@@MetalJesusRocks if you look at the next' configuration menu you will see the Timex Sinclair TC 2048 option , that is the version released in the US. I am not a fan of sinclair computers myself , but i have tried some of the games ... My eternal first ever computerlove still is the Commodore 64 , i got both versions of THEC64 when they came out
The Timex Sinclair 2068 was a variant of the ZX Spectrum made for the US market, but it doesn't look much like a classic Spectrum (not black!) and had an incompatible ROM. There were add-ons to provide a British ROM which caused more things to work, but the timings were different because it was designed to produce output compatible with American (NTSC) television rather than British (PAL) TV. It had some significant innovations over the original, with additional display modes. Those extra modes are present in the ZX Spectrum Next (and the ZX Uno, too).
I’m in the U.K. and my first computer was a ZX81 and the The Spectrum 48k. And your right, for people like me it’s a blast from the past. Love the look of it.
I love to hear first impressions on old systems, this was great. If you'd like me to hook you up with an original ZX Spectrum then let me know and I'd be happy to help!
It really is interesting to get different impressions and perspectives on hardware we grew up with. As a New Zealander C64 was somewhat dominant but I recall the software shelves at the local camera store in Gisborne (go figure) had a fair selection of Spectrum titles. Admittedly the majority were budget range. The local bookshop stocked Crash, also. Gisborne is fairly remote so it may be a testiment to the Spectrums penitration we saw it pussed here is relatively remote location ( ehem NZ in the 80s). I had a Spectrum I bought off a school friend for 100 bucks (which was a surprise to his mum haha long story... Big dollars for 13 year old) at my Mum's house and 64 Dad surprised us with for xmas at his. Being exposed to 64 and speccy versions of games I did appreciate the colourful high-res nature of Speccy when compared to 64 block browns and grey's. I've bought into this latest Next kickstarter and super excited to dive into this scene August next year!
We had a second hand commodore Vic 20, I also think a 64 but can't be sure, had the Amstrad cpc 464,so I recognise batman and robocop but they were in colour.
I'm kind of in love how so many of the comments in this video are Brits getting slapped with that nostalgia wave. I love that feeling and am glad this video brought that feeling to those folks. As someone whose first ever "real" computing was doing very simple text-based games in BASIC on a VTech PreComputer 1000, I can really dig on what this machine is about, at least in terms of how computers in the '80s worked. What a cool little machine!
My favourite 8-bit machine was actually American - the Atari 8-bit range. I still have a few, although most now need repairing. But I also had a soft spot for the Sinclair machines. I have a couple of Spectrums. Our original 16K unit, which I broke six months after we got it in 1983 (I intend to finally fix it this year) and a 48K Spectrum that a friend asked me to look at because the keyboard wasn't working (broken mylar ribbon) which I fixed many years ago but he never collected it. Used to go round his house often to play on it before I got my 800XL. The Spectrum was probably the first computer I had a go on. A cousin was playing Hungry Horace on his 16K unit when I went to his house one day. The beauty of the machine was that it could do so much from so little. No graphics chip. No sound chip either. And yet it introduced Brits to colour computing the way that the really simple ZX81 had done for computers in general at a time when American computers were really expensive. At the time, £1 could get you about $2.30 but American companies would typically sell stuff in the UK on an exchange rate of £1 = $1, which meant that they were often twice as expensive as they were in the US. So, a £400 American computer in real terms cost the equivalent of $1000 in the UK. But then along came Clive Sinclair with his little beauties that proved extremely popular.
Here in Portugal both the 48 and the 128k version were huge in the 80's. I have really fond memories of them. Heck, I still have my 128k in the basement!
Playlist you must try from back then ------>>>> Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Jet Set Willy 2, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Atic Atac, Knight Lore,Head Over Heels,Jet Pack, Elite, Hobbit graphical adventure, Dizzy
I once took a shit in my friend's pond at a house party when very drunk. I guess that's what the yanks are doing now, with their creation of stuff like that huge texas sized island made of rubbish that's in the ocean.
girlsdrinkfeck we can fuck your nation up at any given time so we get to say who is in the other side of the pond. Now go back to your shitholes before I take the internet away too
@Slope's Game Room To this Yank, the ZX Spectrum represents the best gaming library ever made. Because it shouldn't exist. Nearly everything that makes a videogame has to be coded in software. There's a passion in that library, a love of gaming that couldn't be stopped. And each title is fascinating, in how it approaches that problem. So many overachieve. And it all looks punk as Hell. This is digital graffiti and underground comix. It's filled with new ideas that were decades ahead of the mainstream. Nothing else has been like it, before or since.
Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner, Atic Atac, Knight Lore, Elite, Jetpac....the list goes on and on. If I remember rightly more than 10,000 games were released on the good old Speccy.
Hello from the UK. ✋ 20,000 games were made for the good old Speccy... You can play 1000 of them built into the Spectrum Vega (a hand held plug & play) - Check on eBay UK & UA-cam for prices and reviews. Used they're about 40-100 UK Pounds. Some places might ship to the U.S. 😃😃
Very nice video, MetalJesusRocks. Another Brit here. I have original Speccys and one of the the new Nexts (it's fabulous). As you note, if you're not used to the 'Speccy' it can all be a little... well, weird... and a little quirky... putting it mildly... but then it'll make you smile ... and then grin... and then the fun starts... and then you fall in love. The Next made me fall in love with it all over again, thirty-umpty years after I fell for the original. Two days of Kickstarter to go if anyone else wants one.
For me, these are the videos that shine on your channel! Choosing an obscure piece of history in the video game timeline and delivering an excellent review-presentation video. Kudos MJR! Missed your Tuesday videos too.
Great video, I grew up in the UK in the 70's and as a 11 year old begged my parents for months to get me a ZX81 and then as a 12 year old the ZX Spectrum - although due to Sinclair's very (at the time) shoddy quality control it took about 3 return trips with my dad to Tottenham Court Road in London to actually get a working 48k version. I learnt to program on it - first in ZX Basic and then later in Z80 assembler/machine code. It gave me a great introduction to computers and set the course of my work ever since (I now live and work in IT in New Zealand, but still love toying around with old computers). The ZX Spectrum Next manual is very true back to the original manual supplied with the machine and brings back some great memories. If you haven't tried them already - my suggestions for the best games would be RebelStar and RebelStar II - turn-based strategy games which have pretty good on-screen directions and I wasted far too many hours with as a kid (and still fire up occasionally on an emulator even today). There's some real strategy involved in moving and shooting from your units or leaving them in cover or sentry mode to anticipate the alien's next move. The strange look of the colours (yes, sticking the UK spelling) is due to the way Sinclair assigned memory to the screen - the pixel resolution is 256x192, but to save precious RAM Sinclair decided that the colour resolution only needed to be 32x24 characters. Since each character can only have 2 colours assigned to it (foreground and background) from a palette of only 15 (of which 7 are just brighter versions) you get a very distinctive look in games where designers had to try and make all the pixels line up to the 32x24 colour grid. There were some 'hacks' used by changing colours during the screen refresh/scan to try and improve this, but most games just dealt with the restriction. For good examples of designers making the most of this restriction see Manic Miner and the follow-up Jet Set Willy. This appearance is commonly called 'colour clash' or 'attribute clash', but it saved a signiifcant portion of RAM for actual programs so Sinclair felt was worth the trade-off. Thanks again for the video, very tempted to bust out the credit card for the 2nd Kickstarter...
It was actually released across the world. I got one in South Africa. My friend had the C64, so I knew both. If I had to choose again, it would still be the spectrum. I did programming on the C64 and Ted the limitations, not only if the basic, but even the machine code. The CPU had a very limited command set, about six times less that the speccy. The C64 basic was useless, you got Simon's basic. You could not even draw a line or plot a pixel. The C64 colours were also very dull, especially the PAL versions. The pixels were also very large and flat. The first Speccies just had a terrible keyboard. It worked ok, but did give problems over time. But the computer was very very cheap that made it possible for me to buy. One more thing, even though there were many different Sinclair versions, there were basically just two versions, much like the C64 and C128, the 48K (also 16K) and a 128K.
The C64's CPU didn't really have a limited command set, it was just a different concept. The 6502 is almost proto-RISC in that it has fewer instructions but they were much easier to use and were faster. The Z80 on the other hand had a lot of instructions, but they were mainly dealing with the different registers. The Z80 was also slower than the 6502, though the machines typically were clocked higher so the speed difference wasn't felt that much. I've coded in assembly on both, and the 6502 is much nicer to work on. The biggest problem with the Speccy was that it was made to be cheap, and wasn't really improved. The lack of sprites and music (before the 128k at least) really hurt its potential. Also it didn't have disk support until much later on, which limited how complex the games could get. The original versions didn't even have built-in joystick support - that required you to buy a special peripheral!
@@deanolium yes it was easier, but at that stage it was very limiting, since you needed so many more bytes to get the job done. There is even today still a very good case for sisc vs risc, but then sisc was preferable. To say it was faster is not true and it can be seen especially with tape speed. Tge speccy had a baud rate of 1200 vs C64 youth just 300. Ry was awful. The Speccy's quality was die sure not as great, but the plus side was that so many could afford it, which included me. The C64 was more of a consumer machine much like an Xbox, while the Speccy was better for enthusiasts. Programmibg was way more powerful and even to make hardware was easy. The biggest lack die the Speccy was the absence of sprites, that is very true and the colour clash was a hassle, which ironically was bypasses by much later techniques, after the era. But I must say the dull colours of the C64 was t nice at all. Many managed to get more pleasing graphics with many of the spectrum games, but in certain games like scrollers, C64 e better. If I had to choose a speccy or C64 for my child today, I would still choose Speccy, because I do not want a toy, but rather an enthusiast system. Unless I could pair Simon's basic with the C64. Ry helped a lot. For the Speccy I would just get a better keyboard. Concerning the disk drive, the C64 disk you've was really terrible. Why did they chose serial? It was incredibly slow, taking more than a minute to load, not much faster than the Speccy's tape. My plus D interface took 3 seconds to load a 48K program and 9 seconds or a 128K program. The microdrive of the Speccy was a terrible idea though. I think sometimes Sinclair really did not think things through, like the printer as well. He should have included joystck ports on the pkus and 128 as well. I built my own. So both had their flaws...
My brother and I bought a 48K ZX Spectrum in 1982. It cost £129.99 with games costing anything from £2 - £10. I immediately took it over and spent the next 3-4 years using it. Computer magazines in the UK would publish game listings that you could type in, debug and if you were lucky it might (after hours of trying) work. It was my introduction to IT which lasted 24 years. Some of my favourite games would be: Arcadia, JetPac, Jet Set Willy, Fred (see my avatar) and anything from Ultimate Play the Game.
My god! The ghost from Fred! Ahh, the £2 Mastertronic games. Every paperboy could manage a few of those each month! I would also recommend any games from Stephen Crow, Wizard's Lair, Starquake and FireLord. Random ones - Spindizzy, Avalon, Dynamite Dan, Booty, Knight Tyme and Fairlight...
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48k with rubber keys, I was about 7 or 8. My friends and I all loved them for gaming. It fell apart in the end after bashing the keys continuously during Daley Thompson's decathlon events! Thought the video was great, thanks MJ!
