Once you learn a Sinclair keyboard, muscle memory takes over. When I was 13 I could type out a BASIC program faster on a squishy Speccy keyboard than anyone could on a 'proper' typewriter style keyboard and that was down to the keys having the BASIC commands on them. It only took weeks to master too. I grant you that it is not as easy to learn these things as an adult though 😉
Even cooler was watching someone hook a record player up to a vintage computer to directly load a "Floppy-ROM." That is, an Eva-Tone flexidisc w/ (a) program(s) stored on it.
@@Madness832 Even cooler than that is hooking my Laptop to my 1983 Apple IIe, via the Apple's cassette port in, selecting a wav file disk image on my laptop from the apple disk server website, then watching the Apple format a disk, write the disk image to a 5 1/4" floppy disk, reboot, then boot the disk as if it was the original disk. And all without me having to do anything other than hit a key to reboot. Amazing.
Indeed. I found it even cooler how this was done between real C-64 and an emulator. For C-64 emulators there is a file-format .T64, which represents the contents of a tape - you load one in emulator and tell it to load from it (then did you have to select to press the play button from emulator menu, you did have to do that on the real thing, right?). Then there were two programs, one to turn a T64 into a WAV and another to turn WAV into a T64 file. The sound will be different, more robust I would say - probably takes more time to degrade to unreadable than regular... Which is why with some casettes I got in 1999 and after, I recorded them into my computer, made a T64 and then made it back to new WAV file and recorded it on tape again :) Sometimes it even read correctly a recorded WAV that didn't read through with the real C-64 datasette anymore, essentially save the content from a degraded cassette. But it was fricking cool, and still is. If you dabble with C-64 cassettes, maybe create new games on an emulator, etc. you should look for this software if you already haven't! Disclaimer: I know the video isn't about C-64 - anyone thinking of telling me that this is no use with Sinclair, please don't. You're missing it - and maybe a chromosome too ;) Edit: Should have looked through the replies first and I wouldn't have ever used the words "even cooler" in my comment :D I'm not taking them out though - funnier this way :)
This was the last Sinclair computer sold by Timex in the USA, but it was not the last Sinclair computer sold in the USA -- Sinclair Research in Nashua, NH sold a U.S. version of the Sinclair QL via mail-order in 1985, although obviously it was another failure in the marketplace. Sir Clive's Cambridge Z88 portable computer was also sold here and was somewhat more successful.
I didn't know the QL was here! I started my IT passion on a TS1000 and got a 2068 new before moving on to a 1040ST, then TT030 then Macs. Just bought a TS1500 and still coding assembly (games) for the TS1000. Also in for KS2 of the Spectrum next!
You know, sometimes I wonder what the world would have been like if old Clive hadn't got the hankering for electric vehicles about forty years too early. Sinclair could've been some kind of early Microsoft/Apple ten years early. Instead he bankrupted himself on a battery-powered bike.
The single keypress based commands on this line of computers is a legacy from the 1K ZX80 - as well as only requiring one keypress to select a command keyword, only one byte is required to store it in memory; furthermore, this makes the BASIC interpreter much simpler (=more compact) to implement as it does not have to parse text as such, and does not have to handle any syntax errors of spelling
So, that's why a letter by letter typed Basic command didn't work. It was in 1986 when I used the English version (ZX Spectrum) of this computer, but I still remember I was stuck with this problem for 1 day.
The PET, Apple ][, Acorn BBC also only use 1 byte to store each keyword in memory. The advantage of the system Sinclair used it that it did syntax checking and only allowed the syntacially correct keywords to be entered: there is no way, for example, to try to enter, say, PRINT FOR with both as keywords; once PRINT is pressed the command keywords are replaced by function keywords. The other micros (mentioned above) just scanned the line and tokenadised it, any syntax checking was left to run time - which the Sinclair machines had already done.
This was my first computer in Argentina, although I learned with a ZX-81 so I was already familiar with the whole keyboard tokens thing and it was pretty fast to use (in the other hand I began working as a programmer in a company in which I had access to the IBM-PC, some friends later on bought Commodore 64s, a Sinclair QL -what a beauty killed by its tape cartridges-, and few years later I worked on a Logo public workshop with over 30 computers that included Spectrum, TI-994A, MSX, Commodore 64 and an IBM-PC Jr. so having the chance to extensively using what was on the market, and even knowing the drawbacks, I wasn't that unhappy with my 2068). As a curiosity, after buying it I found and bought from a book store a 2068 tech manual that included the entire Z80 assembler code for its ROM. I have no clue of how it got there, for it seemed to be a Timex-Sinclair document meant for in house use: it was printed in a light blue recycled paper in an odd font that seemed to be vectorialy drawn, with the covers made in the same paper, so it seemed to be a draft copy, and it was about 10 cm thick, about the size of a white/yellow pages (phone guide) from that time. Even later I got a thermal printer lent, it was incredibly noisy and looking trough this tech manual with a friend, we managed to change the internal clock speed hence altering the pitch of the printer noise, so we had the wrong idea of making music with it. We fried some components from the motherboard in the attempt, with a puffing noise and a little cloud of white smoke, and that was the end of my 2068 experience.
@@blitzmensch the paper was so thin and low quality, it didn't survive the pass of time. I had to throw it away a couple of years ago, when moving. I took it and noticed the ink was lost, and it was pointless to keep it around anymore.
@@blitzmensch BTW, the "paper" was a book about 10 cm (4 inches) thick made of thin recycled paper layers, a couple thousand pages, glued togheter on one edge, no covers. The whole ROM was listed in Z80 assembler (eg. instructions like LD HL, one per line), plus some text to document blocks of code.
Some Timex 2068 were made in Portugal. All of them sold here had the "unicorn" emulator cartridge bundled for free. We also had the 2048 which was ZX 48K fully compatible.
@@LuisDanielLopes Those +2As etc hilariously came about After Alan Sugar, of Amstrad fame, bought Sinclair Research. At that point you see a very different industrial design, with vastly improved keyboards and integrated storage devices. First the tape player, much like on the CPC 464. But also later a model with a 3" floppy, same as on the CPC 6128.
Advertising the computer as 72K reminds me of companies advertising a computer today as having "20GB" when it actually has 4GB of RAM plus an Intel Optane caching SSD...
OMG, I did NOT know this was still a thing! :O ...again a thing? Whatever, this is the first time I've heard of this :D I've been amused by the thought that SSD is likely fast enough that emulating my first PC, an IBM PS/1 286 with a megabyte of RAM -space- would work fine by using a file to emulate the RAM :D But SSD as RAM, like having a 16GB of swapping with 4GB of RAM - shouldn't that make the system unusable smoothly when you're going to around 6-10GB's, which seems to be the average with my 20GB (of real RAM) Lenovo ThinkPad...? Or is this Intel Optane some super SSD that kinda comes close to RAM speeds? Might be interesting to see if in close future we're going back to how it was in the early days, when storage and RAM were not a separate thing :) But this kind of stuff is just bulls ballsack throwing contest - not cool. Sometimes there has been products doing stuff like that, but not being dishonest like that and advertise more like "4GiB of RAM and a caching SSD combined to give you virtually 20GiB of RAM with nearly indistinguishable performance *small print* _performance may vary depending on use case, not suitable for memory critical operations_ " I could be OK about it - I'm not OK about it being advertised *as* 20GB when it isn't.
This has been a problem before options. Sometimes drives are sold as "hybrid" SSD and HDD, which is fine, but some deceptive ads describe drives with ordinary caches, solid state memory that was a very small fraction of the disk memory. I haven't seen much described as "hybrid" lately, but I have seen it for drives sold by third-parties on Amazon and eBay. Uptake just has some fancy algorithms for deciding what's used often enough to be kept on SSD, and what can be dumped and left on the hard drive disk. But it does make mistakes and the benefits are highly dependent on what kind of task the PC is doing. Besides "ram disks", there are swap partitions and swap files, which are basically doing the same thing. That's why in modern Linux, swap size should match ram memory, up to about 8GBs. Years ago the recommended double the ram size. For more than 8GBs ram, well besides for hibernating there's not going to be much use for all that "disk" memory, anyways. That amount of RAM can be easily utilized, the user might consider having no swap at all.
