10 ms·
ZX Spectrum: Q&A with some of the folks who worked on legendary PC
- sys_64738 5y agoBack when programming was an art and a programmer needed to know the underlying hardware that the software was running on intimately. Nowadays the nearest you get to that is with embedded programming. Makes you wonder why computers need to get faster so that we can run the latest code.
- erwincoumans 5y agoAgreed 0xFCE2! Indeed, the game industry and robotics still care about performance, since it affects joy (we want smooth framerates, VR headsets can make you sick as low frames per second) and safety (robot control often has real-time requirements). My first computer was a commodore 64 (like you?) and I care about performance, so I enjoy working in those areas.
- mburee 5y agoI really think most game devs don't reallzcare about performance, how many games out there use more than one core/thread? There's so much game engine/abstraction hell going on, I can't imagine they could care a lot about what's going on at a low level
- erwincoumans 5y agoIndeed, I was referring to C++ or Rust game engine developers. For example Teardown, by Dennis Gustafsson: https://mobile.twitter.com/tuxedolabs?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/tuxedolabs?lang=en a nice game and well optimized c++ custom game engine. Many game developers use Unreal Engine or Unity, thise game engines have been optimized pretty well.
- bluedino 5y agoDon't forget about HFT
- moffkalast 5y ago> why computers need to get faster so that we can run the latest code Wirth's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- jameshart 5y agoThis grossly understates the level of complexity involved in even the simplest things we take for granted in general purpose operating systems on general purpose hardware nowadays. In order for you to read this comment, your computer is interacting at an astonishing speed with possibly wireless networking hardware, transmitting, receiving and error correcting on the fly in order to establish a secure, trustworthy connection to a server, from which it can receive an encrypted message containing the text of this message. Having received it, together with a bunch of high level layout instructions, your machine has then determined how to lay out a visual display of hundreds of thousands of pixels, drawing at sub pixel resolution dynamic glyphs drawn from font data that it is loading on demand from a storage medium that indexes data using a permission-based filesystem and continually optimizes the arrangement of the data. Your computer may never have been called upon to draw this symbol in this particular typeface and size and color before: 喜 - yet it can do so almost instantaneously when you browse to this comment. Isn’t that kind of magical? Those glyphs are composited over a color background and sent to a high resolution display device with at least two orders of magnitude more pixels than a ZX spectrum. While all this is going on you can be running a dozen more equally complex operations. You might have an audio file or data stream playing, or even a video stream. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating the vast gulf of capability between an ‘80s 8 bit micro and a modern computer.
- gus_massa 5y agoYou forgot real time orthography and gramar checking while I'm writing this comment. When I was young, you had to press a special button to make WinWord find the pile of errors you made. When I was younger, the ZX Spectrum had no spell checker.
- jameshart 5y agoReading back over my comment I could have used some of that :) But yes, I was focused on just pulling down and displaying a comment, not even touching on the input processing capabilities. And this is stuff that a computer does without even breaking a sweat - this is just constant background activity supporting the vastly more complex stuff the machine can do if you task it to. A ZX Spectrum reading data from a tape drive at about 1400 bits per second required almost its entire CPU’s attention. At that speed just loading the 1614 UTF8 bytes of my comment above into memory would take over 9 seconds, during which time the computer is doing literally nothing else.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoYour comment reminded me of The Story of Mel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel
- the_af 5y agoMel would disapprove of modern computers.
- klelatti 5y agoIIRC the ZX Spectrum’s ROM included a stack based VM for floating point calculations with a ‘bytecode’ defining the operations - largely I think to cram more instructions into the 16k. The full disassembly is available at https://skoolkid.github.io/rom/maps/all.html https://skoolkid.github.io/rom/maps/all.html
- antirez 5y agoYes, exactly, and a channels abstraction to output formatted text on different targets: screen, printer, ...
- moffkalast 5y agoZX Spectrum, the OG Raspberry Pi 400.
- bencollier49 5y agoOuch, that one made me wince! The RaspPi is very much an heir of the Acorn machines. Obviously your point still stands, but...
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoThe rivalry was captured well by the BBC docudrama "Micro Men" (aka Syntax Era): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
- bencollier49 5y agoYes! I've pretty much watched it to death... I was always an Acorn fan, but these days I also have a ZX Spectrum Next.
- the_af 5y agoOoh. The Next is a premium item, isn't it?