Absolutely fascinating to hear the perspective of someone from across the pond, about a computing artifact that is both uniquely British and uniquely 80s British. I spent the best part of a decade living and breathing ZX Spectrums, so things like colour clash and the weird, beepy sound are not only famliar to me, they're also deeply nostalgic. The Spectrum Next has got me back into Spectrums, even to the point where I've finally taught myself machine code and converted an old arcade game (The Pit) to the old 48k model! As for some "hidden gems", you should try to play: Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner, the Julian Gollop game Chaos, 3D Deathchase and Knight Lore. And if you can get past the funky graphics, the conversions of Chase HQ, R-Type and Midnight Resistance are considered to punch way about their weights.
+Dave I remember once in Sinclair User magazine in the late 80s magazine they had the Official USA Arcade team playtest some Spectrum games and they thought 75% of then were unplayable sh*te! It was hard to blame them because they had never seen colour clash or games that had trouble scrolling before. Wow that's great you wrote your own game. My favourite Spectrum game is Dynamite Dan. I still play that now. Is lots of fun and hard too so each turn doesn't last too long
I used to go to my room with my sister and “play the spectrum”…. Then unexpectedly at age 13 she became pregnant and had our first child… we named him Adolf
That keyboard (and overall physical design) **is** really cool. They did an amazing job on it, and that's not even taking into account the issues they had getting the keyboard done during the first Kickstarter. It's a great bit of kit, and the attention to detail and how it works is amazing - I have one, and I'm so glad I got it.
@@sugarandfudge the late Rick Dickinson was industrial designer for the Next. He was responsible for the iconic industrial design of the Sinclair machines, I think pre Amstrad but happy to be corrected. There is a great video of him discussing design dna and decisions for the Next on YT. I'll see if I can find it...
The keyboard comes more or less wholesale from the Spectrum +. Or at least, to look like one. It's rejigged just slightly so that the key positions are mostly seamless with a "modern" keyboard. It actually uses one of those slimline laptop style keyboards, though the curved keycaps overall make it feel far more comfortable.
I'm 39 so was very young when my Uncle got a C64 but to this day I have such fond memories of playing that commodore. In the early 90s my dad taught me basic dos programming so this ZX Spectrum really looks fun to muck around on
Dang, this brings back some childhood memories. My Speccy (ZX Spectrum) was awesome! Chuckie Egg, Ikari Warriors, Commando, Green Beret, Rick Dangerous, Bomb Jack, Vigilante, Power Drift, Where Time Stood Still. So many great games!
Very good review. To the point. Looks like a great machine. From Greece and now 47 ,i will never forget the day i loaded up bomb Jack in the tapecorder for 3 mins and then i realized i could load up tapes of music as i was playing the game !!! We're talking full analog fun !!! Or the day i got scared shit less when i first died in The rocky horror show ... man , i wish kids today can have half the fun we use to have while playing a game. Still remember 5 guys playing in turns , so we can beat the cpu and strip Samantha Fox... one deal before the end a friend of ours pushes the plug and it resets... God the laughter and fun... not to mention the souvlakia eaten while loading games... I can see all old computers have their own crowd of people around , but nothing like the Speccy scene. Man they make games today !! It is nuts! Great work ! Keep it up !
Ahh, the Speccy! A computer that is ingrained into almost every Brit's historical knowledge of games in the 80s. I never owned one, but this one looks grand.
Well it was either the spectrum or the amstrad, which was British too! Alas less successful. In other European countries like in Spain they were more or less equally successful!
An american here...I had to look at the thumbnail a few times, I thought it was a new released raspberry pi kickstarter. Great looking machine. I had a commodore 64 like most american 80's kids...
It was a very common computer over here in the UK! I've still got quite a few tapes of games for the Spectrum, BBC and C64! This is really cool! Great to have a modern way to enjoy the classic!
I was looking for a video exactly like this, as I was looking at backing the Kickstarter myself...I didn't have one as a kid but have played around with the Timex Sinclairs that were released in the US. I ended up backing it today and noticed your video afterwards, but your video made me happy with backing it. I think the community of game developers are going to be a great draw, and it's going to be awesome to do old-school coding with!
The thing that I think separates you from the rest of the Video Game UA-camrs (at least the ones that pop up for me) is that you cover EVERYTHING and treat the very obscure systems/items the same respect you would for a Nintendo or Playstation product. That's why I think you're one of the best out there. Keep rockin! \m/ \m/
Zx spectrum was also in Europe. I lived in the Netherlands and i had one. It is also my all time favorite home computer. What a great machine. (Yes i also loved the c64, amstrad etc). But the speccie has a special place in my heart.
Looking for a gem, check out Turbo Esprit which was ahead of its time. Its quite like driving around in GTA. You are a cop in a machine gun mounted car within a realistic city with traffic and pedestrians that obey the road laws (traffic lights, speed, one ways, crossings, roadworks, petrol stations). You are tasked with stopping drug dealers by either ramming or shooting them off the road before they make there drug drops across the city. You can also kill the other cars or pedestrians using your gun or driving with impunity. Its great fun. It was on other systems but it ran best on the Spectrum.
If you talk to British people about what they remember about The Spectrum, they'll mention Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Elite, Saboteur, Skool Daze, Daley Thompson Decathlon amongst others. Theres kind of a quirky British sense of humour that rubs off on some of those games
I'm an avid viewer of your channel from the UK. I started with the Sinclaire ZX81 1k. Black and white. Upgraded to 16k expansion pack. Then moved onto Sinclaires 48k Spectrum. Colour, Which I still have. Try Atic Atac for ZX Spectrum . First game I ever finished. Keep 😎 cool man
I was a Commodore boy through the eighties too - the playground computer battles were easily won, but the Spectrum had its place and was of course very important in the birth of home computing. Great vid and a refreshing approach. Top Vid MJ!!!
i am 44 years young boy and i spent thousands of hours playing with my Spectrum zx 128k andmy friend Timex 2048k, back in the 80s and i still have mine.
@@MalcySP Similiar to Glug-Glug, that was my first game ever. it came at the same day with my Sinclair zx 128k . ua-cam.com/video/0By72paXwzo/v-deo.html
Love it! It brings back soooo many memories! It was my first computer, got it for Christmas 1982/83 and bunch of kids around me have it. Later we moved on to c64 but ZX Spectrum will always have a special place in my heart :)
I'm 43 and Brazilian, and a Speccy was my first computer ever. I remember going through 3 full minutes to load a game on a cassette tape, and being all giddy to see it work and play for hours. I've played some great games, you should try at least Manic Miner, one of the most famos Speccy games!
At one point it was the best selling computer here in Portugal! ZX Spectrum 128k + 2 (with the cassete player incorporated) was my first computer! It was a gift for finishing 4th grade :). Couple of years later, had a Master System II, but it never gave me the amount of fun and hours of play time of the magnificient Spectrum!!! And it still works to this day! Thanks for the vídeo.
"Didn't know what I was doing, died a lot, had fun" That is 80's computer gaiming in a nutshell!
4 роки тому+2
Greetings from Spain! Love the video! Brings me sweet memories with my zx spectrum +2. That it was a true gaming experience with 6 year old, also for the interminable loading games with the cassette player!
Back to school back to school I hope the kids think I am cool ..gots my hair combed back my boots tied tight I hope I don't get in a fight .... Back to schooooooool
ZX Spectrum +2 was my very first console played on an old black and white TV with no remote. Not sure when exactly this was but I was born in 85 for reference. God I miss that machine!
I think this project is really awesome, especially for those that have nostalgia for the ZX Spectrum which undoubtedly will be primiarliy the British market. I think it's awesome that it is an FPGA system (which puts it in the "Analogue" tier of accuracy) and the build quality on it looks fantastic from what I can see. I also think it is amazing that they have the future built into the system for programmers and home-brewers that always wished they had more power to work with. I'm sure they will have a ton of fun with it. That being said, the price... $425 + Shipping, tax and duties is SUPER steep for anyone that isn't super nostalgic and enthusiastic for the system. Thats probably what their core market is, and even with that sliver of the gaming population, I'm sure the Kickstarter will still be a great success again. That all being said and for everyone else out there that has an interest in this project, that wants to experience it in FPGA quality. Look into the MiSTer project. It too is also an FPGA solution, but you can flash many cores to it, including the ZX Spectrum and all their variations. You can also flash the other computers to the FPGA core such as the Commodore 64, Amiga, a bunch of Atari PC's, you can flash a number of console cores, such as the NES, SNES, SMS, Gamegear, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Neo Geo.. the PC Engine and Genesis (and their respective CD attachments) and dozens of real PCB's of Arcades. The platform is open source, so not only updates coming at what feels like daily... there are more cores to be made and existing cores to be further refined! The platform is built for longevity and it has a bright future. All this call all be done at a price point of around $300-350 and still give you the flexibility of displaying in Analogue (RGB/Component/Composite) display as well as Digital (HDMI)... and even both at the same time if you can believe it. Both solutions are great, and those who are nostalgic for the ZX Spectrum are gonna love the kit you described... for everyone else? Look into the MiSTer. It's a retro gaming game changer, and the future of video game preservation. Thanks for sharing the review!
What sets the Next apart from other FPGA machines is the case/keyboard. The aim was to get the best typing experience possible, rivaling modern laptops (hi MacBook!). The case itself was designed by the original designer of the Spectrum. And to get the keyboard functioning properly took quite a bit of time. This you wouldn't have with a MiSTer. And that's why it's so much more expensive.
Had this early in it's lifespan here in the UK, and liked that fact that it was also a computer, not just a console. For an American, I can't see any interest in it, think of it as an NES with extra limitations. A few great titles to check out would be; starquake, jetpac, and android 2. All of those are easy to pick up and play games, and still very playable even today.
Wow. So many memories. Thanks for making this video! I live in the US but am originally from the UK, I got a Spectrum 48K for Christmas back in 82 or 83, I would have been 8 or 9. I remember that Christmas, a whole batch of Spectrums which were sold were defective, so much so that it actually made the national news, because the Spectrum was the hot Christmas toy that year. True enough, when I opened my Spectrum on Christmas morning, it didn't work. As a little kid, I was, as you can imagine, heartbroken! And back in those days, shops weren't open all the time, so I had to wait a couple of days until the shops opened again so that my parents could take it back and exchange it! The agony! lol. The original 2 models of the ZX Spectrum were the 16K and 48K, which technically were identical except for the amount of RAM. Games in those days came on cassette tape, I remember it was 1.99 or 2.99 pounds for "budget" titles, and regular titles were 9.99 if I remember right. You would connect the cassette recorder to the Spectrum via the Ear and Mic 3.5mm audio ports, type LOAD "" on the spectrum (using the very unique keyboard layout which is another story) and then press play on the cassette recorder. And then wait for several minutes with your fingers crossed that the game would load. All accompanied by digital noise similar to a fax or modem. Also, you correctly mentioned about the colour rendering limitations. It was limited to rendering colour in blocks, and so when sprites went in front of each other, the colours would clash. In fact, this is what the effect was called - "colour clash." I'm not sure if that was ever its official name, but it's what the gaming press and all we users called it. A very signature affectation of the Spectrum. In its later years, developers found ingenious ways to minimise the effect. There were some incredible games for the time on the system, some of which you showed in the video. JetPac, Atic Atac, and some of the first 3D isometric games like Alien 8, Batman (different from the Batman one you showed), Knight Lore, The Great Escape (which you showed). Those were from one of the premier developers for the system: Ultimate Play the Game. And they "ultimately" became Rare, who are of course still around. CodeMasters are another developer who got their start making 1.99 and 2.99 budget games for the Spectrum, with games like the Dizzy series. Still going strong nowadays with series like Dirt and Grid. I had a good 3 or 4 years with my Spectrum before moving to an Atari ST in 85 or 86. I think I still have the Spectrum somewhere at my parents' house, but 10 or more years ago I remember trying it and it didn't work. It looks like I've missed the deadline for this kickstarter, but if they do another one, I'm certainly interested. I had a TRS-80 compatible before the Spectrum, but the Spectrum was my first serious experience of computing and gaming and will always be very special to me. Thanks again for making this video - and all your videos! Your channel is one of the best!