I had a ZX Spectrum as a kid and it was the first computer I learned to program on. I actually found the preset commands on the keys quite useful when learning - especially if English is a second language. You also knew for a fact the full command set - no hidden commands. All in all, I quite enjoyed learning basic this way.
In Chile we had 4 different ZX Spectrum compatible NTSC microcomputers during the 80s: Timex Sinclair 2068 , Timex Computer 2048, Microdigital TK-90X and Sinclair ZX Spectrum (16K and 48K, NTSC). Both the Timex Computer 2048 and the TK-90X were 99.9% compatible with the ZX Spectrum 48K.
Correction: the SEGA Master System didn't use the GI AY-3-8912; it actually used the TI SN76489, which is similar, but not the same. Also, the AY-3-8912 was the sound chip in the ZX Spectrum 128, +2, and +3 models, supplementing the horrid little beeper from the original Speccy and Spectrum+.
In my C64 days I was hardly interested in the alternatives like the Sinclair. But now its a joy to see these machines in action and get the technical backgrounds. This channel is gold, thanks!
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000. I used simple C64 progs on it till I was able to get ZX81 books for it. I really liked the keyword shortcuts (no thoughtless misspellings to trigger error codes…) I suppose an emulator now would need a special keyboard or an overlay but I'm up for it
Good video, and I loved learning about the improvements the 2068 brought over the Spectrum. That said the comparison with the VIC-20 is interesting but feels off to me. In Britain the main rival to the Spectrum 48k (an inferior machine to the 2068!) was the Commodore 64, and many playground arguments were had about which was superior. The VIC 20... the graphics were extremely low resolution (and screen was essentially text based with user defined characters limiting it further), and with 5K of total RAM in the unexpanded machine, it simply wasn't practical to create the kinds of games that were available on the Spectrum. Cartridges? Cartridges were considered expensive - games on tape varied from about 2GBP to 10GBP, while cartridges generally cost way more than 10GBP, hard for kids on pocket money to afford - and didn't completely workaround the VIC 20's limitations. They were also limited to 16K, so didn't really work around the 5k RAM limit, they just made it slightly less painful. I think you also may have shortchanged the Spectrum/Timex machines on expandibility too. Sinclair released a variety of interfaces that, assuming the 2068 was a compatible, should have worked without issue. This included their Microdrives system - a floppy disk alternative that was considerably cheaper (50GBP per drive, plus 75GPB for the interface which supported up to... 8 I think?... and added networking) although there were, like all Sinclair systems, reliability questions. It also had substantial third party support including several model of "real" floppy disk drives. Maybe those weren't available on the US, but there's a listing here that's specifically 2068 oriented that covers much of the hardware available: www.timexsinclair.com/computers/timex-sinclair-2068/articles/hardware-reviews/ so I assume hardware support was good from that. And given the unintentionally short lifetime of the 2068 I'd assume Timex planned to release US versions of Sinclair's interfaces and Microdrives. In the end people were not comparing a 48k machine to a cheaper 5k one, the big issue was that at some point in 1982 it simply became impossible to sell new incompatible models of 8 bit computers in virtually every market. Commodore themselves found this out the hard way with the C16 and +4, and the era is littered with 8 bit computers that just didn't get anywhere. Everyone knew at that point that if you wanted something with a large software library consisting of the types of program you wanted, the only options were X and Y, where X and Y were different in each country. People weren't buying computers any more to learn how to use computers, they were buying it for the software, and bang for buck wasn't really the primary consideration over what you'd already heard of, recommendations from others, and existing third party support. (EDIT: Apologies if there's an "Actually" tone to this, there isn't intended to be, it's just... VIC 20? It feels really off!)
Both the Spectrum and Apple ][ had "messed up" screens...I don't remember the Apple ][ being classed as cheap. The Apple ][ screen mapping is described as deliberately messed up in the manuals. Looking at the maps you'll see it's not for cheapness (it's probably cheaper to go from one row to the next like the PET), but for efficiency (and speed) of putting characters on the screen. On the Apple ][ the top row is the 1st 40 bytes of the screen RAM, the next 40 bytes are the 40 bytes of the 9th screen row, the next 40 bytes are the 17th row of the screen. The next 8 bytes are off the screen. That's the first 128 bytes of screen RAM The next 128 bytes are rows 2, 10, 18 and 8 spare bytes, and so on, with each row in each third of the screen starting 128 bytes after the previous row! The spare 8 bytes in each 128 bytes of the 1024 bytes allocated to the screen are allocated to the peripheral cards (in the slots). This weird mapping is carried over into the high res screen. The Spectrum screen is designed for fast character insertion: Think of the screen in character cells. For 8 character rows, there are 32 cells across the row, and the next row starts 32 bytes further on in memory, taking 256 bytes of memory. But each character is made up of 8x8 pixels. The 8 pixels across are stored in a byte, so 8 bytes,are required for each character. These are stored 256 bytes apart in memory - the second pixel row of a character is 256 bytes in memory after the first row, and so on for each 8 pixel rows. This means that the definition of the character pixels can be stored in 8 sequential memory locations accessible by incrementing the low byte of the memory pointer by 1 each time, but when transferring to screen memory, the locations are I incremented by 256, or an increment of 1 to the high byte of the memory pointer each time. The next two blocks of 8 rows follow the same pattern. This pattern makes it easy and quick to convert a screen x,y position to a memory location, and back again, via (fast processor) bit operations (unlike the need to multiply or divide by 40 for, say, a PET), along with reading screen pixel patterns to compare against character definitions.
Ah, the days when magazines printed out entire programs for you to type into your computer. The first game I remember typing in was a Basic version of Air Attack for the Commodore Pet in 1980 or thereabouts. I probably still have the magazine somewhere...
Yes, and sometimes you would also see one of the articles about what to poke to do interesting things with the hardware. On the ZX80 the whole bus went out on the expansion connector so you could hang some prototype hardware out there and drive it.
I miss those days, I remember having several books with BASIC programs for the various computers I've had over the years from my VIC-20, to my Tandy 1000SX, and others. Plus I remember subscribing to COMPUTE! Magazine back in the day.
You didn't mention the Timex extended screen modes. There's an extended colour mode where the colour cells are 8x1 pixels instead of 8x8. Then there's a monochrome mode of 512x192 pixels, doubling the horizontal resolution. I don't think much software made any use of these though because they're unique to the TS2068. I'd expect that the AY sound chip is still accessible with the ZX Spectrum ROM in place, but ZX Spectrum software won't have been written to use it. The 128K Spectrums used the same sound chip, but present at a different I/O port address. There are 48K Spectrum games that use the 128K sound chip, so theoretically it would be possible to patch one of these to use the TS2068's sound chip address. The computer also lived on until 1989 in Portugal and Poland.
The 512x192 monochrome mode was identical to one in the prototype of Pandora, the portable Spectrum that never made it out before Sinclair sold up to Amstrad. The Pandora screen driver software, which had multiple independent windows and much better font support, was developed in the Sinclair Cambridge labs on a 2068 and an old Zenith green-screen monitor (the same model as you can see in the police chief's office in Bladerunner!) that had been modified to the same (very odd) aspect ratio that the Pandora's flat-screen CRT presented.
I rememeber i had ported apple ii ‘star trek’ game to the ts2068 using the 512 pixel mode. I wish i still had all the casette for the software I had written for it. Memories...
There were 48K Spectrum games that used the AY chip, if it was present on the same IO port as on a 128K Spectrum. I'm suspecting this one probably is, as there were also AY expansions ("Sound Card" if you will) for 48K Spectrums that would make use of this code in games that didn't _need_ the 128K RAM. Also, those extra graphics modes were also available in the SAM Coupé, along with one that was true 16 colour, 1 colour per-pixel, from a pretty reasonably pallet selection, but it really needed the faster Z80C processor to use it efficiently. I wonder how good the compatibility may be between Sam Coupé and TS2068 using those modes would be? I would be surprised if porting would be much of a challenge, that's for sure.
@Alex I have two of these Polish models, one with the standard keyboard and one with 'real' keys. I also have this TS2068 and the TC2068. In fact, I have about 30 different Spectrum compatible machines 😁 beta.collectorsbridge.com/collections/425?page=5
@@bobsobol Sadly, I think it predates the use of the standard audio port of the 128k. Some early AY addons for the 48k existed that used wildly different addresses. Most modern AY sound cards will use the same address as the 128k. In theory it might be easier to patch individual games to use the 2068's AY address than phsyically mod the 2068.
