"I fuckin' hate you" I'm with you, Ian. I had the one with the rubber keys, and it was murder. Those games made you work for it, and if you got stuck you couldn't just look up a UA-cam video - you had to sit and persevere. Completing a game 30 years ago felt like such a massive deal compared to now.
Craziest thing I heard is that in the 80s there were pirate radio stations in Russia that used to broadcast games and so you could tune in and record the (really horrible noisy) broadcast onto tape and play it. Now that is cool and way ahead of its time.
Bob Mallett Wow, I didn't know that :D I knew that they were used for a long time to create pages but not that they could actually receive data from the analogue transmission. Maybe they were black and white pages with squares that represented 1s and 0s. I'll have to look it up.
That's insane, I wouldn't have thought it would be possible to reliably broadcast a game over the air waves due to the static noise that you get on radio.
+beatchef. Yer we had them in the UK as well. There was one called the "Radio Chip Shop" that was broadcast about 3:00 in the morning. If your radio had a line mic input you could hook it up direct to the tape recorders line output, Otherwise it's was a case of having the recorder really close to the speaker but that didn't work so good. I was still at junior school at the time so my old man would do it for me.
Funny thing is that I would be playing a brand new game in 10 minutes on my Speccy in the 80's but with today's games I have to wait for it to download, than install and maybe update with a patch or two which could end up taking several hours.
But also nowadays you can buy the 'Divmmc Future' that plugs into the expansion port of your Spectrum, and using the SD card, will load those games in a couple of seconds, and very reliably (if you use the '.TAP' game files). So modern technology has enhanced the vintage 8-bit gamer's life too. This adaptor also has a 'Kempston' joystick interface built-in so even a Sega Genesis controller will work with it... I use one on my Spectrums. Classic gaming, on original hardware, without the waiting for tapes to load! :-) Not affiliated to the Divmmc adaptor, just a happy user ;-)
I even remember the distinctive pattern of noise that meant the game's font was loading in--no matter how elaborate the letters, it always sounded roughly the same, weirdly.
The purpse of the loading raster bars and the accompanying sound was to keep the user informed of the current status of the loading procedure. Without that, the user would have been kept in the dark, not knowing if the game is loading until the end.
You could even buy and download programs with it, 20 years before Steam. "Micronet 800 provides facilities for [...] buying programs which are downloaded to you over the telephone. [...] the amount of programs for sale is limited. There are two 16K programs and about 10 48K programs and none of the famous names is among them either." www.worldofspectrum.org/hardware/feat24.html
The dude said he was born in 1990. I'm only two years older, but games-wise he seems to be of a totally different generation than for example, yours truly. I played tape games on Commodore (the Spectrum was a bit more uncommon where I'm from) in the early nineties. I personally only had the Nes, and later PC:s, but visiting older kids, or friends that had older siblings or something, tapes, floppies, Dos-commands, CGA-colours and all that became very familiar to me. They were still even making new games for the C64 and the Spectrum at the time.
He should've been given a proper Competition Pro, or at least some cheap Quickshot-joystick in his hand (they're playing on the +2 afterall), and something like Jetpac or Manic Miner in the deck and he would've had a blast.
Full disclosure, I was trying to craft a joke out of the expression of being late and pregnant and being young and the name of the show... and it didn't workout at all. I hope it doesn't come off as dizzin his momma. The bratty boy's mum. But yeah, I also grew up with DOS prompts and configuring sound blaster channels and IRQ numbers to get the dang game working. A game that usually came to my hands by means closer to magic than commerce, there was an underlying traffic of disks and diskettes, every kid I knew had boxes and boxes of them, because the pieces of crap would fail constantly... "Mortal Kombat II on PC! Hell yes!" Disk 14 out of 17 with a read error..... no game until you get a new copy of that disk from someone..., and then cross your fingers for 15-17, and maybe tomorrow one of the others will just suddenly die. Those were the days...