I just bought an original “ZED EX” speccy plus 2 with the built in cassette from a charity shop for 5 English pounds, With original manual and power supply. After a quick solder job inside the power pack and a good cleaning of the tape heads and mechanism it works perfectly. RF signal is a bit weak so I need to do an av mod. All in all, a bit of a bargain.
Nah, don't do an AV mod on it - the +2 has an RGB output, that you can get leads for easily to connect to SCART which then include the audio (if you AV mod the RF port, you're going to lose the audio). If getting a lead, just make sure you get the right one - there are 2 different versions - one for the grey +2, and one for the black +2A/B/+3
I'm from the UK, i got a ZX Spectrum 128k + 2 back in 1985 for Christmas. I was only 7 at the time and this was the first games machine i owned. Over the years i eventually owned over 100 games which came on Cassette Tapes. The games would take about 5 minutes or longer to load up, with those unmistakable 8-bit loading sounds. Graphically the games had their charm with a fuzzy colour palette that still holds it's charm today. The intro screen would load up line by line, usually from the top which enhanced the anticipation of waiting to play the game. I loved the Spectrum, it's very nostalgic for me. I used to borrow games from my local Library, copy them, and share them with my friends; they would also do the same. Some of the classic games i played were Ghosts'n Goblins, Bubble Bobble, Attic Attack, Dragon's Lair, Escape From The Mummy's Tomb, Ant Attack, Manic Miner, Robocop, Subterrainean Nightmare...so many great Games. But those games were challenging to say the least....3 lives, no continues, pixel perfect timed jumps and movement, memorisation of levels and enemy movements. This was hardcore gaming at it's purest. good times 🙂 The Spectrum was a huge part of Brittish Culture which birthed it's own underground base of bedroom coders including the likes of the legendary Matthew Smith, and such renowned software houses like Codemasters who were established on the Speccy. The ZX Spectrum Next looks like a pretty authentic modernisation of the Spectrum that i knew and loved. Hopefully more people will enjoy the delights that they missed out on back in the day which can only be a good thing, and maybe in time, the ZX Spectrum Next can develop it's own bunch of bedroom coders for the modern era. Great video 👍
My first computer here in the US was a Timex Sinclair 1000. You hooked a tape recorder up to it to load and save programs. Only experience with that brand. The keyboard has the same basic language commands associated with them. Fun little computer.
Man this brought back memories, This was the computer that made me fall in love with video games. I owned and still have the Spectrum 128k including the manual and I have a lot of the games that you featured on your channel as well as many more. I also used to buy the magazine for the system which was called "Your Sinclair" which always had a unique cover. Some of the games were trashy but some of them were really good back in the day. Games like Rescue, Robocop, Athena, Freddy Hardest, Dizzy, Bomb Jack, Renegade, Super off road, Pang, The New Zealand story, Jet Set Willy, Chase H.Q and many more. At school we used to say are you a Sinclair or Kempston player as they were two joystick manufactures who's joysticks were compatible with the system. I may have to purchase this system, thanks for sharing.😀👍
@@mattyrose3931 I only remember playing games where you would select either the Sinclair or Kempston joystick, but i remember different joysticks coming afterwards. Anyway i would always chose the option To Redefine Keys lol
@@GGGx3 Good point, Sinclair indicated all other compatible joysticks, like I said the cheaper ones. The Kempston was a really sturdy stick with two big red buttons at the front and a round "knob" at the top of the stick. I had a friend who had a Kempston, I was really envious because it felt like the stick on an arcade machine!
Rescue by Mastertronic was the actual shizz 👍 loved Target Renegade too. So many great games with little to no instructions where you just had to figure it out as you went along. Loading times sucked tho 😂🤣
@@bscrazeee8905 Yeah the loading was a pain especially if it crashed. I also remember the loading sound of the tapes/games which sounded like the early dial up internet that we had. Happy days lol
Great video. I was 13 in 1985 when my friend from school had a Spectrum and we absolutely loved it. As the console craze crashed for you guys in the USA, everyone here migrated on to the Spectrum and C64 computers, with rich kids getting an Acorn. I still love the Spectrum and seeing you experience it for the first time was awesome. Speccy is my love as yours was C64.
Nostalgia overload for me, my dad bought a zx when i was born so this was all i had until the nes came out.. i did even do a bit of prigramming on it at a very basic level with the help of that massive manual lol
Honestly it’s so great listening to you talking about the good ol’ speccy! Lose the zen ex and just call it the speccy, such great memories from my childhood. It’s probably not for anyone younger than 35 and maybe UK but sure brings it all back,,
Looks like you had a lot of fun with it! Remember being 7-8 years old when we had this and coding my own very simple text based programmes was really cool back then! Enjoyed this until we brought the Amiga 500+
Love your enthusiasm! The 48k Spectrum was my first computer when I was 13 yrs old. I learned to program in BASIC on it and have so many good memories of those times. It's amazing what some coders managed to coax out of such a limited machine. I moved on the the C64 after a couple of years because I loved the SID chip, hardware sprites and scrolling capabilities. That was when I learned program in machine code. Eventually I sold them and moved on through various consoles, but nothing has ever captured my imagination like those first few years with the speccy and 64.
@@Trueseeker-r8q It was the black screen with red lines appearing for a split second and white border as the tape finished loading, that signalled you'd just wasted the last 4&1/2 mins of your life!
I've been playing around with mine for the best part of 6 months now - I got mine from the first run of the Kickstarter. I love it! Granted I grew up the Speccy through. The Spectrum was well known in other European countries as well. You did have the Spectrum in the States, but it never took off. Look up the Timex Sinclair series for more info on that! :) Just a heads up, it sounds like you've got some bad roms. They work fine on mine. Some versions of the 48K games don't work on the 128K. There were sometimes a v2 as it were, that were reprogrammed so they do work on the 128K/+2/+3. There's still some games that don't like the +2A/+2B/+3. I highly recommend to you, that you get the RGB Scart cable, and run it through an OSSC. Otherwise, you'll miss out on some of the "fancy graphical" stuff. I know the Next already has HDMI out, but the fancy stuff doesn't come through correctly. Just another heads up really. As a game that helps show off the old Spectrum, try Dan Dare. If you want to see some really rough graphics, try the ZX81 mode. That was the computer before the Spectrum. No colour, no sound. (Though there are some games that have Spectrum 'like' graphics) Happy Gaming!
@@maxxdahl6062 That's not how I've come to understand it. Timex decided to pull the plug on the "Timex Sinclair" venture, since it never broke the market in the States in 1983. Which of course was only a year after the Speccy came out. Timex themselves carried on making computers for many years afterwards. They just didn't like how the market had gone in the States. If you know a different chain of events, please let me know. 😀
Awesome vid mate , The ZX Spectrum 128k was my first ever computer , wish I still had it , Used to love loading the games by tape , You have made me a BRIT truly happy :-)
This was my introduction to gaming I had the 48k with the rubber keys and external tape deck, powerboat, pssst & 3D deathchase were my favorite games on it
@@wr0ngun I've no idea which model that is. All the 48k I ever saw had the hard plastic keys like in this ZX Next version. I actually preferred the rubber keys to the hard ones, it was a terrible design
Brit here, been following you for a couple of years now, great vid 👍 Brought up with Sinclair stuff since the rubber key 48k, I had a passion to draw loading screen alternatives with drawing programs, also tailor some and include them in the tape loader..it was in the timing..great memories Keep up the good work 👏
Hi metal Jesus the zx spectrum next is just what the retro collector’s want in my opinion great video very factual in what you do very honest opinion which is very refreshing 👍😎😎
exactly. The computing industry is now all about the big money, so it's great that there's now a true enthusiast piece of hardware. Not the 'enthusiast' gear of today for PCs, 'enthusiast' to them, means they just whack up the price and add some extra cores... yawn.
@@mrpositronia yeah, "building" a computer by doing expensive Lego with pre built parts doesn't make you a computer enthusiast. Someone buying a graphics card isn't an enthusiast. What real computer enthusiasts actually do is stuff like building their own ones (I don't mean sticking pre made parts together, I mean building the parts themselves), collecting old computers like Amigas and Atari STs and/or creating their own using their own parts, programming their own OSs, programming their own games, finding and preserving old equipment like CRT monitors before they go to landfill Like the channel RetroManCave is what I'm talking about: ua-cam.com/users/RetroManCave It seems like Americans think the only computers that exist are Windows/Linux PCs and Mac. Whereas every European older than around 30 knows it goes FAR deeper than that. There's so many distinct different types
@@jeanesseintes3451 why buy a turntable when you can just stream music? Why buy a camera when your phone takes pictures? Why buy a new Spectrum when your PC can emulate it? These are all good questions, for non enthusiasts.
The best thing about the spectrum was you could code games for it yourself. I remember buying books full of game code that you could input and build a game from ground up. Pretty wild. It was like learning a new language inputting the code.
Most of what I know from the ZX Spectrum is from Kim Justice's amazing channel. If you're interested in old school British gaming history, she's the one to subscribe to.
The ZX Spectrum was huge in Uruguay, and in Brazil they had pretty accurately reproduced and locally made clones: TK-90 and TK-95. The TK-90 was a pretty decent clone of the ZX Spectrum 48k (rubber keyboard and all), and the TK-95 was also a 48k but with an improved keyboard, an entirely different design than the ZX Spectrum+ keyboard. The TK-95 also had built in support for Portuguese characters and a little built-in application to make User Defined Graphics. In Argentina it was more of a mixed bag, with a heavier influence of the US market (remember Argies were at odds with Britain at the time...) so the C64, VIC-20, and Timex Sinclairs were more popular in Buenos Aires at least. Some American computers like the Atari 800 XL, the TI99-A and later Atari ST and the Amiga family were also found later in Uruguay, but less so because they were generally more expensive than the British low cost Sinclairs and Brazilian clones.
This isnt the original. The original was the ZX-80, then the ZX-81. The number represents the years they were released. The Sinclair C-5 mini car never caught on. Sir Clive Sinclair was a genius.
The ZX Spectrum 16 or 48k with rubber keys was the Original "ZX Spectrum". The ZX 80 and 81, were not part of the Spectrum range of Sinclair machines, and as someone who was there at the time, can confirm first hand the 80 and 81 were nothing more than overpowered calculators that had to be powered down after 15mins to avoid overheating 😁
Renegade & Target Renegade are highly recommended. Put many hours into those back in the day! - I had a Spectrum +3. The games came on floppy discs instead of tapes, the benefit being there was hardly any load time, and you could still connect a tape recorder and load tape games.
Hi Metal Jesus. I'm from Spain. Here it sold like hot cakes too. It was the dominant system. We even had a very prominent games creation industry, many of the games went to sell really well in the UK. We also had here Amstrad CPC, C64 and even MSX system but the Sinclair Spectrum was HUGE. Man I played it so many hours... So nice to hear you talk about it!
