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NES was a game machine, built specifically to work like arcade machines of the time. Spectrum was trying to be a general purpose computer. It had a BASIC in th

NES was a game machine, built specifically to work like arcade machines of the time. Spectrum was trying to be a general purpose computer. It had a BASIC in the ROM, for goodness' sake! That it was able to do that, at a similar pricepoint to the NES, earlier, and yet in spite of lacking dedicated arcade-style sprite hardware, it still turned into a successful gaming platform? That's pretty impressive. Not being sprite-centric also meant that Spectrum games included early 3D titles like Mercenary, Sentinel, Elite, and even Freescape games like Driller which featured fully shaded polygons. Apparently Elite made it to the NES in 1991. I have no idea how that was achieved.

kragen 5y ago
Yeah, kind of. It's nice that it had color but it's too bad the color was ugly. It's nice that it had sound but it's too bad the sound was ugly beeps. Since they weren't constrained by CP/M compatibility, if they'd used a 6502 instead of the Z80, they could have delivered a hell of a lot more compute, and consequently better 3-D, at a lower price point. It's too bad they didn't do that. It's what the Apple ][, the C64, the Commodore PET, the Atari 2600, the Atari 400/800, the NES, and the Acorn System 1 did. Sprites and tiles would have made it a hell of a lot easier to write games in BASIC (at least 2-D games), which is what a lot of us wanted to do with the machine at the time, and they also enabled things like the mouse pointer and mouse velocity slider in the C64 version of GEOS—which, incidentally, also suffered badly from the color clash problem, and was also ugly. The Atari 800 also had BASIC in ROM (albeit in a plug-in cartridge) in 01979 and also had tiles and sprites. The TI-99/4 in 01979 also had sprites and 8×8 two-color tiles, inherited from the ColecoVision, and BASIC in ROM. The BASIC instruction manual, if it was the same as the TI-99/4A, taught you how to do animations by redefining characters in the pattern table. The Apple ][ and ][+, also in 01979, were the ones that were most similar to the Spectrum: they had BASIC in ROM and only 6 ugly colors in high-resolution mode (280×192) and no sprites, but 16 colors in low-resolution mode (a much nicer selection than the Spectrum's, but dependent on NTSC). 01979 was three years earlier than the Spectrum. Sinclair was trying to sell a personal computer with stripped-down 01979 graphics in 01982, 1½ Moore's-law cycles later. The Spectrum came out after the IBM PC and the CGA. You could run AutoCAD on those, though not until December. Basically I think that hindsight shows that the Spectrum made some really bad technical choices on the Spectrum, and they kind of ruined the company. Sinclair could have been another Apple or ARM (another offspring of Sinclair Radionics) instead of another Amstrad.
- jameshart 5y ago
  > Sinclair was trying to sell a personal computer with stripped-down 01979 graphics in 01982, 1½ Moore's-law cycles later. Moore’s law goes two ways: power in the same space doubles, or you can build something of the same power in half the space. And crudely, space = chips. If you can use less chips you can save money. Sinclair made something at least as capable as an Apple ][ using much less silicon and brought it to market at a much lower price point. Sinclair “was trying” to sell it? It SOLD! It was spectacularly successful!
  - kragen 5y ago
    It had half the colors of an Apple ][, dramatically worse sound, and arguably even less computing power, but it's true that it was ten times cheaper and had more RAM. It sold well in Europe due to poverty and because the non-NTSC Apple ][s and Apple ][+s sold in Europe were black-and-white only. It didn't do very well in Japan or South America, and perhaps most importantly, it completely flopped in the US. It did poorly enough that, following the flops of the Sinclair QL and the TV80, the remains of Sinclair Research were sold off to Amstrad in 01986. But it didn't have to be that way. As with the DEC VT100, with the benefit of hindsight we can see how some moderate design changes would have made it immensely more capable.
- antirez 5y ago
  The Z80 was not much slower than the 6502 (2x slower at the same clock speed if you factor in the more complex operations). The limitations of the spectrum were not related to the CPU itself, but the fact the CPU had to do everything, and even this way the raw hardware capabilities were shit.
  - kragen 5y ago
    How would you redesign it with the benefit of hindsight?

kragen 5y ago

Yeah, kind of. It's nice that it had color but it's too bad the color was ugly. It's nice that it had sound but it's too bad the sound was ugly beeps. Since they weren't constrained by CP/M compatibility, if they'd used a 6502 instead of the Z80, they could have delivered a hell of a lot more compute, and consequently better 3-D, at a lower price point. It's too bad they didn't do that. It's what the Apple ][, the C64, the Commodore PET, the Atari 2600, the Atari 400/800, the NES, and the Acorn System 1 did. Sprites and tiles would have made it a hell of a lot easier to write games in BASIC (at least 2-D games), which is what a lot of us wanted to do with the machine at the time, and they also enabled things like the mouse pointer and mouse velocity slider in the C64 version of GEOS—which, incidentally, also suffered badly from the color clash problem, and was also ugly. The Atari 800 also had BASIC in ROM (albeit in a plug-in cartridge) in 01979 and also had tiles and sprites. The TI-99/4 in 01979 also had sprites and 8×8 two-color tiles, inherited from the ColecoVision, and BASIC in ROM. The BASIC instruction manual, if it was the same as the TI-99/4A, taught you how to do animations by redefining characters in the pattern table. The Apple ][ and ][+, also in 01979, were the ones that were most similar to the Spectrum: they had BASIC in ROM and only 6 ugly colors in high-resolution mode (280×192) and no sprites, but 16 colors in low-resolution mode (a much nicer selection than the Spectrum's, but dependent on NTSC). 01979 was three years earlier than the Spectrum. Sinclair was trying to sell a personal computer with stripped-down 01979 graphics in 01982, 1½ Moore's-law cycles later. The Spectrum came out after the IBM PC and the CGA. You could run AutoCAD on those, though not until December. Basically I think that hindsight shows that the Spectrum made some really bad technical choices on the Spectrum, and they kind of ruined the company. Sinclair could have been another Apple or ARM (another offspring of Sinclair Radionics) instead of another Amstrad.

jameshart 5y ago
> Sinclair was trying to sell a personal computer with stripped-down 01979 graphics in 01982, 1½ Moore's-law cycles later. Moore’s law goes two ways: power in the same space doubles, or you can build something of the same power in half the space. And crudely, space = chips. If you can use less chips you can save money. Sinclair made something at least as capable as an Apple ][ using much less silicon and brought it to market at a much lower price point. Sinclair “was trying” to sell it? It SOLD! It was spectacularly successful!
- kragen 5y ago
  It had half the colors of an Apple ][, dramatically worse sound, and arguably even less computing power, but it's true that it was ten times cheaper and had more RAM. It sold well in Europe due to poverty and because the non-NTSC Apple ][s and Apple ][+s sold in Europe were black-and-white only. It didn't do very well in Japan or South America, and perhaps most importantly, it completely flopped in the US. It did poorly enough that, following the flops of the Sinclair QL and the TV80, the remains of Sinclair Research were sold off to Amstrad in 01986. But it didn't have to be that way. As with the DEC VT100, with the benefit of hindsight we can see how some moderate design changes would have made it immensely more capable.
antirez 5y ago
The Z80 was not much slower than the 6502 (2x slower at the same clock speed if you factor in the more complex operations). The limitations of the spectrum were not related to the CPU itself, but the fact the CPU had to do everything, and even this way the raw hardware capabilities were shit.
- kragen 5y ago
  How would you redesign it with the benefit of hindsight?