The most disappointing hardware for the ZX Spectrum?

[PeterJ]

It's maybe worth noting that the Commodore 1541 drive originally cost US$399 (equivalent to $1,120 in 2021).

I don't think many families in the UK would have gone for that. Yes the Microdrive was unreliable, but Sir Clive was always about keeping things affordable, and it was a balancing act.

The Spectrum started off at £125 / £175. It was always aimed at being affordable to families in 1982. The Commodore 64 was £399 at start in the UK. A better constructed machine in many ways, but out of the budget of many too (until prices fell).

Average weekly gross salary for men in 1982 was £154.30

[AndyC]

Yeah, but the design of the Commodore drive system was insane. It was basically a whole other computer dedicated to loading data from disk and then transferring it to the C64 via a serial cable. There were definitely cheaper ways of providing disk access.

I think Sinclair just got fixated on the idea of high speed tape as a cheap solution and didn't pay attention to the fact all the custom components involved just ended up making it almost as expensive as disk, meanwhile the increased using of off-the-shelf disk components was bringing their cost down.

[PeterJ]

I'm finding this really interesting @AndyC,

I agree about the apparent fixation on the idea of high speed tape. I do think the use of it in the QL was a mistake.

I went back to the September 1983 issue of Your Computer (which features the review of the MicroDrive), and looked for advertisements for floppy drives. There were not many, and of course then the only option was 5.25" drives. MicroPower were offering an Acorn 100K floppy drive for £264.50, and a double sided 800K drive for a whopping £803.85. Another company (Big M), was offering a 100K single sided 5.25 drive for £199.95. You would still need the interface though.

I suppose Sir Clive could have waited until 1985 and produced something similar to the Opus Discovery, which was £199 with one single sided 3.5" floppy drive.

[catmeows]

It's maybe worth noting that the Commodore 1541 drive originally cost US$399 (equivalent to $1,120 in 2021).

Yesterday I was looking into old mags for articles about Microdrive and floppies and I found this article: https://archive.org/details/Computer_An ... ew=theater

What is surprising that Commodore 1541 was the cheapest disk drive with price £225. And 1541 is a smart drive, with RAM, ROM, CPU and serial interface. I can only guess the reason why Cumana and other could not be as cheap is scale of production. But Sinclair was in different weigth category, may be he could really push price of drive under £200 or £150. Yes, it would be single side, single density, FM or GCR encoding.
Ok, I admit, I'm really deep into realm of WHAT IF, but for me most dissapointing hardware is nonexistence of standard Sinclair floppy

[PeterJ]

Yes, @catmeows,

Just checked the magazine I referenced above, and by September 1983 you could pick up a 1541 for £229.50 from Spectrum Computing (No relation!)

I agree we are in the 'What If' scenarios, but I just don't think (especially considering the low cost of the original Spectrum), that Sir Clive would have produced something more expensive than the computer. In 1983, floppy disks were a rarity (at least for the home user).

[Matt_B]

Commodore went down that route because it was cheaper to build a CPU controlled disk drive than put an off-the-shelf controller chip in one. Well, for them at least, as they made CPUs and could order them at cost.

Although somewhat expensive compared to what you could buy later in the decade, by which point manufacturers had worked out that there was a market for cheap mass produced disk controllers, the 1540 drive was a major price breakthrough for 1981. I believe it was the first time you could buy the combination of a computer (VIC-20 or later C64) and a disk drive for less than $1000 in the US.

Unfortunately, they had to bodge the software resulting in a really slow transfer rate. It wasn't much of a problem with the VIC-20, because it didn't have a lot of RAM and files tended to be small, but it rather gimped the C64. Loading games from Microdrives was far faster, so it's a shame that they weren't more reliable.

[PeterJ]

Loading games from Microdrives was far faster, so it's a shame that they weren't more reliable.

Agreed 100%

[cha05e90]

Not for me, I was really happy to get high speed storage (relative to tape) at a low price.