The ”colour clash phenomenon” was an interesting ”feature” which meant that the ZX Spectrum could only render a maximum of two colours per 8 by 8 pixel area, in order to save memory space.
the spectrum version of r-type was largely considered to be superior to the c64 and amiga versions. i couldn't even complete it with an infinite lives poke :(
Great video, you should definitely give Chris a tour of the Commodore Amiga, it was way more advanced for 1985 so we weren't quite in the total dark ages back then. The Amiga was the Apple Mac fully formed (in concept) whereas the Mac itself was still in rough shape, of course the Amiga died off thanks to it's parent company but it was a huge deal for mid 80's to early 90's especially in the UK.
Oh God I feel old. I had a 48K, like he showed, and you needed a separate tape recorder. Then there was a command prompt and you had to run it. I have an old Mac now (I got it off eBay) and I was trying to explain to a friend that it didn't have a hard drive. She simply didn't understand.
Me too. Ive been struggling to realise why Spectrum games on youtube dont sound right, then I remembered, the 48 didnt pass sound to the TV AT ALL, it came out of a little speaker on the bottom of the system, sounding less harsh and somehow more charming.
6:03 because loading off audio tape and sending data via a system designed to send audio over phone wires are basically the same problem, and solved in the same way. Tapes were used because more than anything else, they were cheap, plentiful and, when new, had a load success rate just high enough to make them worthwhile. A disk drive system would often cost almost as much, or more, than a microcomputer itself. 6:20 They didn't do it in the background because it was a visual indicator of how loading was progressing. This is the 80's equivalent of a progress bar. 17:26 Symbol Shift is a holdover from the old 48k keyboard, which only had 40 keys. The +2 had a much bigger "professional" keyboard, but they wanted to try and keep it compatible with as much of the old software as possible. 20:23 Eight colours, but unfortunately the Spectrum can only use 2 colours in a 8*8 pixel block.
Treasure Island Dizzy, Chuckie Egg, Outrun, Paperboy, Bruce Lee: Enter the Dragon & Back to Skool were my favourites especially Back to Skool. I only had a certain amount of time before bedtime and the thought of a game crashing, or crashing several times in row, while loading only heightened the stress levels and anticipation.
The first ZX Spectrum- the one they had in the back not the one they used- was my first computer ever. It took 30 minutes or so to load a game, IF you were lucky to load it successfully the first time. I remember myself loading games when I was about to finish my homework. I didn't have many games, I remember playing Alien Destroyer, a Galaga style space shooter, a platform game with a dog, an Indiana Jones game I couldn't understand how to play because I was still in elementary school and a couple of other ones I remember nothing about. I also learned a lot about Basic using this little thing. All this makes me wonder how will games be after 20 or 30 years. Will we look back and say things like "I can't believe we used to wait for a game to download or load a level" because games will do so instantly? Will we be using controllers to play our games or control our avatars directly with our minds? We will use TVs to play them or will VR become the next standard? I can't wait to find out. I need a time machine!
I remember getting Rambo from WH Smiths, trying to load it and it took so long I thought it was broken. I let it load once, while we went out and I came back to the Rambo title screen all good to go. It crashed after about 5 minutes and I never saw that game playable again lol.
Sir Clive almost popped a vein when he found out that more school children were using his Spectrum to play games than to learn maths and coding. He never really grasped the fact that Spectrum sales were largely driven by kids saying "Please Dad. Buy me a Spectrum. I promise I will use it for my homework." (I know because I was one of them :-) Also he never really understood that practically the only people learning coding were the people writing the games. Long live the Speky.
I used to have a little screwdriver that I adjusted my tape recorders heads with to get the optimum playback from pirated games I had got from friends at school...every tape head is different and at a different position so this adjustment is crucial, also the correct volume was important...getting games to load was a hobby in itself and one of the joys of the spectrum...your reward for all this adjusting and volume changing? a game that actually loads, brilliant!