The Sinclair C5 was mega-hyped in the UK as a "revolutionary transport device" (much like the Segway), but proved to be just a very underwhelming, lame electric scooter intended to suck up Welsh govenment subsidies.
@@haweater1555 From my memory, it was ridiculed before it was produced and after it was produced. The media in the U.K. decided to let it fail before anyone had had one. It was a great idea let down by the technology of the time and the "open" design. These are the memories I have as I was around as a geeky teenager at the time :)
The Sega master system uses something similar to the AY called the Texas Instrument SN76489. Being it has 3 channels only capable of playing square waves, and one more dedicated to noise. Although, the third channel and the 4th channel collide with each other. Artists had to get creative when it came to percussion. Being forced to use a limited noise macro option if they wanted the third PSG channel. Even then, it was pretty limited. So they used it for harmonics or bass usually. But basically, it is just a dummied down version of the AY. (This is a huge oversimplification)
I had the TS2068 and got it from Electronics Store "Pedro Benavides" in Caracas Venezuela. Nice Computer in that time many magazines had programs and tricks to implement with the computer I sold it and got my first PC an Equity from EPSON.
As a 12 year old I got used to the keyboard entry system right away, and could type listings in pretty fast within months and I previously had used traditional keyboards on other computers. One thing to remember is that the UK versions had a colour coded system on the keys, which did help to speed up the learning of that entry method.
something else that's not always appreciated is that most of the function assignments make some sort of sense. P for PRINT for example. LOAD isn't on L, which is given to LET, which is an incredibly important command for declaring and assigning values to variables in BASIC. Instead, it's on the nearby J. K is closer, but is given over to LIST. another important BASIC command. of course, this is all sidestepped in the later 128K Basic which allows letter by letter entry and is preferred on emulation. These machines exist in a particular vacuum of time where the software was expected to be used on these machines.
You know what's cool? Since every ZX Sprectrum software is stored in a sound file, this means that you can load a game from pretty much anything. Phone? Yes. Computer? Yes. Walkman? Yes. Kinda cool ngl.
It's literally digital analog conversion, nothing more. You could store anything you want on a c64 on a cassette, hell, you could do the same for your current pc... (even if your pc needs software to do that)
Pretty much all home computers from the early 80s used cassete tapes as a storage medium. A C64 costed $600 at release while the 1541 floppy drive was $400. It wasn't until the mid 80s that floppy drives dropped in price, though they caught on earlier in the US compared to the rest of the world.
Let me say it, your content is probably some of the best you can find on UA-cam, period. The dedication put to the videos, the research, the edition... Everyting is so polished that I can't complain. There's not a thing I can objectively say 'this can be improved'. Congratulations, David. You deserve a place in history, for bringing history to us.
You'd be amazed how many UK games programmers started their careers with the ZX Spectrum, including me. The display RAM layout isn't that weird - if you're not crossing one of the boundaries, all you had to do in machine code to get to the next line down was to increase the high byte of the address.
Definitely need to make a bigger EPROM for those 2 ROMs, with a switch on the top address line to switch between them so you dont have to swap out chips to go between modes!!
@@TheJeremyHolloway Yep, Amigas have them too! They were especially needed when the A1200 came out so that you could switch to the old Kickstart ROM, otherwise a lot of older games wouldn't run on the A1200. Even the Amiga500+ and the A600 would have needed a ROM switcher, methinks, due to the Kickstart 2 ROM in those models.
Those shortcut key commands were no problem at all for me back in the day when I was 12 years old. Great computer. It taught me assembler programming and I ended up writing an emulator for it on the PC later on. The ROM in it is very good.
Me too. I bought a new 25 MHz 486 in 1993 just to be able to write the emulator in my beloved high level language, instead of in 286 assembly. But I'm older, I was 17 when I bough my first ZX-80 and 81.
READ THE SMALL PRINT "You pay only $397 when you order." To get the $197 you have to send to them another computer or game console, and the other $100 is a manufacture rebate. So not really $197 is it.
I don't know if it's the same on the 2068, but on the original ZX Spectrum line you could get the sound output simply by connecting to the MIC socket as the tape output and speaker shared the same I/O port. While it might have been the last US Sinclair/Timex machine, Sinclair did go on to produce a 128K Spectrum and the QL (targeted at business) before being bought out by Amstrad who released the +2, +2A, and +3 Spectrum derivatives. Amstrad also released the Sinclair PC 200, a CGA PC clone that didn't really have much impact. Under the brand Cambridge Computers, Sinclair also sold the Z88 which was a portable and I think Sir Clive's last computer product.
The C5 = Sinclair's Doom! Speaking of ROMs, you can find one or two online that implement a regular keyboard input (similar to ZX Spectrum +2 implementation). Anyway, very nice video!
@@DavidLee-df888 Actually it was made in a vacuum cleaner factory(Hoover). And I don't think the washing machine motor is strictly true, because washing machine motors are 110AC or 230VAC, and the C5 was 12VDC. It basically ran on a car battery, which likely wouldn't have lasted very long. Because lead-acid vehicle batteries are not really designed to handle repeated, charge, discharge, cycles.
@@jezz2k SAM released in 89, Spectrum in 2017 can really not be compared. I meant among the computers that challenged the 16 bit ones. Spectrum Next is a nostalgic release. I never had one (SAM) so I wanted to know more. Which of the 8-bit computers pre 90 was the best then? Or pre 95? Not newly designed stuff. You can build an improved new T-ford today - I would never buy one.
Commodore 64 vs 48k Spectrum was THE school playground rivalry for us British computer kids back in ‘83. We don’t count the BBC Micro because only the rich kids could afford those. Hey 8-Bit guy check out ‘Micro Men’ on YT, it’s a retelling of the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn, and the heat to win the contract for the BBC Micro. But it also shows Sir Clive Sinclair’s obsession with the C5. Great original intercut real TV news from the time about how the U.K. was gripped by the micro boom.
In the UK the Spectrum was a lot cheaper, I think the games were much better than the VIC20 due to the extra RAM too. There is no question though, the C64 was better than the Spectrum :D, it was still more expensive but the C64 was much better. Of course when we got to the Spectrum 128k it became a lot more competitive against the C64.
That bit with the game loading with the commentary over the top of it - did anyone else imagine the loading sounds in their head while they watched it? :-)
The video on the TS2068 is more advanced than the ZX Spectrum. It has more video modes and some have a higher resolution. Also, the "ULA" is called the "SCLD" instead. It also had a full memory bank controller and the Spectrum did not. I coded on the TS2068 for many years. I even made hardware expansions. Be careful with hardware modifications. The SCLD is extremely sensitive and I would avoid connecting anything directly to it. Also, Timex had disk drives and other companies had streaming tape drives.
Hi tech guy do enjoy your videos thanks for all the Sinclair coverage. One advantage of the "keywords" on the Sinclair units, was each had its own "sinclair custom ascii" code. So for example storing the command PRINT only took up one byte in memory not five. Having space savings like this helped allow much larger BASIC programs to be written into the somewhat limited memory.
lol. Pretty common trick for systems that stored anything on tape, because the tape is just regular audio tape. The only common system this fails with is the Atari microcomputers, because they use a dedicated tape drive over the SIO connection. For the longest time I thought this was just for the sake of being proprietary... But it turns out it's a cost cutting measure for the computer. (at the cost of making the tape drive do some of the work.) SIO is used for a wide variety of peripherals, including purely digital ones. So it turns out that the Atari has a DAC, but not an ADC. That means it can put out an audio signal (which it uses when saving to tape), but it can't accept one. To get around this with the tape drive, the drive itself actually has two band pass filters tuned to the frequencies used by the tape, and... Feeds the result through the digital input lines... Ironically the Atari uses stereo tapes and has an audio passthrough, so you can play cassette audio in sync to your program if you write your tape correctly. (think of it as a much clumsier version of CD audio in games.) Rarely used, but it's an interesting idea...
I went for the BBC Micro Model B after working all summer to afford it, and then waiting several months for it to arrive! One of my roommates at uni had a Speccy though, and I remember playing a bunch of Jetpac on it.