Same here. While other (with way more financial possibilities than me) bought a really expensive OpusDiscovery (i.e.) I could "only" afford the ZX Spectrum Expansion System (later added a Multiface One, of course...). I never ever loosed any data - alas when the loading time of data got longer and longer you knew that you have to backup the data on a new Cartridge... Fun fact: You could really humiliate C64 users' 1541 setup by the pure loading speed of the ZX Microdrive.

[toot_toot]

I always felt that while the Microdrive did have a bit of the ethos of “making computing affordable”, it also reeked of Sinclair trying to make a proprietary hardware format that they could exploit. The QL is a good example, publishers were really unhappy with the exclusive nature of the Microdrive format. Imagine if Sinclair managed to get the Spectrum using Microdrives? Think of all that money Sinclair would make in royalties, which it certainly wasn’t making from the tape format! But even if the QL was successful, the plan was to use proprietary Wafer drives for the next QL, again it just feels like Sinclair trying to go with a proprietary format that they could exploit more (maybe Clive Sinclair was really annoyed at the Imagine guys driving Ferraris and Sinclair not getting any royalties?)

[Pobulous]

I was disappointed with the RAM Turbo joystick interface - the original version that I had was incompatible with a number of games.
I'm not even sure how many games didn't work with it - was it loading problems or the RAM Turbo that caused the game to crash/freeze?
Original Lenslok version of Elite was definitely incompatible.

I never bought any ROM cartridges - the extra cost and limited selection didn't make them an essential purchase.
On top of that, after using the joysticks of the time on the Spectrum, I discovered that the rubber keyboard was a more accurate and more flexible option in almost every case.

[cj7hawk]

How about the refrigerated Mars Bar overclocking add-on... I know it was an april fools joke, but I think a few people actually tried it from memory...

ZX Spectrums... Overclocking before it was cool back in 1983...

Of course, it still ran at 3.5MHz... The idea was that somehow putting a cold mars bar on the z80 would make it run faster.

I hope I'm not the only one who remembers that episode.

[flatduckrecords]

A Mars a day, helps your ULA!

[JollyRoger]

I always felt that while the Microdrive did have a bit of the ethos of “making computing affordable”, it also reeked of Sinclair trying to make a proprietary hardware format that they could exploit. The QL is a good example, publishers were really unhappy with the exclusive nature of the Microdrive format. Imagine if Sinclair managed to get the Spectrum using Microdrives? Think of all that money Sinclair would make in royalties, which it certainly wasn’t making from the tape format! But even if the QL was successful, the plan was to use proprietary Wafer drives for the next QL, again it just feels like Sinclair trying to go with a proprietary format that they could exploit more (maybe Clive Sinclair was really annoyed at the Imagine guys driving Ferraris and Sinclair not getting any royalties?)

That was also my assessment of the choice to go with Microdrives on a machine that was being pitched towards serious users, the business world and professionals. It was an avenue that Sinclair Research hoped to monetise and it blew up in their face. Most of that target demographic wouldn't have taken the Microdrive seriously as a credible storage format - especially if they were accustomed to floppy disks on IBM compatibles and other computers. It was a typically short-sighted decision from Sinclair Research that helped doom the QL.

[1024MAK]

What is surprising that Commodore 1541 was the cheapest disk drive with price £225. And 1541 is a smart drive, with RAM, ROM, CPU and serial interface.

If we are playing WHAT IF, my question is, if Sinclair had the interest, and could get cheap bare drives (without the control electronics), could the company have used a Z80A, the bare minimum of SRAM, ROM and very basic I/O chip (including glue logic) which almost certainly would have been a ULA, to produce a low price disk drive for the ZX Spectrum?

It may have even been possible (at the expense of available program space) to use the Z80A processor in the ZX Spectrum itself to talk (via a ULA) to a ‘bare’: floppy disk drive.