"We might not be able to try them all out" "Whys that Ian?" Because they take 15 to 20 minutes to fucking load per game, that's why Chris Bratt and if you fart or cough loudly the Spectrum will reset itself. Welcome to gaming in the 80's kids.
Excellent and hilarious vid. So many memories. Can completely agree with the younger chap here though, as a kid I was horrified by the sample speech on FW Diz.
I totally missed this little gem. The DOS version of Joust was my introduction to gaming. Ian's had occasion to talk about this thing a few times on the channel now, and I always hear a particular relish in his voice when he does. Gawd.... oh I feel old... I laughed really hard at "this is the sound of video games" BTW
What if you don't like a steam game you've spent ages downloading? If you're going digital, it takes longer to get a game loaded up than it did back in the day (download then get the obligatory patches)
The crash in Fantasy World Dizzy is because you are playing the game on a grey +2. It bugs out quite badly on this machine. You can see ULA glitches at 12:24 and distorted speech at 9:55. It works fine on later machines like the +2a though.
Thanks Ian for this wonderful moment :) Chris: about your question on how to obtain the games, since the tape has basically sound recorded on it, you can transmit the game via radio (I know a couple of radio shows in Europe that did that). You can plug the radio to your Speccy, or just record the sound using a radiotape recorder.
I look forward to another generation on, when Chris and friends have to explain Pokemon Go, lol. Great video though, made me chuckle and it was great to see Dizzy again. :)
this console came out the year I was born. By the time I'm old enough to retire, more time will have passed since Witcher 3 or GTA5 or Metro Exodus than have passed between today and the release of Dizzy 3. Crazy to think what kind of games we'll be spending our time on 30 years from now, if technology continues to advance at the same pace.
i was old enough to play these. imagine i used to stay up all night playing those games which programs had to be loaded from a cassette recorder. 48k programs take 5 minutes to load.
the iron oxide is the physical manifestation of bits streaming down the wire down the internet kid .... real men tune their tape heads with a screwdriver to align the heads to the tape..
As soon as I heard the title music for Dizzy, I lit up with joy :). I remember leaving my Amstrad on over night so I didn't have to lose my progress...ah the years before saving games was full of hardships. Ian, if you want to feel nostalgic for the good old days, you should play Stories Untold on Steam.
This was amazing, so much love for Fantasy World Dizzy and Head Over Heels. And the noise of the cassette loading may be torture for Chris but it's legit my childhood in a sound. Ian's glee is delightful 😁 I split the difference between your ages and cut my teeth on Commodore and Amstrad and I loved both of those plus Wizball, Moving Target, Kwik Snax, Paperboy... The list goes on! Chris might be a spring chicken but Ian is a lovely mature cheddar 🤗
You could get cartridges (the Interface 2) - games loaded instantly, although they only commercially released 10 games... The Interface 1 enabled connection to the microdrive - another way to load games faster...
Great video however I definitely think there is something wrong with your Spectrum. They would crash like once a month not 3 times in a day!, I used to hate the loading noise and remember thinking the same thing "is this necessary" especially as my mates C64 was silent and usually played music when the games were loading.
Ah, the good-old contented memory banks error. If you load _Fantasy World Dizzy_ on a +2A (or +3), the sampled speech at the beginning actually sounds normal.
I think that Charles on a dalek is most likely Charles on a chess piece... Probably the king, even though he's not a king, but that makes more sense, and the piece is square.
Magnetic tape can oxidize after a while in poor conditions, rendering it unreadable. In this case, however, it likely due to Chris' movement jerking the spectrum - on his lap - causing a read error, or a misalignment of the power connector, both of which can crash the Spectrum. Oh the other hand the +2's datacorder was never that great, and prone to the odd read error even back in the day, even when laid flat.
The vast majority of my cassette games work today. But there are others that failed on the first attempt and have never worked. They were often so cheap we never bothered getting a refund either lol.
I played the MSX when I was a kid. Same loading crap with the tapes 😫 The noise was awful and most of the time it crashed after 15 min or so. Then came the Sega 8 bit Master System and cartridges were introduced. Good times.