Yep, back then in communists states people used to say "if you don't steal you steal from your children". So because export of high-tech electronics to comm-countries was forbidden, and it was cheaper to steal than to develop own computers, they (mainly ZSSR and CSSR) stole and copied 1-1 the ZX design. In Bulgary they stole Oric Atmos design. There were few exceptions, in the former Yugoslavia they were making Oric Atmos by legaly buying license and parts. They also made few of theyr own computers like Galaxia, Orao, Iskra Delta... Hungary has also legaly imported some Enterprise 128 computers...
My 1st computer! Made me so happy to see it in action after all these years. Those shortcut key commands were pretty annoying...I would program for hours every day as a 12 year old, and never really got fast using them.
Remember that the ZX Basic language was tokenised, so took up less memory than other computers of the time, where you typed the whole word in, plus meant fewer typos. In your example, PRINT took one byte, whereas on other computers it was six bytes (P, R, I, N, T & SPACE). It also meant that runtime interpretation could be quicker. It very quickly became easy and fast to use.
The only computer of the time that I know of which didn't tokenadise its basic was the Acorn Atom, though it did allow abbreviations to cut down memory usage. The CBM PETs (and later), Apple ][s, Acorn BBC all tokenadised their programs. Apple's parser was extremely heavy handed in tokenadising every token it could find - useful to avoid entering spaces (which is added back around every token on listing) but a pain when it found a token in the middle of a "long" variable name (IIRC the Apple ][ along with the PETs allowed any length of variable name but only recognised the first two characters). PRINT is a bad choice of keyword; both the Apple ][ and CBM machines allowed it to be abbreviated to "?" The Acorn Atom and BBC allowed "P." as an abbreviation. The CBMs also allowed all keywords to be abbreviated due to how the tokening routine worked - you typed the first few characters and then shifted the next. eg GOSUB could be abbreviated to GOs (with the S shifted, usually producing a heart symbol); when listed the full keyword was there as the token was expanded. This did lead to confusion with some people. Specifically the # of PRINT# and INPUT# was part of the keyword. Trying to use ?# as an abbreviation for PRINT# looked ok, but generated a syntax error on running as it was the print token followed by a '#' character. The correct abbreviation was Pr (P followed by shift-R). As the # needs to be checked to change the token, INPUT# proceeds INPUT in the list of tokens. Thus "In" generates INPUT#, and there is no abbreviation for INPUT.
@@AmstradExin It's quite a big jump between the two. But possible. I immediately said "uh, no it wasn't" having programmed said chip in the past, ah well lol
Hm.. there was also something like Melodik: zxspectrum48.i-demo.pl/aymusic.html .. normal 48k spectrum could play 128k songs.. it was a huge leap..:) There is also now this: hw.speccy.cz/melodik2.html .. so if you have some time.. GO FOR IT :D
Awwww I was hoping you'd do more on the Sinclair computers, especially the one I had, the ZX Spectrum 128k+ (the grey one with included / built in cassete player). I know ZX Spectrums weren't that famous in the US but I was still hoping you'd do a video on them eventually... oh well...
I saved aluminum can money and bought my first computer the Tymex Sinclair 1000, memory expansion and chess game. I program a lunar lander game for based on a magazine article. Met Steve Jobs 6months later when he delivered some apple computers to our high school.
Oh, my God! I had one of these. Talk about a blast from the past. My father bought me one from Kmart in 1983, of all places. But, I graduated to an Atari 800XL soon afterward.
You're incorrect about "All Sinclairs" having no option to type commands without using the shortcuts, the Sinclair 128K model introduced 128 BASIC which allowed normal typing. The 48K+ and all subsequent Sinclair branded models also had a vastly improved keyboard, it still wasn't perfect by modern standards but it did the job. When Amstrad took over they improved on the keyboard still further and retained 128 BASIC. In any case, once you got used to the weird shortcut layout you could program very fast, I still remember all the shortcuts decades later!
He also seems to have forgotten the Sinclair QL which used a much more structured basic and no keyword entry - you had to type the who lot...mind you it used a 68008 processor, not the Z80 of the previous machines. Rumour has it the 68008 was chosen over the 680000 as it was cheaper when designing the machine, but when production was started the 68000 was cheaper. Though it does cut the data bus required in half so would make the PCB cheaper...
Well given the Vic 20 was dreadful (I had one for years, thanks), he doesn't understand why the screen layout works the way it does (hint, learn some z80 assembly and think about printing a line of text), he doesn't get the additional screen modes and uses poke rather than plot to make a point and doesn't understand how you read a character at a screen position even though it's in the manual, gets the master system sound chip wrong and uses an assertive tone throughout it seemed much in the same vein as the previous retrospectives on the subject. Sure, come to it with C64 love, come to it thinking that the ViC 20 was a half decent computer (seriously?). But at least ask questions and shoot later. Typically I make a rule of not watching 8 bit guy on anything non Commodore as it's so depressingly inevitable. I broke that rule like a fat person going for the Pringles. I should have known. Great on many subjects, but sadly this time struck out. But so many people like the video so that's cool too.
@@cigmorfil4101 More like he focuses on the variants that made it to US shores. The sad thing is that European nations imported way more from USA back then than the other way. So living in Europe you got quite familiar with both local and US computers. But the other way round is not really the case. You could notice this in his summary video on storage formats, where the barely touched on the 3" floppy used by Amstrad (Nintendo used a very similar, but incompatible format for their famicom btw).
@@cigmorfil4101 I think the most significant factor in choosing the 68008 for the QL was that it allowed the designers to use standard 8-bit wide memory and support chips, plus that it simplified the layout of the circuit board quite a lot.
14:20 how much would a RAM expansion cart for VIC-20 cost in 1983? I realise a fully expanded VIC-20 would still have less RAM than a Timex Sinclair but it'd be a lot closer than the 5K of the stock system 14:40 even with an emulator cart, wouldn't availability of software be greater for the VIC-20 unless you'd resort to importing software from Europe?
The comparison the VIC-20 is irrelevant because the TS2068 didn't reach the market until November 1983, by which time the C64 was already selling below $200.
I remember buying my 16k expansion cart for the VIC 20 for around $40. I think you could get it cheaper through mail order but I was 12 at the time and had to rely on what my local Commodore store had in stock. Also I think the expansion's original price was $79
Very nice!! Would love to see an episode about the BBC Micro. Born and raised in the US I had heard little about this but became fascinated upon reading 'Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer' and learning about their national computer literacy project and the BBC producing their own easy-to-use and program computer. Compared to all the PEEKS and POKES I had to put up with as a kid I was shocked to learn how the BBC made the included BASIC easy to use for graphics , music, sounds and thus games. Even the manual (which I recently downloaded to read) was easier and more friendly than either the VIC or C64 manuals; including coding projects to make your own custom charters and code for a lunar lander type game as just one example - wow!
Even as it wasn't co-marketed by Timex, there is one more computer that was sold in the USA. The Sinclair QL. Heck you could even say there was yet another Sinclair computer, the Cambridge Z88 (based on the Z80) which was made by Cambridge Computer, the new company that Sir Clive started after he sold Sinclair Research to Amstrad. Both were sold in the USA but very few of each were sold. So saying the TS2068 was the last in the line of computers of Sinclair Research sold in the USA is not completely true. Timex left the market after the TS2068 but Sir Clive fumbled along for two more computers in the USA. One more thing. The Sinclair QL was sold as a 32bit computer (it used the Motorola 68008 processor designed to work with 8-bit memory systems.)
I recall that the QL was marketed as a "16 bit computer" - not 32 bit? [edit: I've found snippets where employees said they would have preferred it wasn't described 32 bit at the launch/pre-launch. archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1984-06/page/126/mode/2up Wow! Talk about stretching the truth! I think they feel back on 16bit as more plausible - in Atari nomenclature it would be an ET 8/32 😆 ] You're right of course about the 68008 being designed with the 8 bit memory bus. This was whilst other computers such as the Atari ST, Amiga and Macintosh all used the 'full' 68000 to start with. The ST was named after the 16/32 bit buses on the 68000. Later the TT was 32/32 when they moved up to a true 32 bit chip 68030. archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1984-06/page/170/mode/2up Computer companies have long cheated with odd 'marketing math' to mislead the uninformed public, such as the '64 bit' Atari Jaguar that had 32 bit CPU and a 32bit DSP (alongwith 64 bit GPU) to make it 'the first 64 bit console'.