Mark

[catmeows]

which almost certainly would have been a ULA

That's good point. I was thinking about floppy interface similar to Disk II or ZX81s F.I.Z., but Sinclair would probably use ULA. So best shot is to think about (something like) ZX Interface 1 connected to Shuggart's SA390 as Shuggart already provided bare drives for Apple and Commodore. That also gives quite good estimation of price, we can add price of drive (~$100, let say £100 for customer) to price of IF1 (£50). That wouldn't be so bad.

[cj7hawk]

Back around '83, a typical "professional" salary where I lived was around $15K per year ( starting salary ). Many people earned less. A few years later I started on $11,000 per year as an assembly programmer in a r&d lab. $300 per week wasn't much, even back then, but before I had a job, I couldn't afford much. Anything over $100 was out of my reach.

Floppy disks were really expensive back then. A typical home PC with FDD cost a few thousand dollars. That was as much as a nice car could be had for.

The Interface 1 was pretty cheap however and Microdrives were actually faster than a lot of similar equipment of the era - even though their "seek" time was longer, and a degragmented image was a pain to deal with. But I could afford a second-hand Interface 1 and Microdrive. I could not afford a floppy drive at the time.

Sure, FDDs started to get cheap enough just a few years later that the higher end amstrads had them just a few years later, around '86... And even then they probably got a good deal of CF2 drives, which I'm guessing was cheaper for them than 3.5" at the time... Even in 1988, I remember getting a 5.25" full -height drive and it STILL cost me over $100 ( $400 equivalent today ) - It was hugely expensive. I didn't get a 3.5" until I got a 486 much later. I think I got my entire Interface 1 and Microdrive for about $80... ( Australian dollars - About 40GBP. )

Sinclair never did anything unless there was a crazy cost advantage in his favor - he just had a habit of underestimating the rapid development of technology of the era, and the appetite of the consumer for convenience and power - he always assumed the lowest possible cost was the only objective. If FDDs were cheap, he probably would have just used one.

Alan sugar wasn't much different - He was selling cheap HIFIs IIRC. Though he did at least have a low and a high end market solution. Still, FDD interfaces for 3.5" drives were starting to come out for a few hundred dollars at the time. Again, out of my price range.

The Interface1 was like magic back then. I didn't mind it was unreliable. I even wrote an accounting package for someone back then that used the Microdrive to save variables in a stream, and he didn't mind that it took around 30 second per operation.

I think most of the hardware for the Spectrum was pretty cool. The light pen sucked. The AY-3-8910 Interfaces I made locally sucked too, because I used the Spectrum Clock-out, so they only worked when the sound routines were in the upper 32K... In the lower 32K, the clock was slowed by the ULA and they sounded.... Strange.... Later I upgraded them with an oscillator, but the cost of the oscillators took away any meager profit I had made on these hand-made PCBs.

So I guess I created one of the most disappointing interfaces for the ZX spectrum, and sold a few to my friends... The upgraded versions were fine, but still less than ideal.

David

[1024MAK]

The AY-3-8910 Interfaces I made locally…

David, just out of curiosity, which I/O ports did you use?

Mark

[cj7hawk]

I didn't do anything with the IO ports. I did include a 0.1 header in case someone wanted to do something later, but it was just for the audio... And there was no amplifier either.. Just a resistor network to connect the three outputs to a single output going to a soldered audio connector IIRC . Pretty basic. I sold them for about $40, which was around GBP20. They were pretty basic... But a lot of 48K games that were designed for the 128 worked just fine on them and the music worked... And the Mark Time Music Box worked OK too. Well, mostly. As I mentioned, the whole lower RAM issue changing the clock was a problem. I didn't know they messed with the clock when I first made them. It looked like a 3.5MHz signal on my oscilloscope. And my sense of tone wasn't good enough that the difference bothered me while playing a game, but a lot of friends were muso's and they definitely noticed it.