There is something seriously wrong with your spectrum :P I've never known them to crash on the 128k menu! I did notice errors in Dizzy as well, it could be bad ram or a dodgy connection somewhere. Certainly not the best way to show off the awesomeness of the spectrum :)
if you selected 'tape loader' for 48k specific games, it used to crash alot. you would have to select the 48k option and you were (as they say) "golden" ;)
"this one up here is like the first ever spectrum, the 48k one, the one with the rubber keys"....it might be 'like' the first ever one, hello there was the 16k one with rubber keys also - although, maybe it was just a Northern thing that we were ripped of those other 32k. I'll get my coat.
Good old times, loved to see this.
My +2 is still on the shelf with all 4 Playstations.
I'm 44 and love to play, it's in my blood!
"I fuckin' hate you"
I'm with you, Ian. I had the one with the rubber keys, and it was murder. Those games made you work for it, and if you got stuck you couldn't just look up a UA-cam video - you had to sit and persevere. Completing a game 30 years ago felt like such a massive deal compared to now.
Pausing the YT video during the loading sequence made me ever-so-slightly anxious that I was going to need to rewind the tape and start again.
This is like father and son bonding back in the old days lol
Craziest thing I heard is that in the 80s there were pirate radio stations in Russia that used to broadcast games and so you could tune in and record the (really horrible noisy) broadcast onto tape and play it. Now that is cool and way ahead of its time.
The BBC micro could download programs from ceefax. Now that was dark magic going on.
Bob Mallett Wow, I didn't know that :D I knew that they were used for a long time to create pages but not that they could actually receive data from the analogue transmission. Maybe they were black and white pages with squares that represented 1s and 0s. I'll have to look it up.
That's insane, I wouldn't have thought it would be possible to reliably broadcast a game over the air waves due to the static noise that you get on radio.
+beatchef. Yer we had them in the UK as well. There was one called the "Radio Chip Shop" that was broadcast about 3:00 in the morning. If your radio had a line mic input you could hook it up direct to the tape recorders line output, Otherwise it's was a case of having the recorder really close to the speaker but that didn't work so good. I was still at junior school at the time so my old man would do it for me.
That's amazing! I never heard of it before. If I only knew about it at that time.
This is brilliant. Ian looks so pleased at how much this seems to be torturing Chris. Things have come a long way since those days.
Funny thing is that I would be playing a brand new game in 10 minutes on my Speccy in the 80's but with today's games I have to wait for it to download, than install and maybe update with a patch or two which could end up taking several hours.
True that, sometimes loading GTAV on PS4 takes longer than it did to load skool daze on the speccy.
Ah, but when you also factor in the time it took to go to the shops and buy the tape, it took considerably longer.
But also nowadays you can buy the 'Divmmc Future' that plugs into the expansion port of your Spectrum, and using the SD card, will load those games in a couple of seconds, and very reliably (if you use the '.TAP' game files). So modern technology has enhanced the vintage 8-bit gamer's life too. This adaptor also has a 'Kempston' joystick interface built-in so even a Sega Genesis controller will work with it... I use one on my Spectrums. Classic gaming, on original hardware, without the waiting for tapes to load! :-)
Not affiliated to the Divmmc adaptor, just a happy user ;-)
There is nothing that's comes close the the nostalgic fuzzy feeling i get from the noise of a speccy loading
+Colonel Basic. Couldn't agree more
I even remember the distinctive pattern of noise that meant the game's font was loading in--no matter how elaborate the letters, it always sounded roughly the same, weirdly.
yeah you could usually know if the game was about to finnish loading from the change in the screechy patterns..
The purpse of the loading raster bars and the accompanying sound was to keep the user informed of the current status of the loading procedure. Without that, the user would have been kept in the dark, not knowing if the game is loading until the end.
One point: There were modems and BBS software available for the Spectrum. It had the Internet!