I used to think that the Sinclair line was rubbish back in the day but honestly the manuals and documentation of the time was far superior to anything that came out for the Atari (until something like De Re Atari). I mean, what other computer had the ROM disassembled and printed in a book that you could buy at a bookstore? Very few, save for the Atari Basic and DOS, which were created by Shepherdson Microsystems (Later OSS). Also it's one of the few platforms that is legal to ship the ROM code with an emulator (Clanto's C64 notwithstanding). Lastly there is an excellent book describing the ULA (The ZX Spectrum ULA: How to Design a Microcomputer). I've become a late fan of these computers in part because while there was literally no corner left uncut they still managed to make something usable that wasn't too precious about hacking into the internals.Perhaps the only other computers of the day that were more "open" were hobbyist computers like the H-89, the AIM-65, and the IMSAI 8080 / Altair 8800.
Ah yes. That's something that's easy to overlook. Documentation. Atari was notorious for terrible documentation. Even the Jaguar was partly taken down by terrible documentation. And for the 8 bit micros Atari even started with the point of view that the general public didn't deserve to have any development documentation, which certainly wouldn't have helped any... Not just poorly made documentation, but actively withholding information... Yeah, great thing to do with a microcomputer, huh. XD
I do remember acquiring in a "dumpster dive" some technical manuals for the IBM-PC -- which included a wealth of technical information in several binders -- including ROM listings but also schematics. Of course these weren't included with a purchase of the IBM-PC -- you had to order them separately (I do vaguely recall they weren't cheap -- but then again, if you could afford to spend $5,000 or more on the IBM-PC, a couple hundred more for these manuals probably wasn't a huge deal -- especially if you bought the computer for engineering purposes).
I do recall that the manual that came with the Sinclair ZX-81 was pretty good -- it was mostly a tutorial BASIC as implemented on the system. Another decent manual for learning programming was found with the TRS-80 for the Level 1 BASIC interpreter. What was presented in these manuals, it was indeed possible to become "self taught" in BASIC. Most other systems had BASIC manual that was more a reference manual than a tutorial for BASIC. Though I "cut my teeth" on the "Trash-eighty" and using the ZX-81 seemed a step backwards, I did know enough to have an appreciation the level of minimalism of the Sinclair ZX-80/81 represented.
@Craig Maloney You've probably seen magazines publish "head-to-head" comparisons of various computers, but here in Denmark, a magazine even published a head-to-head review of computer MANUALS! Needless to say that the manuals for the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum were head and shoulders above the rest.
The keyboard is scanned in an amazingly cheap way - 5 row bits read via the ULA port and 8 rows controlled by the high byte of the address bus. Thus 40 keys max.
This comment is about the speccy vs. C64. As an 8 yr old, the C64 didn't have any graphic commands or commands to make sound. The speccy had lines, circles, and beep commands. As an 8yr old, this was so much easier. I never understood C64 sprites till I was an adult many years later, but did understand "UDGs" on the speccy and also how to make your own fonts. I also thought Z80 was easier than 6502(10) as a 10yr old (though didn't spend much time on C64 assembler, but spent a lot of time on Z80). Main reason for using the speccy is because all of my friends had them. I the UK, there were a ton of peripherals for them, more so than the C64 - different kinds of disk drives, many different printer interfaces, many different joystick and multifunction interfaces where you could store a snapshot of the RAM onto a storage device (tape or microdrive). I do agree that technically, the C64 was the better machine, but as an 8-10yr old in the UK, nobody had a C64, but I knew 10 people that had a spectrum. I never knew anyone that had a Vic20. I don't remember even stores having them.
3:36 Look Commodore boy, you don't get to complain about shift and 0 to delete when Commodore couldn't even be bothered to include four directional arrows. :D 6:33 It's less likely a cost saving measure: It seems like it's designed to make it very quick and easy to plot 8x8 characters to the screen. The system is about one mental leap away from having a tile graphics generator. 7:19 There were third party solutions for disk drives. Sinclair intended to use endless loop tape drives, called Microdrives as a storage medium, but it was unreliable and never really caught on. Had the Timex Sinclair caught on I imagine most of these periphericals would have turned up in due course.
5:45 technically speaking, most modern computers still have a text mode which is mostly used in Real mode or beginning stages of Protected mode and can be accessed with bios interrupt commands.
But you wouldn't be using it to watch the video, and you would never go into it after booting your GUI. Unless you forgo X (or other equivalents) and use aaxine or something!
What you call the most annoying feature of any Sinclair Computer is in fact the thing that makes all Spectrum childs like brothers. We all love that way of typing in BASIC in the Spectrum. No one needs to "find" the command you need. You just know all the positions as anybody that knows typewriting knows where any letter is without "having to look for it".
Fun nostalgic video. Was the Timex Sinclair librarian in Toronto. Went as far as the Sinclair QL. We used small tape drives. Spent many nights programming and playing with the whole line of Sinclair computers. Sent my computers to a PC museum in Madison. Still have 2 Sinclair A bikes.
I'm always fascinated to see the American perspective on Sinclair's computers. I was a Commodore 64 head (still am) anyway, but it's still interesting. It would be really cool if you could get hold of a BBC Micro - a very popular (and powerful) British home computer that was mostly used in schools and sometimes industry/business.
Chris Curry claims the only American who has ever understood what Sinclair machines were intended to do was Jack Tramiel because he intended the Plus 4 to fill the same niche.
Joseph Davies I’m concerned about too much negativity on this video because I’d been asking for this for ages and he’s done it, loads of people said there was a backlash to the last Sinclair video and I was like don’t be silly! But there are a fair few snipey comments on here.
I actually got one of these a couple of years back for $10 with 2 brand new Sinclair 1000's, but the 2068 had no power supply. I thought I had one, plugged it in, and a second later BOOM! I was looking everywhere I could to figure out what chip I blew up and couldn't find it due to every image on the internet being that of a different board design, but your's is identical, and it turns out it was the sound chip! Thank you!
Yup. The C16/Plus 4 also had better BASIC than the C64. However, with that said, The old Acorn BBC Micro had probably the best BASIC I've ever used on an 8-bit computer
Around about that time, every school kid I knew was learning typing on OG typewriters. If any school had a computer, they had a C64 or some Acorn system with a decent keyboard.
@@spodula Speccys were quite common in primary schools. After Sir Clive protested, and Spectrum became an official computer for UK schools, in addition to the Beeb and RML-380Z. Sure the main problem with the Speccy in schools, due to small size it's likely much easier to steal than a BBC Computer or 380Z
People didn't use it for typing. It was for writing software, edutainmet (your parents hoped) and playing games. Printers were extremely exotic, expensive, noisy, or used awful silvery thermal paper, so serious typing was usually confined to mechanical and electronic typewriters.
The only computer I ever saw in a school prior to High school with dedicated IT classes around 1994, were all Apple II systems... Then again I didn't go to any British schools...
@@MarcKloos No, it's the character SCREEN$ returns. It worked by comparing the bitmap on the screen with the bitmaps for the character set in rom. To get the colour there was the ATTR(...) function.
@@K-o-R It actually compared it with the character set pointed to by a system variable. By default that was in ROM, however you could create your own character set in RAM, point the system variable at it - and SCREEN$ would then work with a custom character set.
ZX Spectrum is a legend. So many kids became programmers because of it, including me. In ex-USSR countries, ZX Spectrum clones with floppy disks were a thing (TR-DOS). Btw there is a strong community that still makes cool ZX Spectrum games and demos for tape and TR-DOS (ua-cam.com/video/XkKPuWZw8wg/v-deo.html - ua-cam.com/video/8c0nteoocd0/v-deo.html - ua-cam.com/video/oohkJ-Uc4tk/v-deo.html - ua-cam.com/video/8LWDFVCjtmg/v-deo.html). Timex's NTSC colors kind of suck compared to the original ZX Spectrum.
The strong point of the Sinclair computers was the pretty easy way to write assembly and make the hardware work exactly as we wanted. That was not the case with all the other computers at this time. When the first "real" PC came on the market, that all changed. However, we have developed hard- and software on the Sinclair which is used still today. With new chips of course, but the ideas we had then, were ground breaking!