@referral madness and the ZX Spectrum Next already has an MSX core so you can run all your old MSX1 games. (And a couple of C64 cores are being prepped independently from developers as we speak so... yes, it will also run C64 games)
ZX Spectrum and compatible clones (like Didaktik Gama and Didaktik M) were massively popular here in the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia) in the late 80s' and even in the early 90s'. It was de facto standard (!) (as the PC in the late 90s' and in the 2000s). There were two main reasons why ZX Spectrum became so popular. First: it was cheap, so poor people could buy it for spared money sometime. Second: it was small, so it was not so hard to smuggle... Czechoslovakia was in the communist space until 1989... I have great memories for the time when I was tiny and I played simple yet great games with my dad on the Spectrum. My dad taught me lately also the basics of BASIC and ... a new programmer was born :-) A few years ago I started a humble collection of Sinclair ZX Spectrum machines (including clones), peripherals, games, and books. I also finally learned Z80 assembly, and I'm currently trying to design a completely new game :) Some tips for good "mainstream" games: - Manic Miner - Splitting Images - Bombjack - Boulder Dash - Exolon - Flying Sharks - Zynaps - Starquake - Cyclone - Jetpac (not an abandonware) - Target: Renegade - and so on (... 3D Deathchase, Saboteur, Automania, Chuckie Egg, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Pole Position, Dizzy 3, Rambo, Paperboy, Booty, ... There are so many significant games for the Speccy... ) I recommend you to download also the game manuals! There is mostly no in-game manual, because of the limited RAM...
8 bit guy is too Commodore-centric. He tried to make a video about the history of the Spectrum but got quite a few things wrong. Metal Jesus did his homework better than Murray!
A very good overview of the system I thought. It was interesting to hear your take on something so intrinsically British and which you had never played before and refreshing to see your passion for the design and ambition of the ZX Next, with it's homebrew and programming potential and also your respect for the original Spectrum and its heritage in UK gaming. Remember that in the UK and Europe it was machines such as this that saw us right through the Video game crash of 1983, for us there really was no crash, micro computer popularity was off the scale, with no shortage of great games to play and imaginative software developers, bedroom coders were making the headlines and companies like Ultimate Play The Game, Ocean and Codemasters were born... As a UK gamer I am ultra nostalgic about the ZX era of gaming, I grew up with the ZX Spectrum and it's even more basic forerunner, the ZX81, I had a C64 also and I loved it, particularly the SID music, but something about the spectrum just clicked with me and I have so many fond memories of the machine, the games and my older brother and I taking turns to play them... never arguing over it of course! 😜 Plus extra kudos on the correct ZX, (Zed Ex) pronunciation! 🤓👍
This is another excellent video! Both very informative and clearly very well researched. It's a great touch that you paid attention to the British aspects, shows a degree of respect lacking from a lot of other channels. Keep up the amazing work!
I had the original ZX Spectrum 48k for my 12th birthday. I persuaded my parents to let me have the manual a couple of weeks beforehand - and by the time I got the computer I pretty much knew Basic! Now here I am, 48 years old, cranking out software for a living, stressed out, under tight deadlines and working from home due to Covid. Thanks, 12 year old me. You keen-o.
I for one am definitely nostalgic! The ZX Spectrum was my very first experience of gaming as a kid... 30+ years later and gaming still remains one of my favourite hobbies. Thanks for the video MJ!
49 in the UK, I grew up on this stuff! We had a ZX 81 (early 1980's... then a Sinclair Zx Spectrum, with programming instructions and examples for programming in the manual... what we called 'Basic' .. . I think there was Zx 48? and then a ZX Spectrum 128 (which we also got) cassette tapes were used to load the games, games that were sometimes really playable and entertaining. With cassette loading it was frustrating when games wouldnt load or the game would crash. 'Asteroids' was the first game I overplayed for hours. 'Back2 School' 'Deathchase' And..'Checkered Flag' were fun at the time. 'The Hobbit' was a popular early ZX Game that was an adventure based on choice and text with sceneries etc.. 'Manic Miner' was a cool game I played a lot (and it's sequel game...can't remember its title?) 'Dizzy' 'Cobra' 'Knight Lore' 'Jet Pac Willy' were fun Games and some of the 'shoot em ups' were great ! (Xenon? Cronos?) Man, I'm gonna have to research the Zx Spectrum games! 'Crystal Castles'? There were also some very strange games in the early 1980's 'experimental' (on the part of the programmers) and now , still seem 'out there'! 'Saboteur' was also a good game (bit later in the Zx Spectrum timeline) There'll be many other good games that I've forgotten about since then... Fun times! Thanks to Clive Sinclair (and the Game Programmers of course!)
The ZX Spectrum sold 5.5. million units across all it's various versions. I had it's predecessor the ZX81 which had no sound, no colour and 1k Ram as standard.
I had a ZX81 too, once, but it broke. I bought another last year just for nostalgic reasons, though. I also have 4 different spectrums: +3, +2A, +2, and a sick 48K rubber key model (the video circuit is SNAFU).
MJR, thanks for an honest look at the Speccy while freely admitting that this is not a machine you’re familiar with. At the end of the day, the hardware of the Spectrum was not fantastic. But... it was cheap and plentiful. Back in the day it was THE computer for British households because it was affordable. Yeah, it had it quirks, but it’s simply.... the Speccy. The Next is a *very* cool interation of both the classic computers and something for the future 👍
Nice to see you reviewing the Next. I, like many Brits grew up with the ZX Spectrum. It was my first computer (the 48k version with the rubber keys!) and I learnt a lot with it. You gave a nice balanced and fair review I thought, remembering that the original unit is about 35 years old. Also it's important to remember when playing the games that most of them were made with only 48k of ram at the programmers disposal. They had to squeeze every byte of space into their code and could be wasteful with nothing. It was incredible what they managed to do when you think about it. Some games to try in 48k or 128k mode would be Head over Heels by Ocean Software, Batman by Ocean Software (a similar isometric style game to Head over Heels, and by the same programmer), Cobra by Ocean (the Stallone movie tie in), Saboteur by Durell software. There's tons more but those games are a good showcase for what the machine could do when decent programmers made games with it.
Brilliant video the Spectrum is buried deep in the British psyche and I was nervous as to see what you would say, but you’ve done it justice Metal Jesus! By the way just as interesting is the company and the man behind all it Sir Clive Sinclair, a proper inventor and entrepreneur, check out the electric car - the Sinclair C5. The British computer scene in the 80s would make a cool video too
Metal Jesus has won many brownie points with the Brits, for consistently calling it the Zed X. You've earned 1000 cups of tea.
And some biscuits
Can I get that tea with a side of Jaffa cakes? They look tasty! 😁
@@MetalJesusRocks jaffa cakes are delicious. I'm sure one of us can Mail some of them over 😁.
Maybe some crumpets too? :D Love the looks of this. I have huge nostalgia for the Speccy - had the 48K, 48K+, then the +3
@@MetalJesusRocks You've never had Jaffa Cakes?! This won't do. Tell me where and I'll send some.
The Spectrum WAS released in the US, Timex released it. Wasn't in huge quantities, but it did make it there.
We didn’t get it in the Seattle area for some reason. At least I never saw one in stores. Maybe too far away?!
They only "got" the nes
@@MetalJesusRocks if you look at the next' configuration menu you will see the Timex Sinclair TC 2048 option , that is the version released in the US.
I am not a fan of sinclair computers myself , but i have tried some of the games ...
My eternal first ever computerlove still is the Commodore 64 , i got both versions of THEC64 when they came out
Guru Larry is correct. The 8 Bit guy did a great video on the Timex Sinclair.
The Timex Sinclair 2068 was a variant of the ZX Spectrum made for the US market, but it doesn't look much like a classic Spectrum (not black!) and had an incompatible ROM. There were add-ons to provide a British ROM which caused more things to work, but the timings were different because it was designed to produce output compatible with American (NTSC) television rather than British (PAL) TV.
It had some significant innovations over the original, with additional display modes. Those extra modes are present in the ZX Spectrum Next (and the ZX Uno, too).
The sinclair Zx 48k was my first computer it changed my world
Same here, the game 'Booty' is still one of my favourites.
@Sagistar this looks based on the the Speccy + shell.
ZX80! It was my dad's, but I got to have a go from time to time.
@J Haller I had and still have my 48k and then the James Bond 128k Speccy
Same...cookie was my fabourite...watching Batman on here the memories came back big time! I need one of these in my life
I’m in the U.K. and my first computer was a ZX81 and the The Spectrum 48k.
And your right, for people like me it’s a blast from the past. Love the look of it.
I love to hear first impressions on old systems, this was great. If you'd like me to hook you up with an original ZX Spectrum then let me know and I'd be happy to help!
It really is interesting to get different impressions and perspectives on hardware we grew up with. As a New Zealander C64 was somewhat dominant but I recall the software shelves at the local camera store in Gisborne (go figure) had a fair selection of Spectrum titles. Admittedly the majority were budget range. The local bookshop stocked Crash, also. Gisborne is fairly remote so it may be a testiment to the Spectrums penitration we saw it pussed here is relatively remote location ( ehem NZ in the 80s). I had a Spectrum I bought off a school friend for 100 bucks (which was a surprise to his mum haha long story... Big dollars for 13 year old) at my Mum's house and 64 Dad surprised us with for xmas at his. Being exposed to 64 and speccy versions of games I did appreciate the colourful high-res nature of Speccy when compared to 64 block browns and grey's. I've bought into this latest Next kickstarter and super excited to dive into this scene August next year!
LOL, Nice. I was going to say lets get RMC in here to talk this thing up. ;D
We had a second hand commodore Vic 20, I also think a 64 but can't be sure, had the Amstrad cpc 464,so I recognise batman and robocop but they were in colour.
Oi,oi.
I sold a nice 128k a few years back, I don't regret getting rid of it to much
I'm kind of in love how so many of the comments in this video are Brits getting slapped with that nostalgia wave. I love that feeling and am glad this video brought that feeling to those folks.
As someone whose first ever "real" computing was doing very simple text-based games in BASIC on a VTech PreComputer 1000, I can really dig on what this machine is about, at least in terms of how computers in the '80s worked. What a cool little machine!
My favourite 8-bit machine was actually American - the Atari 8-bit range. I still have a few, although most now need repairing. But I also had a soft spot for the Sinclair machines. I have a couple of Spectrums. Our original 16K unit, which I broke six months after we got it in 1983 (I intend to finally fix it this year) and a 48K Spectrum that a friend asked me to look at because the keyboard wasn't working (broken mylar ribbon) which I fixed many years ago but he never collected it. Used to go round his house often to play on it before I got my 800XL.
The Spectrum was probably the first computer I had a go on. A cousin was playing Hungry Horace on his 16K unit when I went to his house one day. The beauty of the machine was that it could do so much from so little. No graphics chip. No sound chip either. And yet it introduced Brits to colour computing the way that the really simple ZX81 had done for computers in general at a time when American computers were really expensive. At the time, £1 could get you about $2.30 but American companies would typically sell stuff in the UK on an exchange rate of £1 = $1, which meant that they were often twice as expensive as they were in the US. So, a £400 American computer in real terms cost the equivalent of $1000 in the UK. But then along came Clive Sinclair with his little beauties that proved extremely popular.
Here in Portugal both the 48 and the 128k version were huge in the 80's. I have really fond memories of them. Heck, I still have my 128k in the basement!
We also got the Timex 2048, i had one myself :)
Cool, I still have my plus 3 hidden in the my Tv stand unit, get it out now and again still🙂
The Untouchables, Batman, Cabal, Comando...bons tempos!!