You could even buy and download programs with it, 20 years before Steam.
"Micronet 800 provides facilities for [...] buying programs which are downloaded to you over the telephone. [...] the amount of programs for sale is limited. There are two 16K programs and about 10 48K programs and none of the famous names is among them either."
www.worldofspectrum.org/hardware/feat24.html
Yeah I wanted to point out that there was some capability, but I honestly didn't know what there was available in the UK at the time.
He wasn't just late to the party. He wasn't even born lol
His mother was late, for the party.
The dude said he was born in 1990. I'm only two years older, but games-wise he seems to be of a totally different generation than for example, yours truly. I played tape games on Commodore (the Spectrum was a bit more uncommon where I'm from) in the early nineties. I personally only had the Nes, and later PC:s, but visiting older kids, or friends that had older siblings or something, tapes, floppies, Dos-commands, CGA-colours and all that became very familiar to me. They were still even making new games for the C64 and the Spectrum at the time.
He should've been given a proper Competition Pro, or at least some cheap Quickshot-joystick in his hand (they're playing on the +2 afterall), and something like Jetpac or Manic Miner in the deck and he would've had a blast.
Full disclosure, I was trying to craft a joke out of the expression of being late and pregnant and being young and the name of the show... and it didn't workout at all. I hope it doesn't come off as dizzin his momma. The bratty boy's mum.
But yeah, I also grew up with DOS prompts and configuring sound blaster channels and IRQ numbers to get the dang game working. A game that usually came to my hands by means closer to magic than commerce, there was an underlying traffic of disks and diskettes, every kid I knew had boxes and boxes of them, because the pieces of crap would fail constantly... "Mortal Kombat II on PC! Hell yes!" Disk 14 out of 17 with a read error..... no game until you get a new copy of that disk from someone..., and then cross your fingers for 15-17, and maybe tomorrow one of the others will just suddenly die. Those were the days...
it could do it in the background, but it was like a progress bar so you know its still doing work and not crashed.
The ”colour clash phenomenon” was an interesting ”feature” which meant that the ZX Spectrum could only render a maximum of two colours per 8 by 8 pixel area, in order to save memory space.
4:50 I used to get most of my games from Boots the chemist of all places. My local one had a pretty good selection..
Ah the memories
The Spectrum was my first ever computer. I remember playing R-Type and Magic Land Dizzy on it.
the spectrum version of r-type was largely considered to be superior to the c64 and amiga versions. i couldn't even complete it with an infinite lives poke :(
Great video, you should definitely give Chris a tour of the Commodore Amiga, it was way more advanced for 1985 so we weren't quite in the total dark ages back then. The Amiga was the Apple Mac fully formed (in concept) whereas the Mac itself was still in rough shape, of course the Amiga died off thanks to it's parent company but it was a huge deal for mid 80's to early 90's especially in the UK.
10 minutes in to the video and it's already the best 'Lets Play' ever. Love it :)
I'm so happy they let Ian in the office for once. Must feel like Christmas for poor Higton.
Oh God I feel old. I had a 48K, like he showed, and you needed a separate tape recorder. Then there was a command prompt and you had to run it.
I have an old Mac now (I got it off eBay) and I was trying to explain to a friend that it didn't have a hard drive. She simply didn't understand.
Me too. Ive been struggling to realise why Spectrum games on youtube dont sound right, then I remembered, the 48 didnt pass sound to the TV AT ALL, it came out of a little speaker on the bottom of the system, sounding less harsh and somehow more charming.
The 128 versions had a sound chip (the same one as in the Amstrad CPC and the Atari ST) so it sounded a lot nicer than the bleeps from the 48k
6:03 because loading off audio tape and sending data via a system designed to send audio over phone wires are basically the same problem, and solved in the same way.
Tapes were used because more than anything else, they were cheap, plentiful and, when new, had a load success rate just high enough to make them worthwhile.
A disk drive system would often cost almost as much, or more, than a microcomputer itself.