- bencollier49 5y agoIt was such a great idea that I couldn't not jump on the Kickstarter. It was a little pricey, but the case, build, presentation and software were all terrific. The team did an amazing job.
- the_af 5y agoIt looks beautiful from the pictures I've seen. I'd love to own one, but cannot justify the price. I didn't have a Speccy but a C64 as a kid, so I went with the cheaper (and more cheaply built) TheC64 from RetroGames Ltd. It's just a working keyboard C64 lookalike with an ARM inside running an old version of VICE. The Next looks like a much more premium thing. I'd really like one ;)
- antirez 5y agoI always thought that maybe they went too far with the compromises with the Spectrum. Yep, it was still a huge success (and I had one when I was 8 years old) but maybe with a few tens of bucks more three of the terrible limits could be removed: the limitations in the color attribute, the terrible sound (even without a chip, maybe also a sin-wave generator to be summed to the square wave one and driven together), a default joystick port. With such features the C64 could have had a much harder time to compete.
- krallja 5y agoHow would you solve color clash with a few tens of dollars? Iirc it’s a memory bandwidth limit, you don’t have enough time to load more than a few bits per pixel, so FG/BG+ 8x(on/off) is usually all you can get. And you load the sprite data during HBLANK.
- nottorp 5y agoIs it that? Or 256x192x4 bits per pixel would have taken ... 24k of the Spectrum's 48k ram?
- jameshart 5y agoOr, for the original model, 24K of the 16K of RAM, which I think gets more to the problem :) A full 4bit graphics mode that used a 24K screenbuffer would probably have found use, even with the heavy RAM cost, though. The Spectrum's lack of graphics modes was probably important for cost from the point of view of keeping the video electronics simple and cheap, though.
- tragomaskhalos 5y agoI'm glad the Spectrum's manual gets a call-out here - that thing really was a masterpiece of accessible technical writing.
- parenthesis 5y agoWhen I gave away my Spectra I kept the manuals.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoEverything about the Spectrum was insanely clever - from the industrial design, to the circuit, to the software, to the manual, to the marketing. It was for all practical purposes a toy - and also a masterpiece of accessible engineering.
- leke 5y agoI remember correctly, I remember learning Sinclair BASIC from the manual, when I was 8 years old (1983).
- stevekemp 5y agoAnd it has to be said being spiral-bound made the book actually practical for reference while typing.
- rhexs 5y agoWas a thing of beauty. https://worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/ https://worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/ Simple, concise, useful.
- empressplay 5y agoFor more from Richard Altwasser: https://paleotronic.com/2018/10/01/an-interview-with-zx-spectrum-designer-richard-altwasser/ https://paleotronic.com/2018/10/01/an-interview-with-zx-spec...
- parenthesis 5y agoIt seems anachronistic to refer to the Spectrum as a PC rather than as a microcomputer. I miss the term microcomputer, but now that everything contains microprocessors (up to and including supercomputers), I suppose it makes more sense to call personal computers personal computers.
- layer8 5y agoHome computer would be the correct and more specific term: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_computer
- parenthesis 5y agoKraftwerk agree.
- yardshop 5y agoI program my home computer. Beam myself into the future.
- donio 5y agoFeels very weird to me too. The problem is that PC meant something much more specific at the time and nobody would have called the Spectrum or even an Amiga or Macintosh a PC.
- TuringTest 5y agoThey were called like that in other languages, at least in Spanish ("ordenador personal"). Probably it helped that we didn't see IBM compatible PCs at home until the late 80's - early 90's.
- kragen 5y agoThe Spectrum came out in 01982, only a few months after the IBM PC. That was long before IBM's monopoly power (well, and Ziff-Davis) had redefined "PC" to mean "IBM PC compatible". The Amiga and Macintosh didn't exist yet. Most "personal computers" ran CP/M at the time.
- Saint_Genet 5y agoAs a kid growing up in the 80, the spectrum were for the dorky and unpopular and the c64 was the fancy option with the coolest games and demos (this is all of course within the microcosm of the already nerdy)
- Joeboy 5y ago> the dorky and unpopular AKA the kids whose parents didn't have a lot of money.
- Saint_Genet 5y agoYes, that’s quite frankly a big part of what made kids unpopular when I was a kid. Don’t know what it’s like these days but I suspect it hasn’t changed that much
- keeran 5y agoThat's weird.. I don't recall feeling like it was a money thing that I had a Spectrum, only that my parents had made the 'wrong' call on a 50/50 decision (though I will forever be grateful for that early exposure to programming!) Trying to search for local prices back then is tricky, but they look to have been in the same ballpark (£180-200).