At the time, the AY-3-8910 was one of the chips on the computers I worked with at work which was made for embedded applications. I never programmed music on them, but apparently that was the original intention. Mostly they just used the AY ports for other applications. They were cheaper to buy than 8255PIOs at the time, since it was an arcade machine company, and they brought in huge quantities of chips like AY-3-8910's for repairs and the like. So although it wasn't the same size as the 8912, I was familiar enough with them and with programming them on the spectrum at the time to connect them up on a piece of breadboard with an edge connector attached and some rudimentary address decoding.

And then I used to house them in an old cassette case that fit everything nicely.

( Or did you mean what did I do with the extra address decoding lines on the 8910? I think I tied them to a rail IIRC... It was a very long time ago. ).

David

[1024MAK]

I actually meant the Z80 in/out port address decoding, but it sounds like you made them to be ZX Spectrum 128K compatible, so that answers my question

The reason I asked, is because before the ZX Spectrum 128K was released, various other third party manufacturers produced sound interfaces that used different Z80 in/out port addresses. For example the BI-PAK ZON X (link) or the dk’tronics 3 Channel Sound Synthesiser (link, link and link).

Mark

[cj7hawk]

Oh, yes, it paralleled the 128K ports. Not exactly, but enough that you could write the ports for a 128K and it would work with this. That was intentional as I worked out early on that the Mark Time Music Box was a 48K program, so wired one up to work with that, then noticed a day or so later that it worked with some of the 128K demo games that came on a covertape.

And then the penny dropped and I realized that anything written for the 48 and 128 would probably not do any detection, but would just write ports blindly and hope it went somewhere... And so it was a cheap "upgrade" for a lot, then I began looking on how to build the external memory paging and had finished recreating the paging in 74 series logic when I dropped the power cord onto the exposed electronics, with it's +12v outer shield, and fried the 128K I was using as a reference, put it all in a box, and never looked back... By this time, I had a 286 and it wasn't something I could deal with cost-wise to repair the 128K at the time ( repairs in Australia typically cost more than a second-hand working machine, and 128s were quite expensive back then over here. ).

Besides I was more into designing my own z80 based computer systems by this time, and was employed doing so, so that was the end of my Spectrum life ( Season 1... Season 2 started a couple of years ago when the bug bit again ).

I still wonder what happened to all my cartridges. Lots of art I worked on with Melbourne Draw - Unfinished games. Code routines. I think they all got thrown when my mother died and the house got sold. Common story though. This was mid to late 90s and the Pentiums were out.. Didn't make much sense to collect all my old junk, especially the old broken 128... Though it literally haunted my dreams for years to come... I'd find Spectrums in dream-world junk shops and relive the excitement of finding them, booting them up, seeing the logo, looking through the drive contents. So eventually I had to start collecting them again. I'm still trying to find an old Currah uSpeech... Need to recreate a very old memory there for my sister.... To this day she still calls me "Gravid" and asks what a "Genie Mouse" does. My mum and sister never did appreciate technology. I still maintain my position that it was saying something else and it was their ears that was the problem.

David.

[1024MAK]

Extra links added to my earlier post

Ouch to killing the 128K

Yes, I have a Currah uSpeech from back in the day. Great fun, but a little frustrating trying to get it to say what you wanted it to say. Back in around 1984/1985 I did connect it along with an I/O interface (from Maplin), which had a magnet/reed door switch connected, so that when my bedroom door was opened, the uSpeech would say “hello mum”.

Mark

[cj7hawk]

Yes, losing the 128 was a bigger blow than I could absorb, and so that was the end of the Spectrum era for me. New money went towards the PC, and other stuff like a Video Recorder and Colour TV and stuff I never had before, and fortunately I got a job somewhere around that time, but it only paid around GBP150/week, so things were tight. That's why I converted old Arcade machines into RGB monitors. I could get an arcade RGB monitor for around $80 at the time. ( About GBP40 ) while real monitors cost around $1000 ( GBP500)

I like the story about the mum alert. If I had done that, my mum would have been convinced the computer knew who she was. The funny thing, my mum always assumed I knew more about computers than I thought I did, but my dad thought I was making it all up to sound big.I guess he went to uni to learn about computers, and I just taught myself, and in his world, that didn't stack up.