6:20 They didn't do it in the background because it was a visual indicator of how loading was progressing. This is the 80's equivalent of a progress bar.
17:26 Symbol Shift is a holdover from the old 48k keyboard, which only had 40 keys. The +2 had a much bigger "professional" keyboard, but they wanted to try and keep it compatible with as much of the old software as possible.
20:23 Eight colours, but unfortunately the Spectrum can only use 2 colours in a 8*8 pixel block.
I'm old. I feel bad. Also you missed out on some classics but glad to see that dizzy made the line up ;)
Great video!! Nostalgic! I used to play this game at 80`s. Thank you.
Great to see the Speccy again!
"This is the sound of fun loading" that is so true Ian. These kids have no idea how easy they have it today.
Oh my god i've never seen a man so broken hearted.
Ian can i give you a big ol hug buddy?
Treasure Island Dizzy, Chuckie Egg, Outrun, Paperboy, Bruce Lee: Enter the Dragon & Back to Skool were my favourites especially Back to Skool.
I only had a certain amount of time before bedtime and the thought of a game crashing, or crashing several times in row, while loading only heightened the stress levels and anticipation.
The first ZX Spectrum- the one they had in the back not the one they used- was my first computer ever. It took 30 minutes or so to load a game, IF you were lucky to load it successfully the first time. I remember myself loading games when I was about to finish my homework. I didn't have many games, I remember playing Alien Destroyer, a Galaga style space shooter, a platform game with a dog, an Indiana Jones game I couldn't understand how to play because I was still in elementary school and a couple of other ones I remember nothing about. I also learned a lot about Basic using this little thing.
All this makes me wonder how will games be after 20 or 30 years. Will we look back and say things like "I can't believe we used to wait for a game to download or load a level" because games will do so instantly? Will we be using controllers to play our games or control our avatars directly with our minds? We will use TVs to play them or will VR become the next standard? I can't wait to find out. I need a time machine!
I remember getting Rambo from WH Smiths, trying to load it and it took so long I thought it was broken. I let it load once, while we went out and I came back to the Rambo title screen all good to go. It crashed after about 5 minutes and I never saw that game playable again lol.
This is the model I had. Jack the Nipper II in Coconut Capers was one of my favourites.
Sir Clive almost popped a vein when he found out that more school children were using his Spectrum to play games than to learn maths and coding. He never really grasped the fact that Spectrum sales were largely driven by kids saying "Please Dad. Buy me a Spectrum. I promise I will use it for my homework." (I know because I was one of them :-) Also he never really understood that practically the only people learning coding were the people writing the games. Long live the Speky.
I used to have a little screwdriver that I adjusted my tape recorders heads with to get the optimum playback from pirated games I had got from friends at school...every tape head is different and at a different position so this adjustment is crucial, also the correct volume was important...getting games to load was a hobby in itself and one of the joys of the spectrum...your reward for all this adjusting and volume changing? a game that actually loads, brilliant!
4:21 Rewinding is like waiting for the game to download from Steam or wanting to play but having to wait for a PlayStation update. :D
The Sampled sound works correctly on the later Black +2A update of the ZX Spectrum which was released in 1987.
The 48k speccy and c64 was my childhood
ahh the sound of joy loading
Love that loading sound.Still have my 48k mint cond.
We were patient kids.
And that is why you never put the computer on your lap... if that power wire wobbles it's game over **CRASH**
Great video guys thanks ;)
The beauty of modern hardware is you can now connect a memory card up to your old Spectrum and load the games quicker. And reliably.
I knew Ian would let Bratterz play Fantasy World Dizzy. :)
I remember Dizzy, and i was always bad at it. I still have my Dizzy clock in my room.
hah, Yeah Codemasters games often had Dizzy merchandise in the inlay. I just assumed no one ever bought any of that stuff.
In a nutshell, this episode reminds me that 'Kids dont know they are born!" ..!!
This makes me feel so nostalgic.