No Brasil foram lançados 2 clones: TK90X e TK95.
Playlist you must try from back then ------>>>> Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Jet Set Willy 2, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Atic Atac, Knight Lore,Head Over Heels,Jet Pack, Elite, Hobbit graphical adventure, Dizzy
Glad to see some Spectrum content from across the ‘pond’. Best wishes from the U.K.
This american, we never on the other side of the pond mate
@@joshuaRizoPatron Americans are a later nationality so yes they are
I once took a shit in my friend's pond at a house party when very drunk. I guess that's what the yanks are doing now, with their creation of stuff like that huge texas sized island made of rubbish that's in the ocean.
girlsdrinkfeck we can fuck your nation up at any given time so we get to say who is in the other side of the pond. Now go back to your shitholes before I take the internet away too
@@joshuaRizoPatron Idiot!!
This was a fantastic video. I would love to see more American view points on British hardware. Keep up the good work
hello slope!
@Slope's Game Room
To this Yank, the ZX Spectrum represents the best gaming library ever made.
Because it shouldn't exist. Nearly everything that makes a videogame has to be coded in software. There's a passion in that library, a love of gaming that couldn't be stopped. And each title is fascinating, in how it approaches that problem. So many overachieve.
And it all looks punk as Hell. This is digital graffiti and underground comix. It's filled with new ideas that were decades ahead of the mainstream.
Nothing else has been like it, before or since.
Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner, Atic Atac, Knight Lore, Elite, Jetpac....the list goes on and on. If I remember rightly more than 10,000 games were released on the good old Speccy.
And, much like the c64, still are. The Next itself has even had a good few now.
It's that kind of a machine.
Hello from the UK. ✋
20,000 games were made for the good old Speccy...
You can play 1000 of them built into the Spectrum Vega (a hand held plug & play) - Check on eBay UK & UA-cam for prices and reviews. Used they're about 40-100 UK Pounds. Some places might ship to the U.S. 😃😃
Chucky Egg was great on Specy, but was a good game on most 80s PC ...
Very nice video, MetalJesusRocks. Another Brit here. I have original Speccys and one of the the new Nexts (it's fabulous). As you note, if you're not used to the 'Speccy' it can all be a little... well, weird... and a little quirky... putting it mildly... but then it'll make you smile ... and then grin... and then the fun starts... and then you fall in love. The Next made me fall in love with it all over again, thirty-umpty years after I fell for the original. Two days of Kickstarter to go if anyone else wants one.
For me, these are the videos that shine on your channel! Choosing an obscure piece of history in the video game timeline and delivering an excellent review-presentation video. Kudos MJR! Missed your Tuesday videos too.
Great video, I grew up in the UK in the 70's and as a 11 year old begged my parents for months to get me a ZX81 and then as a 12 year old the ZX Spectrum - although due to Sinclair's very (at the time) shoddy quality control it took about 3 return trips with my dad to Tottenham Court Road in London to actually get a working 48k version. I learnt to program on it - first in ZX Basic and then later in Z80 assembler/machine code. It gave me a great introduction to computers and set the course of my work ever since (I now live and work in IT in New Zealand, but still love toying around with old computers). The ZX Spectrum Next manual is very true back to the original manual supplied with the machine and brings back some great memories.
If you haven't tried them already - my suggestions for the best games would be RebelStar and RebelStar II - turn-based strategy games which have pretty good on-screen directions and I wasted far too many hours with as a kid (and still fire up occasionally on an emulator even today). There's some real strategy involved in moving and shooting from your units or leaving them in cover or sentry mode to anticipate the alien's next move.
The strange look of the colours (yes, sticking the UK spelling) is due to the way Sinclair assigned memory to the screen - the pixel resolution is 256x192, but to save precious RAM Sinclair decided that the colour resolution only needed to be 32x24 characters. Since each character can only have 2 colours assigned to it (foreground and background) from a palette of only 15 (of which 7 are just brighter versions) you get a very distinctive look in games where designers had to try and make all the pixels line up to the 32x24 colour grid. There were some 'hacks' used by changing colours during the screen refresh/scan to try and improve this, but most games just dealt with the restriction. For good examples of designers making the most of this restriction see Manic Miner and the follow-up Jet Set Willy. This appearance is commonly called 'colour clash' or 'attribute clash', but it saved a signiifcant portion of RAM for actual programs so Sinclair felt was worth the trade-off.
Thanks again for the video, very tempted to bust out the credit card for the 2nd Kickstarter...
It was actually released across the world. I got one in South Africa. My friend had the C64, so I knew both.
If I had to choose again, it would still be the spectrum. I did programming on the C64 and Ted the limitations, not only if the basic, but even the machine code. The CPU had a very limited command set, about six times less that the speccy.
The C64 basic was useless, you got Simon's basic. You could not even draw a line or plot a pixel. The C64 colours were also very dull, especially the PAL versions. The pixels were also very large and flat.
The first Speccies just had a terrible keyboard. It worked ok, but did give problems over time. But the computer was very very cheap that made it possible for me to buy.
One more thing, even though there were many different Sinclair versions, there were basically just two versions, much like the C64 and C128, the 48K (also 16K) and a 128K.
The C64's CPU didn't really have a limited command set, it was just a different concept. The 6502 is almost proto-RISC in that it has fewer instructions but they were much easier to use and were faster. The Z80 on the other hand had a lot of instructions, but they were mainly dealing with the different registers. The Z80 was also slower than the 6502, though the machines typically were clocked higher so the speed difference wasn't felt that much. I've coded in assembly on both, and the 6502 is much nicer to work on.
The biggest problem with the Speccy was that it was made to be cheap, and wasn't really improved. The lack of sprites and music (before the 128k at least) really hurt its potential. Also it didn't have disk support until much later on, which limited how complex the games could get. The original versions didn't even have built-in joystick support - that required you to buy a special peripheral!
@@deanolium yes it was easier, but at that stage it was very limiting, since you needed so many more bytes to get the job done. There is even today still a very good case for sisc vs risc, but then sisc was preferable. To say it was faster is not true and it can be seen especially with tape speed. Tge speccy had a baud rate of 1200 vs C64 youth just 300. Ry was awful.
The Speccy's quality was die sure not as great, but the plus side was that so many could afford it, which included me. The C64 was more of a consumer machine much like an Xbox, while the Speccy was better for enthusiasts. Programmibg was way more powerful and even to make hardware was easy.
The biggest lack die the Speccy was the absence of sprites, that is very true and the colour clash was a hassle, which ironically was bypasses by much later techniques, after the era.
But I must say the dull colours of the C64 was t nice at all. Many managed to get more pleasing graphics with many of the spectrum games, but in certain games like scrollers, C64 e better.
If I had to choose a speccy or C64 for my child today, I would still choose Speccy, because I do not want a toy, but rather an enthusiast system. Unless I could pair Simon's basic with the C64. Ry helped a lot.
For the Speccy I would just get a better keyboard.
Concerning the disk drive, the C64 disk you've was really terrible. Why did they chose serial? It was incredibly slow, taking more than a minute to load, not much faster than the Speccy's tape. My plus D interface took 3 seconds to load a 48K program and 9 seconds or a 128K program.
The microdrive of the Speccy was a terrible idea though. I think sometimes Sinclair really did not think things through, like the printer as well. He should have included joystck ports on the pkus and 128 as well. I built my own.
So both had their flaws...
My brother and I bought a 48K ZX Spectrum in 1982. It cost £129.99 with games costing anything from £2 - £10. I immediately took it over and spent the next 3-4 years using it. Computer magazines in the UK would publish game listings that you could type in, debug and if you were lucky it might (after hours of trying) work. It was my introduction to IT which lasted 24 years. Some of my favourite games would be:
Arcadia, JetPac, Jet Set Willy, Fred (see my avatar) and anything from Ultimate Play the Game.
My god! The ghost from Fred! Ahh, the £2 Mastertronic games. Every paperboy could manage a few of those each month! I would also recommend any games from Stephen Crow, Wizard's Lair, Starquake and FireLord. Random ones - Spindizzy, Avalon, Dynamite Dan, Booty, Knight Tyme and Fairlight...
You didn't pronounce it "Zee Eks Spectrum." The Brits are pleased
and canadians
It took me until he pointed it out 2 mins in to notice.
xD
The computer is called a "Zed Eks" but the letter is still called "Zee"
We are pleased indeed. Splendid.
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48k with rubber keys, I was about 7 or 8. My friends and I all loved them for gaming. It fell apart in the end after bashing the keys continuously during Daley Thompson's decathlon events! Thought the video was great, thanks MJ!
So great to see an American channel covering some classic 80s British history, bonus points for calling it it's correct name The Zed X!
Absolutely fascinating to hear the perspective of someone from across the pond, about a computing artifact that is both uniquely British and uniquely 80s British. I spent the best part of a decade living and breathing ZX Spectrums, so things like colour clash and the weird, beepy sound are not only famliar to me, they're also deeply nostalgic. The Spectrum Next has got me back into Spectrums, even to the point where I've finally taught myself machine code and converted an old arcade game (The Pit) to the old 48k model!
As for some "hidden gems", you should try to play: Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner, the Julian Gollop game Chaos, 3D Deathchase and Knight Lore. And if you can get past the funky graphics, the conversions of Chase HQ, R-Type and Midnight Resistance are considered to punch way about their weights.
I lost much of my youth to playing Chaos, Chase HQ, and Rock Star Ate My Hamster...
The Spectrum port of Cabal is fantastic too.
+Dave I remember once in Sinclair User magazine in the late 80s magazine they had the Official USA Arcade team playtest some Spectrum games and they thought 75% of then were unplayable sh*te! It was hard to blame them because they had never seen colour clash or games that had trouble scrolling before. Wow that's great you wrote your own game. My favourite Spectrum game is Dynamite Dan. I still play that now. Is lots of fun and hard too so each turn doesn't last too long
I used to go to my room with my sister and “play the spectrum”…. Then unexpectedly at age 13 she became pregnant and had our first child… we named him Adolf
That keyboard design looks really cool!
That keyboard (and overall physical design) **is** really cool. They did an amazing job on it, and that's not even taking into account the issues they had getting the keyboard done during the first Kickstarter. It's a great bit of kit, and the attention to detail and how it works is amazing - I have one, and I'm so glad I got it.
@@sugarandfudge the late Rick Dickinson was industrial designer for the Next. He was responsible for the iconic industrial design of the Sinclair machines, I think pre Amstrad but happy to be corrected. There is a great video of him discussing design dna and decisions for the Next on YT. I'll see if I can find it...
@@EvanJohnston1973 Here we go:
ua-cam.com/video/TbFYoWTdy3Y/v-deo.html
So sad that he passed away a little before it entered production... :-(
The keyboard comes more or less wholesale from the Spectrum +. Or at least, to look like one. It's rejigged just slightly so that the key positions are mostly seamless with a "modern" keyboard. It actually uses one of those slimline laptop style keyboards, though the curved keycaps overall make it feel far more comfortable.
I'm 39 so was very young when my Uncle got a C64 but to this day I have such fond memories of playing that commodore. In the early 90s my dad taught me basic dos programming so this ZX Spectrum really looks fun to muck around on
Dang, this brings back some childhood memories. My Speccy (ZX Spectrum) was awesome! Chuckie Egg, Ikari Warriors, Commando, Green Beret, Rick Dangerous, Bomb Jack, Vigilante, Power Drift, Where Time Stood Still. So many great games!