- Marazan 5y agoThe spectrum was way cheaper than a C64. The speccy had a launch price of £125 (£175 for the 48k version), the C64 launched at £399 in the UK.
- Saint_Genet 5y agoThe c64 peripherals we’re way more expensive too. Commodore had an official cassette player as well as a floppy disk drive that weren’t cheap. Though I suspect I in the long run probably spent more money on worn out joysticks
- Joeboy 5y ago
- paines 5y agoWhat baffled me most about that time, was that (some) developers would use PCs to develop ZX spectrum games. This was e.g. described in Bob Papes fantastic book "It's behind you", where he recalls the development of R-Type. Nowadays you would definelty do so, and you still can, e.g. with using C with z88dk and target a whole palette of Z80 targets.
- midislack 5y agoAnybody who likes this should read the book, The ZX Spectrum ULA: How To Design A Microcomputer, which runs you through how the computer actually works.
- renaudg 5y agoAs somebody who grew up with the Amstrad CPC in France (it was the best selling 8-bit micro there), I've always found the cult status of the ZX Spectrum in the UK difficult to rationalise. IMO, it's the biggest f***ing rose-tinted reality distortion field in all of retrocomputing. I appreciate that the Spectrum was an affordable entry point into the fascinating world of computing, and that it had a bit of a first mover advantage in the UK market. But the vastly superior C64 was released only a few months later, and the also-British Amstrad CPC two years after that. How could the Speccy remain so popular ? Let me try to explain : The Amstrad had a built-in colour monitor + tape drive for the same price as the C64 (with also a cheaper green screen option), a fully RGB video signal (unlike the C64), a faster clocked Z80 CPU than the Spectrum, the best graphics capability of the three by far (16 colours 160x200 with a great palette, 4 colours 320x200, monochrome 640x200, no colour clash), the same AY sound chip found later in the 128K Spectrum, standard Atari-style joystick ports, a decent keyboard, and the easiest and most capable BASIC flavour too. The C64 had a weird palette (no red !), but also hardware sprites which allowed smooth arcade-like gameplay, and the undisputed king of sound chips : the SID. I can't think of a single hardware advantage for the Spectrum. Contrary to popular belief in the UK, the Amstrad's worldwide unit sales (3 million in 6 years) were not far from the Amiga (4 million in 7 years) or even the Spectrum (5 million in 10 years). They're all dwarfed by the C64's ~15 million, though. Software availability was similar : most games were released on all 3 platforms. The Amstrad did suffer from some disappointing (but easy to avoid) lazy Spectrum game ports from smaller UK publishers, but the larger ones (e.g. Ocean) also produced some of its finest games (the Amstrad ports of Gryzor, Chase HQ, Operation Wolf, Rainbow Islands, Dragon Ninja... are all the best 8-bit conversions of the arcade). This was also balanced by French & Spanish publishers that were all Amstrad-first. In short : IMHO the most interesting and relevant 8-bit match is "C64 vs Amstrad CPC". These two were actually playing in the same league. Yet, the dominant conversation online today still seems to be all about "C64 vs Spectrum" and I find that puzzling, as if people were still seriously arguing today that the Atari ST was a more capable and legendary computer than the Amiga. Bitmap Books released a series of "visual commpedium" art books featuring the Amiga (of course), the C64 (fair enough), the Spectrum (lol for a gfx book), but still not the Amstrad CPC to this day. Some of this may be down to ignorance : I came across people who were simply unaware of the CPC's graphics prowess compared to the Spectrum, as they had only ever seen "green screen" Amstrads, if any. Others had lazy Speccy ports in mind when they argued the CPC was slower and couldn't do smooth scrolling (I show them Pinball Dreams : https://youtu.be/yl_MSCpGC0M?t=1377 https://youtu.be/yl_MSCpGC0M?t=1377) But I wonder if besides the nostalgia goggles & ignorance, there's maybe a different taste for pixel art aesthetics at play ? I was stunned to hear that some people preferred the Spectrum in this games graphics comparison I've put together : https://imgur.com/a/D7Ocd https://imgur.com/a/D7Ocd What ?! I'm curious to know what unbiased younger people think about that one...