Although probably not least because the Spectrum in the UK is better than the US Timex. Never owned a Spectrum, but my dad had (still has long disused) a ZX81, but moved on to the Oric instead. I knew plenty of people who had Spectrums.
Yeah the C64 was superior but it was also more expensive. In November 1982 a Commodore 64 would've been £299 whereas a 48k Spectrum was £175. A year on, the C64 was now £239 and the ZX was £129. Essentially, it's clear you get what you pay for, but both computers were very good
Really?! I never thought to try that. I never saw it mentioned anywhere when I googled for how to get line output from a Speccy. I'll have to try that and see if it works on this machine.
@@The8BitGuy I had a Sinclair Spectrum 48K and used an external sound amplifier connected to the MIC. In fact, internally the speaker, the MIC and the EAR connections all went through the same ULA pin. Internally the ULA could set that pin to three voltages: one was 0 volts, and the other two were used the lower one for "MIC only output" (to ensure that the speaker didn't make sound while storing a program in the tape), and the bigger one for "MIC and Speaker output". At software level there were two bits in the port 254 for the sound: setting both to zero would set the voltage to 0 (and allow to read data from the EAR connection); setting the MIC bit to 1 would set the pin to low voltage, and setting the SPK bit would set the pin to high voltage. To play a sound, the bit must be changed on-off quick using software.
@@MatroxMillennium Thinking about it, it was actually a common trick back in the day to get amplified sound from the 48k using the tape deck, but it kind of fell out of favour later with the rise of multiload games and later models sending audio through the RF. IIRC, You'd swap the mic over to the ear, press pause and then play and record, and the tape deck could be used as an impromptu speaker.
From my old days I still have Unipolbrit 2086 in its rarest (meaning, fully featured) version (with AY chip, 8255-based parallel port and ZX Spectrum Emulator cartridge, all of those things were optional to cut down the price of something already considerably cheap at that time). It wasn't a secret it was based on Timex Sinclair 2068 (American version) and Timex Computer 2068 (European version) and from your video I can only see it even behaves the same way (with regards of those annoying two black colors). The only obvious difference is the lack of the second joystick port (and the color of the case, Unipolbrit 2086 is black and looks more like overgrown Timex Computer 2048). Personally, I've found addition of 8255 chip a nice touch, I started to use it for small electronic projects. Eventually I wrote some piece of Z80 assembly and a bit of PC DOS software capable of loading games (those that could be cracked appropriately) directly from PC using parallel port in a matter of seconds. Anyway, your videos always bring a lot of memories!
I might have mentioned in your TS1000 video that the while I hardly ever used a TS1000 (it belonged to my brother who didn't want me to touch it) I think I owe part of my software developer career to Timex putting the programming keyboards (and graphics) right on the keyboard. Seeing these enabled my 12 year old brain to unlock the possibilities and wonders of programming.
Just one thing to note: there are like 24,000+ ZX Spectrum titles on World of Spectrum. So I think the reason to own a Timex would be to replace the ROM and explore that library.
But how many of those games are 128K only? The 128K Speccy had all the extra hardware features that the 2068 had and the 48K didn't, but only 48K RAM while the 128K Spectrum+ had 128K. Any Spectrum games that could use the 2068's hardware features probably wouldn't run because of the lack of RAM.
@@GeoNeilUK It's quite astonishing how many of those 128k games are actually just 48k games that load all at once. It was really quite late in the life of the system that genuinely 128k only games that couldn't work on 48k at all started appearing. FYI, WOS usually lists both 48k and 128k versions on the same page.
@Lassi Kinnunen Actually, it gets you more loading, unless you're really good at the game and are likely to get through the entire thing. The 128 versions tend to preload all of the level data, resulting in a longer initial load, the tradeoff for which is that there's no need to multiload later levels.
Trust me, you can become really fast on a Sinclair keyboard! All those different shifted keyword combos become burned into your memory. Also, good machine code sprite drawing algorithms were easily obtainable (and not too hard to figure out for yourself). BASIC _was_ horribly slow but we soon ditched that, for the most part. PS: The VIC-20 was despised in the UK. Awful screen modes, tiny RAM.
If only Sinclair would have added Hardware sprites and scrolling and included the AY from day one. It would have been "Goodbye Mr. Commodore." To this day though, the Spectrum still on occasion outshines the C64, becoming a sum of more than its parts.
Actually, you know what would have made a MASSIVE difference? The ULA is a gnat's wing away from being a fully featured semi-autonomous tile generator, and that would have massively reduced the amount of work required to create scrolling titles.
I should have said this years ago, but your channel is so good that even though I am not into neither know anything about vintage computers I always enjoy your videos
Good vid. Having been an owner of a ZX81 and moving to a ZX Spectrum back in the day it took about 3 months to get used to the majority of key combinations. That resulted in much faster programming for sure. I moved to a C128 after the Spectrum and found the programming on the C64 and C128 to be much more complicated.
ZX Spectrum 16Kb was my first computer in 1983. What a machine. The bright palette and nice resolution made for some incredible games, despite the colour clash.
Visits to the local computer shop in the mid-late 80's - a shop full of commodore 64 / VIC-20s all playing different versions of 'Axel F', all out of sync
1:54 I actually have a device that pulls a very similar trick here, the Psion Organiser. I was lucky enough to get one of these things complete in box and it advertises itself as having "14K memory" but if you look it up you'll find the original Psion Organiser only has 2K static RAM onboard. You may think it has a 12K ROM then, but no! It only has a 4K ROM. The remaining 8K then? That's an 8K non-rewritable EPROM memory stick that they bundled with the unit. Hence 2K static RAM + 4K ROM + 8K EPROM = 14K!
Interestingly, Psion were actually responsible for some of the earliest software released for the Spectrum, too. The "Horace" series and "Chequered Flag" spring to mind, but there were others.
@@TheTurnipKing And the office suite of word processor, spreadsheet, database and "business" graphics for the Sinclair QL - these were later ported as the exchange suite to the PC.
The input method for Sinclair BASIC did obviate the need for a parser in the BASIC interpreter (thus saving some space in the ROM) -- also by "forcing" input of only specific command/keyword at specific times also meant that you also didn't have to worry too much about syntax errors. I also vaguely recall a few interesting "features" such as the VAL() function going beyond what was typical for most other BASICs -- in most other BASICs if you typed: PRINT VAL("1+2+3") the output was typically 1 (the parser stopped at the "+"), while in Sinclair BASIC the output was 6. One minor annoyance was that Sinclair BASIC (at least on the ZX-80 and ZX-81) didn't use ASCII
Once you learn a Sinclair keyboard, muscle memory takes over. When I was 13 I could type out a BASIC program faster on a squishy Speccy keyboard than anyone could on a 'proper' typewriter style keyboard and that was down to the keys having the BASIC commands on them. It only took weeks to master too. I grant you that it is not as easy to learn these things as an adult though 😉
That´s exactly what happened when I was 11 years old programming my ZX spectrum+ Not even thinking about it.
Childhood trauma!
Mastery of commands was quickly achieved :D
Same!! On a Plus it was easier because you had a dedicated Extend Mode key.
I think it would be cool if modern keyboards had those supplemenarty words on teh keys or above/below etc
There's something incredibly cool about playing a wave file on a modern laptop and having an old computer able to load a game from that.
Even cooler was watching someone hook a record player up to a vintage computer to directly load a "Floppy-ROM." That is, an Eva-Tone flexidisc w/ (a) program(s) stored on it.
@@Madness832 Even cooler than that is hooking my Laptop to my 1983 Apple IIe, via the Apple's cassette port in, selecting a wav file disk image on my laptop from the apple disk server website, then watching the Apple format a disk, write the disk image to a 5 1/4" floppy disk, reboot, then boot the disk as if it was the original disk. And all without me having to do anything other than hit a key to reboot. Amazing.
Indeed. I found it even cooler how this was done between real C-64 and an emulator. For C-64 emulators there is a file-format .T64, which represents the contents of a tape - you load one in emulator and tell it to load from it (then did you have to select to press the play button from emulator menu, you did have to do that on the real thing, right?).