But going from a Spectrum to working each day on z80s in Assembly was like a dream come true for me... So I didn't miss the spectrum as much as I thought I would... I mean, it still hurt, but there was always something new to replace it. PCs moved very quickly for a time like that.

David.

[equinox]

Didn't make much sense to collect all my old junk, especially the old broken 128... Though it literally haunted my dreams for years to come... I'd find Spectrums in dream-world junk shops and relive the excitement of finding them, booting them up, seeing the logo, looking through the drive contents. So eventually I had to start collecting them again.

I enjoyed this post so much.

I'm obsessed with dreams for some reason... probably because they're such a huge part of being human (we have 'em every day) but nobody properly understands the mechanism. I decided that I would start to fight back. So after the tenth time I had that stupid "suddenly remembering I am still at university, but had forgotten and I have missed months of lectures" -- I actually unpacked my degree certificate and stared at it, and said to myself aloud, "I got a degree, I passed."

You then proceed to the next, slightly harder level of dreams. And you think, "better the devil you know..."

The most disappointing ZX hardware is the one that never got past the dream stage, like the Loki.

[equinox]

Yes, I have a Currah uSpeech from back in the day. Great fun, but a little frustrating trying to get it to say what you wanted it to say. Back in around 1984/1985 I did connect it along with an I/O interface (from Maplin), which had a magnet/reed door switch connected, so that when my bedroom door was opened, the uSpeech would say “hello mum”.

I got Superior Software's SPEECH! on the BBC Micro to say:
*SAY DANYELL REEDZ PORN MAGGAZEENZ
when Daniel's mum came into his room. He was mortified and trying to hit the Break key. Naturally she didn't understand a word of the computer nonsense so no harm was done.

[cj7hawk]

Didn't make much sense to collect all my old junk, especially the old broken 128... Though it literally haunted my dreams for years to come... I'd find Spectrums in dream-world junk shops and relive the excitement of finding them, booting them up, seeing the logo, looking through the drive contents. So eventually I had to start collecting them again.

I enjoyed this post so much.

I'm obsessed with dreams for some reason... probably because they're such a huge part of being human (we have 'em every day) but nobody properly understands the mechanism. I decided that I would start to fight back. So after the tenth time I had that stupid "suddenly remembering I am still at university, but had forgotten and I have missed months of lectures" -- I actually unpacked my degree certificate and stared at it, and said to myself aloud, "I got a degree, I passed."

You then proceed to the next, slightly harder level of dreams. And you think, "better the devil you know..."

The most disappointing ZX hardware is the one that never got past the dream stage, like the Loki.

I spent a few weeks tracking down as much as possible on the Loki as I could, and I'm pretty confident Sir Clive could have pulled it off and created an incredible computer/games machine. The circuitry for the video driver wasn't much more complex than the ULA... Working out what the real specifications should have been was the key... I think they would have gone with 512x192@16 colours and 256x192@64 colours with four depths. It could have been incredible. Sound blaster quality sound and VGA like graphics in 1986 would have blown everyone away.

Honestly, if they went the extra mile, installed a z280 and ran CP/M, it could have changed computer history, and now there would probably be a third option alongside IBM and Apple architectures, not to mention the lead in technology the UK would have had. It would have performed like a 386 or even a low-end 486 back when the 286 was the most common architecture. And with hardware accelerated graphics there would have been nothing that could touch it.

It really burned me that the Loki never came to fruition. One day I plan to remake it from scratch, meet all of the original promised and touted specifications and use only technology that was commonly available in 1986 to do it and prove that Sir Clive really could have done it and delivered a product at the price claimed...

I ended up writing it up as the objective for a course I did at RMIT, and the more I learned from the past, the more I regretted that it never happened.

Hardware Accelerated Graphics. Just how much did we miss out on... I like your idea that the most dissappointing hardware for the ZX Spectrum was the one that never saw light of day.

David