The amiga was a great step up after this, the games looked so much better
"We might not be able to try them all out" "Whys that Ian?" Because they take 15 to 20 minutes to fucking load per game, that's why Chris Bratt and if you fart or cough loudly the Spectrum will reset itself. Welcome to gaming in the 80's kids.
It's a little more reliable than you'd think, to be honest; Jetpac still loads lovely from tape.
Hello Eurogamer! I subscribed!
But I have a question - how did you plug in your retro speccy to lcd tv?
i was thinking the main screen looked very sharp and clear (compared to my olf rf(?) cable.
Used to love going down to Woolies with my mum and getting a C64 tape
haha classic, the dizzy games were brilliant back in the day.
Think Ian needs to get Chris playing more amazing Spectrum games 😄
Excellent and hilarious vid. So many memories. Can completely agree with the younger chap here though, as a kid I was horrified by the sample speech on FW Diz.
Oh man, so much nostalgia.
This was pretty good, much better than most react videos.
I totally missed this little gem. The DOS version of Joust was my introduction to gaming. Ian's had occasion to talk about this thing a few times on the channel now, and I always hear a particular relish in his voice when he does. Gawd.... oh I feel old...
I laughed really hard at "this is the sound of video games" BTW
Memories.... Misty water-coloured memories.... Of my old Speccy.
What if you don't like a steam game you've spent ages downloading? If you're going digital, it takes longer to get a game loaded up than it did back in the day (download then get the obligatory patches)
"That was the sound of nostalgia". So much nostalgia.
That was delightful.
The crash in Fantasy World Dizzy is because you are playing the game on a grey +2. It bugs out quite badly on this machine. You can see ULA glitches at 12:24 and distorted speech at 9:55. It works fine on later machines like the +2a though.
Literally my childhood gaming experience, except for the fact that I played one of the old Ataris, C=64, and MSX.
Thanks Ian for this wonderful moment :)
Chris: about your question on how to obtain the games, since the tape has basically sound recorded on it, you can transmit the game via radio (I know a couple of radio shows in Europe that did that). You can plug the radio to your Speccy, or just record the sound using a radiotape recorder.
I look forward to another generation on, when Chris and friends have to explain Pokemon Go, lol. Great video though, made me chuckle and it was great to see Dizzy again. :)
this console came out the year I was born. By the time I'm old enough to retire, more time will have passed since Witcher 3 or GTA5 or Metro Exodus than have passed between today and the release of Dizzy 3. Crazy to think what kind of games we'll be spending our time on 30 years from now, if technology continues to advance at the same pace.
Should have hooked him up with Lords of Chaos. That's a Chris Bratt game through and through.
first video i watched from these guys and this is amazing I'll sub
i was old enough to play these. imagine i used to stay up all night playing those games which programs had to be loaded from a cassette recorder. 48k programs take 5 minutes to load.
the iron oxide is the physical manifestation of bits streaming down the wire down the internet kid .... real men tune their tape heads with a screwdriver to align the heads to the tape..
buggering up the azimuth screw on my +2 due to messing naround with it too much, due to certain games not loading ;)
As soon as I heard the title music for Dizzy, I lit up with joy :). I remember leaving my Amstrad on over night so I didn't have to lose my progress...ah the years before saving games was full of hardships.
Ian, if you want to feel nostalgic for the good old days, you should play Stories Untold on Steam.
You could also record games from the radio Ian remember ? :D
nostalgia hits hard... I had Atari with tapes
I had a +2a, and all my mates had just a +2. I thought that extra 'a', made me so much cooler.
I remember the +2 (tape) and +3 (disk) but don't remember the 2a what was the difference?
+Ryusennin nice one
At least you tried, Ian. Respect+ for those who have come before us.
This was amazing, so much love for Fantasy World Dizzy and Head Over Heels. And the noise of the cassette loading may be torture for Chris but it's legit my childhood in a sound. Ian's glee is delightful 😁 I split the difference between your ages and cut my teeth on Commodore and Amstrad and I loved both of those plus Wizball, Moving Target, Kwik Snax, Paperboy... The list goes on! Chris might be a spring chicken but Ian is a lovely mature cheddar 🤗
This brings back memories. Ian play Ninja Warriors.