Then there were two programs, one to turn a T64 into a WAV and another to turn WAV into a T64 file. The sound will be different, more robust I would say - probably takes more time to degrade to unreadable than regular... Which is why with some casettes I got in 1999 and after, I recorded them into my computer, made a T64 and then made it back to new WAV file and recorded it on tape again :) Sometimes it even read correctly a recorded WAV that didn't read through with the real C-64 datasette anymore, essentially save the content from a degraded cassette.
But it was fricking cool, and still is. If you dabble with C-64 cassettes, maybe create new games on an emulator, etc. you should look for this software if you already haven't!
Disclaimer: I know the video isn't about C-64 - anyone thinking of telling me that this is no use with Sinclair, please don't. You're missing it - and maybe a chromosome too ;)
Edit: Should have looked through the replies first and I wouldn't have ever used the words "even cooler" in my comment :D I'm not taking them out though - funnier this way :)
Using a real tape is even cooler !!!!!
@@Madness832 I have one of those, it has 3 games, 1 for ZX81, 1 for VIC20 and 1 for Spectrum.
This was the last Sinclair computer sold by Timex in the USA, but it was not the last Sinclair computer sold in the USA -- Sinclair Research in Nashua, NH sold a U.S. version of the Sinclair QL via mail-order in 1985, although obviously it was another failure in the marketplace. Sir Clive's Cambridge Z88 portable computer was also sold here and was somewhat more successful.
I didn't know the QL was here! I started my IT passion on a TS1000 and got a 2068 new before moving on to a 1040ST, then TT030 then Macs. Just bought a TS1500 and still coding assembly (games) for the TS1000. Also in for KS2 of the Spectrum next!
You know, sometimes I wonder what the world would have been like if old Clive hadn't got the hankering for electric vehicles about forty years too early. Sinclair could've been some kind of early Microsoft/Apple ten years early. Instead he bankrupted himself on a battery-powered bike.
I seem to also recall an ill-fated Sinclair PC though I don't recall if it was sold in the US. Not really Sinclair in any meaningful way though.
The single keypress based commands on this line of computers is a legacy from the 1K ZX80 - as well as only requiring one keypress to select a command keyword, only one byte is required to store it in memory; furthermore, this makes the BASIC interpreter much simpler (=more compact) to implement as it does not have to parse text as such, and does not have to handle any syntax errors of spelling
So, that's why a letter by letter typed Basic command didn't work. It was in 1986 when I used the English version (ZX Spectrum) of this computer, but I still remember I was stuck with this problem for 1 day.
The PET, Apple ][, Acorn BBC also only use 1 byte to store each keyword in memory.
The advantage of the system Sinclair used it that it did syntax checking and only allowed the syntacially correct keywords to be entered: there is no way, for example, to try to enter, say, PRINT FOR with both as keywords; once PRINT is pressed the command keywords are replaced by function keywords. The other micros (mentioned above) just scanned the line and tokenadised it, any syntax checking was left to run time - which the Sinclair machines had already done.
@@gabormiklay9209 your memory is probably foggy, as a word by word command cannot even be typed...
@@walterg74 I'm sure it happened, and it could have been done only for 1 command (maybe LET). Too bad I don't have the computer to try it.
Oh Hi
This was my first computer in Argentina, although I learned with a ZX-81 so I was already familiar with the whole keyboard tokens thing and it was pretty fast to use (in the other hand I began working as a programmer in a company in which I had access to the IBM-PC, some friends later on bought Commodore 64s, a Sinclair QL -what a beauty killed by its tape cartridges-, and few years later I worked on a Logo public workshop with over 30 computers that included Spectrum, TI-994A, MSX, Commodore 64 and an IBM-PC Jr. so having the chance to extensively using what was on the market, and even knowing the drawbacks, I wasn't that unhappy with my 2068).
As a curiosity, after buying it I found and bought from a book store a 2068 tech manual that included the entire Z80 assembler code for its ROM. I have no clue of how it got there, for it seemed to be a Timex-Sinclair document meant for in house use: it was printed in a light blue recycled paper in an odd font that seemed to be vectorialy drawn, with the covers made in the same paper, so it seemed to be a draft copy, and it was about 10 cm thick, about the size of a white/yellow pages (phone guide) from that time.
Even later I got a thermal printer lent, it was incredibly noisy and looking trough this tech manual with a friend, we managed to change the internal clock speed hence altering the pitch of the printer noise, so we had the wrong idea of making music with it. We fried some components from the motherboard in the attempt, with a puffing noise and a little cloud of white smoke, and that was the end of my 2068 experience.
@@blitzmensch the paper was so thin and low quality, it didn't survive the pass of time. I had to throw it away a couple of years ago, when moving. I took it and noticed the ink was lost, and it was pointless to keep it around anymore.
@@marcosdiez7263 what a pity. Well thanks anyways I guess
@@blitzmensch BTW, the "paper" was a book about 10 cm (4 inches) thick made of thin recycled paper layers, a couple thousand pages, glued togheter on one edge, no covers. The whole ROM was listed in Z80 assembler (eg. instructions like LD HL, one per line), plus some text to document blocks of code.
Some Timex 2068 were made in Portugal. All of them sold here had the "unicorn" emulator cartridge bundled for free. We also had the 2048 which was ZX 48K fully compatible.
@@LuisDanielLopes Those +2As etc hilariously came about After Alan Sugar, of Amstrad fame, bought Sinclair Research. At that point you see a very different industrial design, with vastly improved keyboards and integrated storage devices. First the tape player, much like on the CPC 464. But also later a model with a 3" floppy, same as on the CPC 6128.
It was with this computer made in Portugal that I entered the world of computers... back in 1987! And never got out of it!
I had Timex 2048 in Poland where they were sold as well... it would be great to have episode about Times 2048 as well...
@@jakubkozakiewicz2061 you had the communist version?
@@zaxarispetixos8728 Pentagon ???
Advertising the computer as 72K reminds me of companies advertising a computer today as having "20GB" when it actually has 4GB of RAM plus an Intel Optane caching SSD...
They started doing that shit again after so long?
OMG, I did NOT know this was still a thing! :O ...again a thing? Whatever, this is the first time I've heard of this :D I've been amused by the thought that SSD is likely fast enough that emulating my first PC, an IBM PS/1 286 with a megabyte of RAM -space- would work fine by using a file to emulate the RAM :D But SSD as RAM, like having a 16GB of swapping with 4GB of RAM - shouldn't that make the system unusable smoothly when you're going to around 6-10GB's, which seems to be the average with my 20GB (of real RAM) Lenovo ThinkPad...?
Or is this Intel Optane some super SSD that kinda comes close to RAM speeds? Might be interesting to see if in close future we're going back to how it was in the early days, when storage and RAM were not a separate thing :) But this kind of stuff is just bulls ballsack throwing contest - not cool. Sometimes there has been products doing stuff like that, but not being dishonest like that and advertise more like "4GiB of RAM and a caching SSD combined to give you virtually 20GiB of RAM with nearly indistinguishable performance *small print* _performance may vary depending on use case, not suitable for memory critical operations_ "
I could be OK about it - I'm not OK about it being advertised *as* 20GB when it isn't.
This has been a problem before options. Sometimes drives are sold as "hybrid" SSD and HDD, which is fine, but some deceptive ads describe drives with ordinary caches, solid state memory that was a very small fraction of the disk memory. I haven't seen much described as "hybrid" lately, but I have seen it for drives sold by third-parties on Amazon and eBay. Uptake just has some fancy algorithms for deciding what's used often enough to be kept on SSD, and what can be dumped and left on the hard drive disk. But it does make mistakes and the benefits are highly dependent on what kind of task the PC is doing. Besides "ram disks", there are swap partitions and swap files, which are basically doing the same thing. That's why in modern Linux, swap size should match ram memory, up to about 8GBs. Years ago the recommended double the ram size. For more than 8GBs ram, well besides for hibernating there's not going to be much use for all that "disk" memory, anyways. That amount of RAM can be easily utilized, the user might consider having no swap at all.
Sorry, I meant Optane, not "options". My tablets not letting me edit that mistake!
Commodore computers said the same thing. It said 80k on the box, which was 64k of RAM and 16k of ROM.
I had a ZX Spectrum as a kid and it was the first computer I learned to program on. I actually found the preset commands on the keys quite useful when learning - especially if English is a second language. You also knew for a fact the full command set - no hidden commands. All in all, I quite enjoyed learning basic this way.