Português?
@@markovitch78 Hell yeah!
Not a 2048?
Treasure Island Dizzy was the tits too. I loved Chuckie Egg, forgot about that. Does anyone remember Hamburger Hill?
The Speccy version of BombJack is considered the best 8 bit conversion of the arcade game. @MetalJesusRocks you should try this!
Very good review. To the point. Looks like a great machine. From Greece and now 47 ,i will never forget the day i loaded up bomb Jack in the tapecorder for 3 mins and then i realized i could load up tapes of music as i was playing the game !!! We're talking full analog fun !!! Or the day i got scared shit less when i first died in The rocky horror show ... man , i wish kids today can have half the fun we use to have while playing a game. Still remember 5 guys playing in turns , so we can beat the cpu and strip Samantha Fox... one deal before the end a friend of ours pushes the plug and it resets... God the laughter and fun... not to mention the souvlakia eaten while loading games... I can see all old computers have their own crowd of people around , but nothing like the Speccy scene. Man they make games today !! It is nuts! Great work ! Keep it up !
Ahh, the Speccy! A computer that is ingrained into almost every Brit's historical knowledge of games in the 80s. I never owned one, but this one looks grand.
Never owned one. Get out imposter.
Well it was either the spectrum or the amstrad, which was British too! Alas less successful. In other European countries like in Spain they were more or less equally successful!
I was a happy Speccy owner, but I do wish the Amstrad was more successful (and operated at a faster speed).
An american here...I had to look at the thumbnail a few times, I thought it was a new released raspberry pi kickstarter. Great looking machine. I had a commodore 64 like most american 80's kids...
@@Hughesburner it's like the 80s never ended. 😁
It was a very common computer over here in the UK! I've still got quite a few tapes of games for the Spectrum, BBC and C64! This is really cool! Great to have a modern way to enjoy the classic!
I was looking for a video exactly like this, as I was looking at backing the Kickstarter myself...I didn't have one as a kid but have played around with the Timex Sinclairs that were released in the US. I ended up backing it today and noticed your video afterwards, but your video made me happy with backing it. I think the community of game developers are going to be a great draw, and it's going to be awesome to do old-school coding with!
The thing that I think separates you from the rest of the Video Game UA-camrs (at least the ones that pop up for me) is that you cover EVERYTHING and treat the very obscure systems/items the same respect you would for a Nintendo or Playstation product. That's why I think you're one of the best out there. Keep rockin! \m/ \m/
It's still a bit rich to call one of the most popular computers around the world featuring a 24,000 software library "obscure", but, well... :D
Zx spectrum was also in Europe. I lived in the Netherlands and i had one. It is also my all time favorite home computer. What a great machine. (Yes i also loved the c64, amstrad etc). But the speccie has a special place in my heart.
Loved my Speccy. Saw some games I had not seen in years! The manual brings back memories. So cool.
Looking for a gem, check out Turbo Esprit which was ahead of its time. Its quite like driving around in GTA.
You are a cop in a machine gun mounted car within a realistic city with traffic and pedestrians that obey the road laws (traffic lights, speed, one ways, crossings, roadworks, petrol stations). You are tasked with stopping drug dealers by either ramming or shooting them off the road before they make there drug drops across the city. You can also kill the other cars or pedestrians using your gun or driving with impunity. Its great fun. It was on other systems but it ran best on the Spectrum.
I loved Turbo Esprit, many hours spent playing it, great fun... have to say that it's a bit of a stretch to compare it to GTA though :)
We got the Timex Sinclair line here in the US. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000, and I still have it, as well as the TS 1500 model.
If you talk to British people about what they remember about The Spectrum, they'll mention Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Elite, Saboteur, Skool Daze, Daley Thompson Decathlon amongst others. Theres kind of a quirky British sense of humour that rubs off on some of those games
DTD... The keyboard destroyer! :)
I'd add, Dizzy, Rainbow Islands, Ghosts and Goblins and Sim City
@@mattyrose3931 It was on those old rubber keys
i own both spectrum 128 and commodore 64 , great machines , now have the games set up on sd cards , best combination of old and new .great video dude
I'm an avid viewer of your channel from the UK. I started with the Sinclaire ZX81 1k. Black and white. Upgraded to 16k expansion pack. Then moved onto Sinclaires 48k Spectrum. Colour, Which I still have. Try Atic Atac for ZX Spectrum . First game I ever finished. Keep 😎 cool man
I was a Commodore boy through the eighties too - the playground computer battles were easily won, but the Spectrum had its place and was of course very important in the birth of home computing.
Great vid and a refreshing approach. Top Vid MJ!!!
i am 44 years young boy and i spent thousands of hours playing with my Spectrum zx 128k andmy friend Timex 2048k, back in the 80s and i still have mine.
I spent 100s of hours on Jetpack alone!
@@MalcySP Similiar to Glug-Glug, that was my first game ever. it came at the same day with my Sinclair zx 128k . ua-cam.com/video/0By72paXwzo/v-deo.html
@@MalcySP then you should know it's actually spelled Jetpac 😁
@@MarcKloos well my Samsung certainly doesn't! But when you're 8 or 9, these details hardly matter
Love it! It brings back soooo many memories! It was my first computer, got it for Christmas 1982/83 and bunch of kids around me have it. Later we moved on to c64 but ZX Spectrum will always have a special place in my heart :)
I'm 43 and Brazilian, and a Speccy was my first computer ever. I remember going through 3 full minutes to load a game on a cassette tape, and being all giddy to see it work and play for hours. I've played some great games, you should try at least Manic Miner, one of the most famos Speccy games!
At one point it was the best selling computer here in Portugal!
ZX Spectrum 128k + 2 (with the cassete player incorporated) was my first computer! It was a gift for finishing 4th grade :).
Couple of years later, had a Master System II, but it never gave me the amount of fun and hours of play time of the magnificient Spectrum!!! And it still works to this day!
Thanks for the vídeo.
"Didn't know what I was doing, died a lot, had fun" That is 80's computer gaiming in a nutshell!
Greetings from Spain! Love the video! Brings me sweet memories with my zx spectrum +2. That it was a true gaming experience with 6 year old, also for the interminable loading games with the cassette player!
Man, the nostalgia seeing “school dayz” again after all those years. That and “back to school” were my childhood.
@RKProductions and that one wee guy that would always grass you up, no matter what haha. "Please sir, I cannot tell a lie, but....". Good times
Back to school back to school I hope the kids think I am cool ..gots my hair combed back my boots tied tight I hope I don't get in a fight .... Back to schooooooool
@RKProductions 00
Skool Daze, Chuckie Egg, Booty, Horace goes skiing, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy. The ALCHEMIST, Zoom. Pretty much Anything by OCEAN or IMAGINE. And then ULTIMATE. Jetpac, Trans Am, Pssst, Lunar Jetman, Sabre Wolf, Underwurld, AticAtac, Knight Lore, Alien 8, Gunsmoke
ZX Spectrum +2 was my very first console played on an old black and white TV with no remote. Not sure when exactly this was but I was born in 85 for reference. God I miss that machine!
I think this project is really awesome, especially for those that have nostalgia for the ZX Spectrum which undoubtedly will be primiarliy the British market.
I think it's awesome that it is an FPGA system (which puts it in the "Analogue" tier of accuracy) and the build quality on it looks fantastic from what I can see. I also think it is amazing that they have the future built into the system for programmers and home-brewers that always wished they had more power to work with. I'm sure they will have a ton of fun with it. That being said, the price... $425 + Shipping, tax and duties is SUPER steep for anyone that isn't super nostalgic and enthusiastic for the system. Thats probably what their core market is, and even with that sliver of the gaming population, I'm sure the Kickstarter will still be a great success again.
That all being said and for everyone else out there that has an interest in this project, that wants to experience it in FPGA quality. Look into the MiSTer project. It too is also an FPGA solution, but you can flash many cores to it, including the ZX Spectrum and all their variations. You can also flash the other computers to the FPGA core such as the Commodore 64, Amiga, a bunch of Atari PC's, you can flash a number of console cores, such as the NES, SNES, SMS, Gamegear, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Neo Geo.. the PC Engine and Genesis (and their respective CD attachments) and dozens of real PCB's of Arcades. The platform is open source, so not only updates coming at what feels like daily... there are more cores to be made and existing cores to be further refined! The platform is built for longevity and it has a bright future. All this call all be done at a price point of around $300-350 and still give you the flexibility of displaying in Analogue (RGB/Component/Composite) display as well as Digital (HDMI)... and even both at the same time if you can believe it.
Both solutions are great, and those who are nostalgic for the ZX Spectrum are gonna love the kit you described... for everyone else? Look into the MiSTer. It's a retro gaming game changer, and the future of video game preservation.
Thanks for sharing the review!
What sets the Next apart from other FPGA machines is the case/keyboard. The aim was to get the best typing experience possible, rivaling modern laptops (hi MacBook!). The case itself was designed by the original designer of the Spectrum. And to get the keyboard functioning properly took quite a bit of time. This you wouldn't have with a MiSTer. And that's why it's so much more expensive.
@@MarcKloos It certainly has it's niche. It's a really cool device. It's just a really expensive case/keyboard.
Had this early in it's lifespan here in the UK, and liked that fact that it was also a computer, not just a console.
For an American, I can't see any interest in it, think of it as an NES with extra limitations. A few great titles to check out would be; starquake, jetpac, and android 2. All of those are easy to pick up and play games, and still very playable even today.
The Speccy was my life in the 80's, you either was a C64 or a Sinclair Spectrum fan here In the UK
...or Amstrad if your parents didn't know what they were buying!
The amstrad 464 was a great
@@MrLordpistoia my uncle let me borrow his, loved playing Commando on it
@ atari 400 was what i had
@@fatboyshortarms Nice. I had the slightly improved Atari 65xe.
Wow. So many memories. Thanks for making this video! I live in the US but am originally from the UK, I got a Spectrum 48K for Christmas back in 82 or 83, I would have been 8 or 9. I remember that Christmas, a whole batch of Spectrums which were sold were defective, so much so that it actually made the national news, because the Spectrum was the hot Christmas toy that year. True enough, when I opened my Spectrum on Christmas morning, it didn't work. As a little kid, I was, as you can imagine, heartbroken! And back in those days, shops weren't open all the time, so I had to wait a couple of days until the shops opened again so that my parents could take it back and exchange it! The agony! lol. The original 2 models of the ZX Spectrum were the 16K and 48K, which technically were identical except for the amount of RAM. Games in those days came on cassette tape, I remember it was 1.99 or 2.99 pounds for "budget" titles, and regular titles were 9.99 if I remember right. You would connect the cassette recorder to the Spectrum via the Ear and Mic 3.5mm audio ports, type LOAD "" on the spectrum (using the very unique keyboard layout which is another story) and then press play on the cassette recorder. And then wait for several minutes with your fingers crossed that the game would load. All accompanied by digital noise similar to a fax or modem. Also, you correctly mentioned about the colour rendering limitations. It was limited to rendering colour in blocks, and so when sprites went in front of each other, the colours would clash. In fact, this is what the effect was called - "colour clash." I'm not sure if that was ever its official name, but it's what the gaming press and all we users called it. A very signature affectation of the Spectrum. In its later years, developers found ingenious ways to minimise the effect. There were some incredible games for the time on the system, some of which you showed in the video. JetPac, Atic Atac, and some of the first 3D isometric games like Alien 8, Batman (different from the Batman one you showed), Knight Lore, The Great Escape (which you showed). Those were from one of the premier developers for the system: Ultimate Play the Game. And they "ultimately" became Rare, who are of course still around. CodeMasters are another developer who got their start making 1.99 and 2.99 budget games for the Spectrum, with games like the Dizzy series. Still going strong nowadays with series like Dirt and Grid. I had a good 3 or 4 years with my Spectrum before moving to an Atari ST in 85 or 86. I think I still have the Spectrum somewhere at my parents' house, but 10 or more years ago I remember trying it and it didn't work. It looks like I've missed the deadline for this kickstarter, but if they do another one, I'm certainly interested. I had a TRS-80 compatible before the Spectrum, but the Spectrum was my first serious experience of computing and gaming and will always be very special to me. Thanks again for making this video - and all your videos! Your channel is one of the best!