I'm not old :( P.S Jetpac best game.
You could get cartridges (the Interface 2) - games loaded instantly, although they only commercially released 10 games... The Interface 1 enabled connection to the microdrive - another way to load games faster...
I must say, that crashing would do my head in too. I never had a problem like that with mine!
Lucky lucky, Daley Thomson still spits R TAPE LOADING ERROR 0:1 at me on a bad day.
From the thumbnail i thought it was Chris Pratt and Robert Pattison. haha
I want to see Chris and Ian doing both the commodore Vic 20 and the commodore 64.
Chris looks as horrified to play this as when he had the porn VR headset on.
You could also obtain games on radio, via air.
So happy my first console was a Master System ;)
Great video however I definitely think there is something wrong with your Spectrum. They would crash like once a month not 3 times in a day!, I used to hate the loading noise and remember thinking the same thing "is this necessary" especially as my mates C64 was silent and usually played music when the games were loading.
I think it crashed on those two occasions because Chris moved it and jogged the power supply loose. No idea why Dizzy crashed, though.
Ah, the good-old contented memory banks error. If you load _Fantasy World Dizzy_ on a +2A (or +3), the sampled speech at the beginning actually sounds normal.
well I found this hilarious, oh look my C64 visual compendium just turned up. Maybe he will enjoy the pictures more xD
I think that Charles on a dalek is most likely Charles on a chess piece... Probably the king, even though he's not a king, but that makes more sense, and the piece is square.
Is the magnetic tape unreadable after 30 odd years? plenty of crashes
Magnetic tape can oxidize after a while in poor conditions, rendering it unreadable.
In this case, however, it likely due to Chris' movement jerking the spectrum - on his lap - causing a read error, or a misalignment of the power connector, both of which can crash the Spectrum. Oh the other hand the +2's datacorder was never that great, and prone to the odd read error even back in the day, even when laid flat.
The vast majority of my cassette games work today. But there are others that failed on the first attempt and have never worked. They were often so cheap we never bothered getting a refund either lol.
Star Lord’s have held up pretty well. So there’s that.
depending on the quality of tape they can have bleed through where the magnetic tape starts to have the layers cross-magnetize each other.
I'm pretty sure Ian is my favorite Euro Gamer. XD
Yes, we may be old, but can you help Robin in his quest for the Silver Arrow?
Good show!
His fucking face :D That was my childhood!
The first spectrum isn't the 48k model - the 16 KB model was the first one released!
They were released at the same time and were the same machine. The 48k machine just had a few more RAM chips.
not even 10 minutes in and im grinning like an idiot I had a plus 2 after my atari 2600 greatest late to the party ever.
Still love my Commodore 64!
I played the MSX when I was a kid. Same loading crap with the tapes 😫 The noise was awful and most of the time it crashed after 15 min or so. Then came the Sega 8 bit Master System and cartridges were introduced. Good times.
Next episode: 3D Monster Maze on the ZX81, with wobbly ram pack....
There is something seriously wrong with your spectrum :P I've never known them to crash on the 128k menu! I did notice errors in Dizzy as well, it could be bad ram or a dodgy connection somewhere. Certainly not the best way to show off the awesomeness of the spectrum :)
if you selected 'tape loader' for 48k specific games, it used to crash alot. you would have to select the 48k option and you were (as they say) "golden" ;)
WWF Wrestlemania was like 4 tapes to load. if you lost, you had to start from scratch.
"What a commentary on modern warfare" :D
"this one up here is like the first ever spectrum, the 48k one, the one with the rubber keys"....it might be 'like' the first ever one, hello there was the 16k one with rubber keys also - although, maybe it was just a Northern thing that we were ripped of those other 32k. I'll get my coat.