic for me. Before that I didn't really have a clue how the graphics in games were made to move. I was so naive that when Tir Na Nog was previewed, and the magazines spoke of the 'liquid animation' and of it being a 'computer movie', I honestly thought that that main character had been made by someone drawing 2 frames of him in midwalk and a clever, secret, computer animation technique had animated the rest of the frames in order for him to look so realistic. I had no idea he had just been drawn by a human.