I just bought an original “ZED EX” speccy plus 2 with the built in cassette from a charity shop for 5 English pounds,
With original manual and power supply. After a quick solder job inside the power pack and a good cleaning of the tape heads and mechanism it works perfectly.
RF signal is a bit weak so I need to do an av mod.
All in all, a bit of a bargain.
Ooh, Lucky you!
So jealous 🤣
Nah, don't do an AV mod on it - the +2 has an RGB output, that you can get leads for easily to connect to SCART which then include the audio (if you AV mod the RF port, you're going to lose the audio). If getting a lead, just make sure you get the right one - there are 2 different versions - one for the grey +2, and one for the black +2A/B/+3
Retro Computer Shack has an RGB cable for your +2!
UncleAbs thanks for the advice, it is the grey one by the way.
I'm from the UK, i got a ZX Spectrum 128k + 2 back in 1985 for Christmas. I was only 7 at the time and this was the first games machine i owned. Over the years i eventually owned over 100 games which came on Cassette Tapes. The games would take about 5 minutes or longer to load up, with those unmistakable 8-bit loading sounds.
Graphically the games had their charm with a fuzzy colour palette that still holds it's charm today.
The intro screen would load up line by line, usually from the top which enhanced the anticipation of waiting to play the game. I loved the Spectrum, it's very nostalgic for me. I used to borrow games from my local Library, copy them, and share them with my friends; they would also do the same.
Some of the classic games i played were Ghosts'n Goblins, Bubble Bobble, Attic Attack, Dragon's Lair, Escape From The Mummy's Tomb, Ant Attack, Manic Miner, Robocop, Subterrainean Nightmare...so many great Games.
But those games were challenging to say the least....3 lives, no continues, pixel perfect timed jumps and movement, memorisation of levels and enemy movements. This was hardcore gaming at it's purest. good times 🙂
The Spectrum was a huge part of Brittish Culture which birthed it's own underground base of bedroom coders including the likes of the legendary Matthew Smith, and such renowned software houses like Codemasters who were established on the Speccy.
The ZX Spectrum Next looks like a pretty authentic modernisation of the Spectrum that i knew and loved.
Hopefully more people will enjoy the delights that they missed out on back in the day which can only be a good thing, and maybe in time, the ZX Spectrum Next can develop it's own bunch of bedroom coders for the modern era.
Great video 👍
I did had one, 30 years ago! Zx spectrum +2, and I didn't lived in Britain, in Portugal. Cool stuff!
My first computer here in the US was a Timex Sinclair 1000. You hooked a tape recorder up to it to load and save programs. Only experience with that brand. The keyboard has the same basic language commands associated with them. Fun little computer.
Man this brought back memories, This was the computer that made me fall in love with video games.
I owned and still have the Spectrum 128k including the manual and I have a lot of the games that you featured on your channel as well as many more.
I also used to buy the magazine for the system which was called "Your Sinclair" which always had a unique cover.
Some of the games were trashy but some of them were really good back in the day.
Games like Rescue, Robocop, Athena, Freddy Hardest, Dizzy, Bomb Jack, Renegade, Super off road, Pang, The New Zealand story, Jet Set Willy, Chase H.Q and many more.
At school we used to say are you a Sinclair or Kempston player as they were two joystick manufactures who's joysticks were compatible with the system.
I may have to purchase this system, thanks for sharing.😀👍
Wasn't it Quickshot or Kempston? I was a Quickshot user... was cheaper, but it had suckers on the base that would really stick to a Beano annual :)
@@mattyrose3931 I only remember playing games where you would select either the Sinclair or Kempston joystick, but i remember different joysticks coming afterwards.
Anyway i would always chose the option To Redefine Keys lol
@@GGGx3 Good point, Sinclair indicated all other compatible joysticks, like I said the cheaper ones. The Kempston was a really sturdy stick with two big red buttons at the front and a round "knob" at the top of the stick. I had a friend who had a Kempston, I was really envious because it felt like the stick on an arcade machine!
Rescue by Mastertronic was the actual shizz 👍 loved Target Renegade too. So many great games with little to no instructions where you just had to figure it out as you went along. Loading times sucked tho 😂🤣
@@bscrazeee8905 Yeah the loading was a pain especially if it crashed.
I also remember the loading sound of the tapes/games which sounded like the early dial up internet that we had. Happy days lol
Great video. I was 13 in 1985 when my friend from school had a Spectrum and we absolutely loved it. As the console craze crashed for you guys in the USA, everyone here migrated on to the Spectrum and C64 computers, with rich kids getting an Acorn. I still love the Spectrum and seeing you experience it for the first time was awesome. Speccy is my love as yours was C64.
everyone talks about xbox series s
metal jesus rocks:
When everybody else goes left...
@@MetalJesusRocks I agree, no one on the right enjoys the xbox series s
@@AdamReveland Your own made up reality...🙄
@DOOMSlayer I was being facetious.
@@AdamReveland Keep the left and the right out of our video games, and movies, and comics and escapism in general :p
Nostalgia overload for me, my dad bought a zx when i was born so this was all i had until the nes came out.. i did even do a bit of prigramming on it at a very basic level with the help of that massive manual lol
Hi, don't know if you have recognized: This the accelerated version. The micro-HDMI and the two USB ports are the ports of a Raspberry PI zero.
Honestly it’s so great listening to you talking about the good ol’ speccy! Lose the zen ex and just call it the speccy, such great memories from my childhood. It’s probably not for anyone younger than 35 and maybe UK but sure brings it all back,,
Looks like you had a lot of fun with it! Remember being 7-8 years old when we had this and coding my own very simple text based programmes was really cool back then! Enjoyed this until we brought the Amiga 500+
Love your enthusiasm!
The 48k Spectrum was my first computer when I was 13 yrs old. I learned to program in BASIC on it and have so many good memories of those times. It's amazing what some coders managed to coax out of such a limited machine.
I moved on the the C64 after a couple of years because I loved the SID chip, hardware sprites and scrolling capabilities. That was when I learned program in machine code. Eventually I sold them and moved on through various consoles, but nothing has ever captured my imagination like those first few years with the speccy and 64.
Affectionately known as 'the Speccy'. Those loading sounds from cassette are the soundtrack to my childhood love of videogames
And then it would crash ...... rewind and start again 🤣
Beeeeeeeee Beep..... Beeeee.... Beeeegeggeeegggegegagaggbddbbww
@@Trueseeker-r8q It was the black screen with red lines appearing for a split second and white border as the tape finished loading, that signalled you'd just wasted the last 4&1/2 mins of your life!
@@bettyswollox1167 oh yeah to a 7 year old child it was like the end of the world 🤣
I grew up on the ZX Spectrum. Got mine in 1986 and have many fond memories. Still have it in working condition as well!
I've been playing around with mine for the best part of 6 months now - I got mine from the first run of the Kickstarter. I love it! Granted I grew up the Speccy through. The Spectrum was well known in other European countries as well. You did have the Spectrum in the States, but it never took off. Look up the Timex Sinclair series for more info on that! :)
Just a heads up, it sounds like you've got some bad roms. They work fine on mine. Some versions of the 48K games don't work on the 128K. There were sometimes a v2 as it were, that were reprogrammed so they do work on the 128K/+2/+3. There's still some games that don't like the +2A/+2B/+3.
I highly recommend to you, that you get the RGB Scart cable, and run it through an OSSC. Otherwise, you'll miss out on some of the "fancy graphical" stuff. I know the Next already has HDMI out, but the fancy stuff doesn't come through correctly. Just another heads up really.
As a game that helps show off the old Spectrum, try Dan Dare.
If you want to see some really rough graphics, try the ZX81 mode. That was the computer before the Spectrum. No colour, no sound. (Though there are some games that have Spectrum 'like' graphics)
Happy Gaming!
Well it didn't really have a chance to take off really, Timex computers more or less went under soon after release.
@@maxxdahl6062 That's not how I've come to understand it. Timex decided to pull the plug on the "Timex Sinclair" venture, since it never broke the market in the States in 1983. Which of course was only a year after the Speccy came out. Timex themselves carried on making computers for many years afterwards. They just didn't like how the market had gone in the States. If you know a different chain of events, please let me know. 😀
@@RetroBoxRoom It was released in Fall 1983 just before Timex Computer Corp folded in Spring 1984.
@@RetroBoxRoom Now, the portugese/european Branch of Timex Comptuer Corp lived on. But the US branch was completely dead.
Ah, I see what you mean. We're talking about the same thing, but from different angles. :)
Awesome vid mate , The ZX Spectrum 128k was my first ever computer , wish I still had it , Used to love loading the games by tape , You have made me a BRIT truly happy :-)
This was my introduction to gaming
I had the 48k with the rubber keys and external tape deck, powerboat, pssst & 3D deathchase were my favorite games on it
3D Deathchase was my life.
I thought it was the 16 that had rubber keys. The original ZX81 came as a diy build kit!
@@MalcySP my speccy had rubber keys, it could play 16k and 48k. Then I got a +2 for my birthday!!
@@wr0ngun I've no idea which model that is. All the 48k I ever saw had the hard plastic keys like in this ZX Next version. I actually preferred the rubber keys to the hard ones, it was a terrible design
@@MalcySP think that was the ZX81 with the hard keys. The +2 had a built in tape deck, and the final release was the +3 that had a floppy drive.
Brit here, been following you for a couple of years now, great vid 👍
Brought up with Sinclair stuff since the rubber key 48k, I had a passion to draw loading screen alternatives with drawing programs, also tailor some and include them in the tape loader..it was in the timing..great memories
Keep up the good work 👏
As a British gamer who grew up gaming in the 70s and 80s I have to say the Next is fabulous. The Spectrum has a UNIQUE place in British pop culture.
Got to agree, I was a VIC-20 and C64 owner, but the majority of my cousins and shoolfriends had a Spectrum. And this version looks REALLY desirable :)
Great video, Jason. I love the in-depth explorations of hardware and games - this and the Polymega look from a couple weeks back are superlative!
Hi metal Jesus the zx spectrum next is just what the retro collector’s want in my opinion great video very factual in what you do very honest opinion which is very refreshing 👍😎😎
exactly. The computing industry is now all about the big money, so it's great that there's now a true enthusiast piece of hardware. Not the 'enthusiast' gear of today for PCs, 'enthusiast' to them, means they just whack up the price and add some extra cores... yawn.
