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The speccie certainly helped kickstart my computer science career. Sinclair BASIC made for a friendly programming experience, and once outgrown, I enjoyed learn

by tromp 5y ago

The speccie certainly helped kickstart my computer science career. Sinclair BASIC made for a friendly programming experience, and once outgrown, I enjoyed learning the intricacies of Z80 programming. Even the attribute color system where each 8x8 block of pixels had one dedicated color byte including a foreground color, background color, and I think brightness and flash bits, proved very charming when I programmed a connect-4 game using attribute memory as storage for the board. You could literally see the alpha-beta game tree search progress through the screen colors. Some of my favorite games were Lords of Midnight, The Sentinel, and Underwurlde. Good times...

stevekemp 5y ago
Definitely how I got my start too, and a lot of others of a similar age: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html My personal-favourite was "Chaos: The Battle of Wizards", by Julian Gallop. I still play that every few months under emulation. There are modern sequels and remakes, but I've avoided them lest I be disappointed! But there were lots of great games, the Dizzy series, RoboCop, Strider, R-Type, and many many more.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > But there were lots of great games, the Dizzy series, RoboCop, Strider, R-Type, and many many more. There was also the peculiar experience that the Spectrum version of a game would often be more playable or essentially faithful to its arcade parent than that of platforms with more power (even the C64). Because the Spectrum developers had to work hard to make the game playable in essentially monochrome, with nearly no sound. There is no better way to make art than through constraints, and the Spectrum was all constraints. All 8-bit systems benefited from this art-through-constraints situation, though, and gaming culture owes everything to it. This could be why I am more inclined to play a cartoon MMORPG like Dofus than anything else; if a games designer is unwilling to choose their own constraints I am going to find the game uninteresting. [Edit to change last sentence: wrong choice of words]

by tromp 5y ago

stevekemp 5y ago

Definitely how I got my start too, and a lot of others of a similar age: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html My personal-favourite was "Chaos: The Battle of Wizards", by Julian Gallop. I still play that every few months under emulation. There are modern sequels and remakes, but I've avoided them lest I be disappointed! But there were lots of great games, the Dizzy series, RoboCop, Strider, R-Type, and many many more.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> But there were lots of great games, the Dizzy series, RoboCop, Strider, R-Type, and many many more. There was also the peculiar experience that the Spectrum version of a game would often be more playable or essentially faithful to its arcade parent than that of platforms with more power (even the C64). Because the Spectrum developers had to work hard to make the game playable in essentially monochrome, with nearly no sound. There is no better way to make art than through constraints, and the Spectrum was all constraints. All 8-bit systems benefited from this art-through-constraints situation, though, and gaming culture owes everything to it. This could be why I am more inclined to play a cartoon MMORPG like Dofus than anything else; if a games designer is unwilling to choose their own constraints I am going to find the game uninteresting. [Edit to change last sentence: wrong choice of words]