Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2015 8:54:11 GMT
For those of you who remember bunking off from rugby practice and informing the then current squeeze you were too busy to take her 'shopping' on Saturday morning The return of the dreaded but seriously addictive rubber keys.............. The ZX Spectrum is back  Good Times |
|
Barry
Rank: Trio
Posts: 195 
|
Post by Barry on Sept 11, 2015 10:59:46 GMT
Ah, the "dead flesh" keyboard! No thank you.
|
|
|
|
Post by Slinger on Sept 11, 2015 11:02:48 GMT
Happy days.  The first machine I ever programmed something on. I wrote a MIDI step sequencer for the Speccy, as well as a fully fledged (or as fully fledged as it could be on a Spectrum) graphics package. |
|
|
|
Post by MartinT on Sept 11, 2015 11:56:27 GMT
Amazing! The 'pair' button and micro-USB socket give the game away. I wouldn't mind betting there's a stripped down Raspberry Pi board inside!
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2015 13:35:14 GMT
Never had the 'Spectrum' had the 'ZX81'..
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2015 14:47:14 GMT
Amazing! The 'pair' button and micro-USB socket give the game away. I wouldn't mind betting there's a stripped down Raspberry Pi board inside! My thoughts spot on Martin, however retro fun abound ZX81 pah I still have my spanking white ZX80 and the kit box too  |
|
|
|
Post by MartinT on Sept 11, 2015 14:54:45 GMT
I had a Spectrum, long gone.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2015 15:03:20 GMT
My coding days started on a Research machines 380Z cutting edge stuff in 1981  5 1/4" floppy drives outstanding  |
|
|
|
Post by MartinT on Sept 11, 2015 16:51:12 GMT
Ah bugger, I haven't seen a 380Z for a few years now. The company I worked for (Kode) had the contract to service them all in businesses and schools. Bloody awful things with low density TTL boards all connected with ribbon cables at the top (i.e. no proper bus like the S-100 system). RM were known to buy seconds and rejects in TTL ICs with the result that they were horribly unreliable (and they certainly didn't pass on the cost savings to customers). We spent all our time patching boards and blasting new ROMs with modified firmware just to keep them running.
Some of the schools had an RM server with twin 8" floppies - no hard disk! As you can imagine, the networks were rather slow!!
|
|
|
|
Post by MartinT on Sept 11, 2015 17:05:53 GMT
I wrote a MIDI step sequencer for the Speccy, as well as a fully fledged (or as fully fledged as it could be on a Spectrum) graphics package. If you can remember back to the days of connecting up to a large host (in our case, City of London Poly) running BASIC via Teletype, there was a Star Trek program doing the rounds, all text based. Short Range scan, Torpedoes etc. I then re-wrote that for my Texas TI-58 programmable calculator! My best bit of hand assembled machine coding was the game of life written for the Z-80. It worked rather well. Not having an assembler, recalculating jumps by hand was rather laborious. |
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2015 18:34:40 GMT
Oh yes the delightful Motorola 68000 chip sets the reliability of certain high end Italian valve amplifiers
|
|
|
|
Post by stanleyb on Sept 12, 2015 8:59:18 GMT
Oh yes the delightful Motorola 68000 chip sets the reliability of certain high end Italian valve amplifiers It also gave us the Commodore Amiga range. I bought every version of them, except the Tower system. Still the best computer OS I ever had. Regretted its demise as if I had lost a valuable family member. |
|
The first machine I ever programmed something on. I wrote a MIDI step sequencer for the Speccy, as well as a fully fledged (or as fully fledged as it could be on a Spectrum) graphics package.