@@mrpositronia yeah, "building" a computer by doing expensive Lego with pre built parts doesn't make you a computer enthusiast. Someone buying a graphics card isn't an enthusiast. What real computer enthusiasts actually do is stuff like building their own ones (I don't mean sticking pre made parts together, I mean building the parts themselves), collecting old computers like Amigas and Atari STs and/or creating their own using their own parts, programming their own OSs, programming their own games, finding and preserving old equipment like CRT monitors before they go to landfill
Like the channel RetroManCave is what I'm talking about: ua-cam.com/users/RetroManCave
It seems like Americans think the only computers that exist are Windows/Linux PCs and Mac. Whereas every European older than around 30 knows it goes FAR deeper than that. There's so many distinct different types
@@jeanesseintes3451 why buy a turntable when you can just stream music? Why buy a camera when your phone takes pictures? Why buy a new Spectrum when your PC can emulate it? These are all good questions, for non enthusiasts.
Hope it's better handled than the original Next campaign. What a balls up that was.
@@alritedave I'm sure they've fixed the teething problems. We'll see.
The best thing about the spectrum was you could code games for it yourself. I remember buying books full of game code that you could input and build a game from ground up. Pretty wild. It was like learning a new language inputting the code.
Most of what I know from the ZX Spectrum is from Kim Justice's amazing channel. If you're interested in old school British gaming history, she's the one to subscribe to.
Ps: love the in-depth video on something that was alien to you until very recently, Metal Jesus. Love your work!
The ZX Spectrum was huge in Uruguay, and in Brazil they had pretty accurately reproduced and locally made clones: TK-90 and TK-95. The TK-90 was a pretty decent clone of the ZX Spectrum 48k (rubber keyboard and all), and the TK-95 was also a 48k but with an improved keyboard, an entirely different design than the ZX Spectrum+ keyboard. The TK-95 also had built in support for Portuguese characters and a little built-in application to make User Defined Graphics. In Argentina it was more of a mixed bag, with a heavier influence of the US market (remember Argies were at odds with Britain at the time...) so the C64, VIC-20, and Timex Sinclairs were more popular in Buenos Aires at least. Some American computers like the Atari 800 XL, the TI99-A and later Atari ST and the Amiga family were also found later in Uruguay, but less so because they were generally more expensive than the British low cost Sinclairs and Brazilian clones.
Nice to see you "sort of" dipping into my childhood (the original ZX Spectrum)🤘
This isnt the original. The original was the ZX-80, then the ZX-81. The number represents the years they were released.
The Sinclair C-5 mini car never caught on. Sir Clive Sinclair was a genius.
The ZX Spectrum 16 or 48k with rubber keys was the Original "ZX Spectrum". The ZX 80 and 81, were not part of the Spectrum range of Sinclair machines, and as someone who was there at the time, can confirm first hand the 80 and 81 were nothing more than overpowered calculators that had to be powered down after 15mins to avoid overheating 😁
Renegade & Target Renegade are highly recommended. Put many hours into those back in the day!
- I had a Spectrum +3. The games came on floppy discs instead of tapes, the benefit being there was hardly any load time, and you could still connect a tape recorder and load tape games.
Spectrum was all over Europe, we even have our own licensed Speccy in Spain made by Inves
Fair play to y'all, without you we might never have got the 128k
Hi Metal Jesus. I'm from Spain. Here it sold like hot cakes too. It was the dominant system. We even had a very prominent games creation industry, many of the games went to sell really well in the UK. We also had here Amstrad CPC, C64 and even MSX system but the Sinclair Spectrum was HUGE. Man I played it so many hours... So nice to hear you talk about it!
Hey man, always nice to see vids about old computers, really miss my Sony MSX. Ever had one MJ?
MSX wasn't sony. It was microsoft.
@@maxxdahl6062 Microsoft developed the standard but Sony made the most MSX machines.
@@nicholasfarley5967 Ah okay my mistake.
@referral madness and the ZX Spectrum Next already has an MSX core so you can run all your old MSX1 games. (And a couple of C64 cores are being prepped independently from developers as we speak so... yes, it will also run C64 games)
Msx means Microsoft extended basic, I had one sure it was a mitsubishi, although lots of manufacturers made them.
ZX Spectrum and compatible clones (like Didaktik Gama and Didaktik M) were massively popular here in the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia) in the late 80s' and even in the early 90s'. It was de facto standard (!) (as the PC in the late 90s' and in the 2000s).
There were two main reasons why ZX Spectrum became so popular. First: it was cheap, so poor people could buy it for spared money sometime. Second: it was small, so it was not so hard to smuggle... Czechoslovakia was in the communist space until 1989...
I have great memories for the time when I was tiny and I played simple yet great games with my dad on the Spectrum. My dad taught me lately also the basics of BASIC and ... a new programmer was born :-)
A few years ago I started a humble collection of Sinclair ZX Spectrum machines (including clones), peripherals, games, and books. I also finally learned Z80 assembly, and I'm currently trying to design a completely new game :)
Some tips for good "mainstream" games:
- Manic Miner
- Splitting Images
- Bombjack
- Boulder Dash
- Exolon
- Flying Sharks
- Zynaps
- Starquake
- Cyclone
- Jetpac (not an abandonware)
- Target: Renegade
- and so on (... 3D Deathchase, Saboteur, Automania, Chuckie Egg, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Pole Position, Dizzy 3, Rambo, Paperboy, Booty, ... There are so many significant games for the Speccy... )
I recommend you to download also the game manuals! There is mostly no in-game manual, because of the limited RAM...
I can't wait for the 8 Bit Guy review. I really do appreciate MJ unbiased perspective.
Duke Togo gonna have a blast featuring this on MurrayNJ08
8 bit guy is too Commodore-centric. He tried to make a video about the history of the Spectrum but got quite a few things wrong. Metal Jesus did his homework better than Murray!
A very good overview of the system I thought.
It was interesting to hear your take on something so intrinsically British and which you had never played before and refreshing to see your passion for the design and ambition of the ZX Next, with it's homebrew and programming potential and also your respect for the original Spectrum and its heritage in UK gaming.
Remember that in the UK and Europe it was machines such as this that saw us right through the Video game crash of 1983, for us there really was no crash, micro computer popularity was off the scale, with no shortage of great games to play and imaginative software developers, bedroom coders were making the headlines and companies like Ultimate Play The Game, Ocean and Codemasters were born...
As a UK gamer I am ultra nostalgic about the ZX era of gaming, I grew up with the ZX Spectrum and it's even more basic forerunner, the ZX81, I had a C64 also and I loved it, particularly the SID music, but something about the spectrum just clicked with me and I have so many fond memories of the machine, the games and my older brother and I taking turns to play them... never arguing over it of course! 😜
Plus extra kudos on the correct ZX, (Zed Ex) pronunciation! 🤓👍
Best games: Saboteur and Arkanoid. Love those.
Batty > Arkanoid
This is another excellent video! Both very informative and clearly very well researched. It's a great touch that you paid attention to the British aspects, shows a degree of respect lacking from a lot of other channels. Keep up the amazing work!
That Metroid t-shirt is amazing btw.
I had the original ZX Spectrum 48k for my 12th birthday. I persuaded my parents to let me have the manual a couple of weeks beforehand - and by the time I got the computer I pretty much knew Basic! Now here I am, 48 years old, cranking out software for a living, stressed out, under tight deadlines and working from home due to Covid. Thanks, 12 year old me. You keen-o.
Amstrad CPC 464 owner myself when I was younger. Great days.
The ZX Spectrum was my first introduction to the gaming world at home 😍
Fantastic video Metal Jesus 😎👍
The greatest gaming machine of all time!!!!
Is the Commodore 64.
I for one am definitely nostalgic! The ZX Spectrum was my very first experience of gaming as a kid... 30+ years later and gaming still remains one of my favourite hobbies. Thanks for the video MJ!
It's always interesting to see an American gamer talk about the ZX Spectrum.
49 in the UK, I grew up on this stuff!
We had a ZX 81 (early 1980's... then a Sinclair Zx Spectrum, with programming instructions and examples for programming in the manual... what we called 'Basic' .. . I think there was Zx 48? and then a ZX Spectrum 128 (which we also got) cassette tapes were used to load the games, games that were sometimes really playable and entertaining.
With cassette loading it was frustrating when games wouldnt load or the game would crash.
'Asteroids' was the first game I overplayed for hours. 'Back2 School' 'Deathchase'
And..'Checkered Flag' were fun at the time.
'The Hobbit' was a popular early ZX Game that was an adventure based on choice and text with sceneries etc..
'Manic Miner' was a cool game I played a lot (and it's sequel game...can't remember its title?)
'Dizzy' 'Cobra' 'Knight Lore' 'Jet Pac Willy' were fun Games and some of the 'shoot em ups' were great ! (Xenon? Cronos?)
Man, I'm gonna have to research the Zx Spectrum games!
'Crystal Castles'?
There were also some very strange games in the early 1980's 'experimental' (on the part of the programmers) and now , still seem 'out there'!
'Saboteur' was also a good game (bit later in the Zx Spectrum timeline)
There'll be many other good games that I've forgotten about since then...
Fun times!
Thanks to Clive Sinclair (and the Game Programmers of course!)
The ZX Spectrum sold 5.5. million units across all it's various versions. I had it's predecessor the ZX81 which had no sound, no colour and 1k Ram as standard.
I had a ZX81 too, once, but it broke. I bought another last year just for nostalgic reasons, though.
I also have 4 different spectrums: +3, +2A, +2, and a sick 48K rubber key model (the video circuit is SNAFU).
MJR, thanks for an honest look at the Speccy while freely admitting that this is not a machine you’re familiar with. At the end of the day, the hardware of the Spectrum was not fantastic. But... it was cheap and plentiful. Back in the day it was THE computer for British households because it was affordable.
Yeah, it had it quirks, but it’s simply.... the Speccy.
The Next is a *very* cool interation of both the classic computers and something for the future 👍
I still have my SINCLAIR Speccy 48k
Nice to see you reviewing the Next. I, like many Brits grew up with the ZX Spectrum. It was my first computer (the 48k version with the rubber keys!) and I learnt a lot with it. You gave a nice balanced and fair review I thought, remembering that the original unit is about 35 years old. Also it's important to remember when playing the games that most of them were made with only 48k of ram at the programmers disposal. They had to squeeze every byte of space into their code and could be wasteful with nothing. It was incredible what they managed to do when you think about it.
Some games to try in 48k or 128k mode would be Head over Heels by Ocean Software, Batman by Ocean Software (a similar isometric style game to Head over Heels, and by the same programmer), Cobra by Ocean (the Stallone movie tie in), Saboteur by Durell software. There's tons more but those games are a good showcase for what the machine could do when decent programmers made games with it.
I was just looking at these online and then moments later you post a video about it
Brilliant video the Spectrum is buried deep in the British psyche and I was nervous as to see what you would say, but you’ve done it justice Metal Jesus! By the way just as interesting is the company and the man behind all it Sir Clive Sinclair, a proper inventor and entrepreneur, check out the electric car - the Sinclair C5. The British computer scene in the 80s would make a cool video too
The USA got the Timex Sinclair, a few versions, I recall they were enhanced versions.
Just one version.
I grew up with ZX Spectrum in the 80s. Learned to program on the Speccy. Love it !!
This feels like a Lgr type thing.
Love that dude
@@phaser_blue what does keepin" on my man mean?
@@AdamReveland Basically "Just keep being you!"
LGR did review the original ZX Spectrum - a decade ago! =)
ua-cam.com/video/tqnIa4rXK_c/v-deo.html
Great to hear that you're pronouncing 'Z'X correctly - a lot of American youtubers tend to pronounce it 'Zee' X Spectrum.