In Chile we had 4 different ZX Spectrum compatible NTSC microcomputers during the 80s: Timex Sinclair 2068 , Timex Computer 2048, Microdigital TK-90X and Sinclair ZX Spectrum (16K and 48K, NTSC). Both the Timex Computer 2048 and the TK-90X were 99.9% compatible with the ZX Spectrum 48K.
12:25 Great to see your cat helping with the filming
Correction: the SEGA Master System didn't use the GI AY-3-8912; it actually used the TI SN76489, which is similar, but not the same. Also, the AY-3-8912 was the sound chip in the ZX Spectrum 128, +2, and +3 models, supplementing the horrid little beeper from the original Speccy and Spectrum+.
What Tim Follin did took out from the horrible beeper... :)
In my C64 days I was hardly interested in the alternatives like the Sinclair. But now its a joy to see these machines in action and get the technical backgrounds. This channel is gold, thanks!
My first computer and where I learned to program!
Yeah great computer for learing -- taught me assembler :)
The keyboards on these things were always deal breakers for me.
I'm sorry to hear that.
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000. I used simple C64 progs on it till I was able to get ZX81 books for it. I really liked the keyword shortcuts (no thoughtless misspellings to trigger error codes…)
I suppose an emulator now would need a special keyboard or an overlay but I'm up for it
Must've been hell.
Good video, and I loved learning about the improvements the 2068 brought over the Spectrum. That said the comparison with the VIC-20 is interesting but feels off to me. In Britain the main rival to the Spectrum 48k (an inferior machine to the 2068!) was the Commodore 64, and many playground arguments were had about which was superior.
The VIC 20... the graphics were extremely low resolution (and screen was essentially text based with user defined characters limiting it further), and with 5K of total RAM in the unexpanded machine, it simply wasn't practical to create the kinds of games that were available on the Spectrum. Cartridges? Cartridges were considered expensive - games on tape varied from about 2GBP to 10GBP, while cartridges generally cost way more than 10GBP, hard for kids on pocket money to afford - and didn't completely workaround the VIC 20's limitations. They were also limited to 16K, so didn't really work around the 5k RAM limit, they just made it slightly less painful.
I think you also may have shortchanged the Spectrum/Timex machines on expandibility too. Sinclair released a variety of interfaces that, assuming the 2068 was a compatible, should have worked without issue. This included their Microdrives system - a floppy disk alternative that was considerably cheaper (50GBP per drive, plus 75GPB for the interface which supported up to... 8 I think?... and added networking) although there were, like all Sinclair systems, reliability questions. It also had substantial third party support including several model of "real" floppy disk drives.
Maybe those weren't available on the US, but there's a listing here that's specifically 2068 oriented that covers much of the hardware available: www.timexsinclair.com/computers/timex-sinclair-2068/articles/hardware-reviews/ so I assume hardware support was good from that. And given the unintentionally short lifetime of the 2068 I'd assume Timex planned to release US versions of Sinclair's interfaces and Microdrives.
In the end people were not comparing a 48k machine to a cheaper 5k one, the big issue was that at some point in 1982 it simply became impossible to sell new incompatible models of 8 bit computers in virtually every market. Commodore themselves found this out the hard way with the C16 and +4, and the era is littered with 8 bit computers that just didn't get anywhere. Everyone knew at that point that if you wanted something with a large software library consisting of the types of program you wanted, the only options were X and Y, where X and Y were different in each country. People weren't buying computers any more to learn how to use computers, they were buying it for the software, and bang for buck wasn't really the primary consideration over what you'd already heard of, recommendations from others, and existing third party support.
(EDIT: Apologies if there's an "Actually" tone to this, there isn't intended to be, it's just... VIC 20? It feels really off!)
Both the Spectrum and Apple ][ had "messed up" screens...I don't remember the Apple ][ being classed as cheap.
The Apple ][ screen mapping is described as deliberately messed up in the manuals.
Looking at the maps you'll see it's not for cheapness (it's probably cheaper to go from one row to the next like the PET), but for efficiency (and speed) of putting characters on the screen.
On the Apple ][ the top row is the 1st 40 bytes of the screen RAM, the next 40 bytes are the 40 bytes of the 9th screen row, the next 40 bytes are the 17th row of the screen. The next 8 bytes are off the screen. That's the first 128 bytes of screen RAM
The next 128 bytes are rows 2, 10, 18 and 8 spare bytes, and so on, with each row in each third of the screen starting 128 bytes after the previous row! The spare 8 bytes in each 128 bytes of the 1024 bytes allocated to the screen are allocated to the peripheral cards (in the slots). This weird mapping is carried over into the high res screen.
The Spectrum screen is designed for fast character insertion:
Think of the screen in character cells. For 8 character rows, there are 32 cells across the row, and the next row starts 32 bytes further on in memory, taking 256 bytes of memory.
But each character is made up of 8x8 pixels. The 8 pixels across are stored in a byte, so 8 bytes,are required for each character. These are stored 256 bytes apart in memory - the second pixel row of a character is 256 bytes in memory after the first row, and so on for each 8 pixel rows. This means that the definition of the character pixels can be stored in 8 sequential memory locations accessible by incrementing the low byte of the memory pointer by 1 each time, but when transferring to screen memory, the locations are I incremented by 256, or an increment of 1 to the high byte of the memory pointer each time.
The next two blocks of 8 rows follow the same pattern. This pattern makes it easy and quick to convert a screen x,y position to a memory location, and back again, via (fast processor) bit operations (unlike the need to multiply or divide by 40 for, say, a PET), along with reading screen pixel patterns to compare against character definitions.
Ah, the days when magazines printed out entire programs for you to type into your computer. The first game I remember typing in was a Basic version of Air Attack for the Commodore Pet in 1980 or thereabouts. I probably still have the magazine somewhere...
I member
That was true even in the IBM PC era. I recall one issue of Dragon Magazine featuring a BASIC program to generate AD&D 1st Edition characters.
@@mrkitty777 Pepperidge Farm Remembers
Yes, and sometimes you would also see one of the articles about what to poke to do interesting things with the hardware. On the ZX80 the whole bus went out on the expansion connector so you could hang some prototype hardware out there and drive it.
I miss those days, I remember having several books with BASIC programs for the various computers I've had over the years from my VIC-20, to my Tandy 1000SX, and others. Plus I remember subscribing to COMPUTE! Magazine back in the day.
You didn't mention the Timex extended screen modes. There's an extended colour mode where the colour cells are 8x1 pixels instead of 8x8. Then there's a monochrome mode of 512x192 pixels, doubling the horizontal resolution. I don't think much software made any use of these though because they're unique to the TS2068.
I'd expect that the AY sound chip is still accessible with the ZX Spectrum ROM in place, but ZX Spectrum software won't have been written to use it. The 128K Spectrums used the same sound chip, but present at a different I/O port address. There are 48K Spectrum games that use the 128K sound chip, so theoretically it would be possible to patch one of these to use the TS2068's sound chip address.
The computer also lived on until 1989 in Portugal and Poland.
The 512x192 monochrome mode was identical to one in the prototype of Pandora, the portable Spectrum that never made it out before Sinclair sold up to Amstrad. The Pandora screen driver software, which had multiple independent windows and much better font support, was developed in the Sinclair Cambridge labs on a 2068 and an old Zenith green-screen monitor (the same model as you can see in the police chief's office in Bladerunner!) that had been modified to the same (very odd) aspect ratio that the Pandora's flat-screen CRT presented.
I rememeber i had ported apple ii ‘star trek’ game to the ts2068 using the 512 pixel mode. I wish i still had all the casette for the software I had written for it. Memories...
There were 48K Spectrum games that used the AY chip, if it was present on the same IO port as on a 128K Spectrum. I'm suspecting this one probably is, as there were also AY expansions ("Sound Card" if you will) for 48K Spectrums that would make use of this code in games that didn't _need_ the 128K RAM.
Also, those extra graphics modes were also available in the SAM Coupé, along with one that was true 16 colour, 1 colour per-pixel, from a pretty reasonably pallet selection, but it really needed the faster Z80C processor to use it efficiently. I wonder how good the compatibility may be between Sam Coupé and TS2068 using those modes would be? I would be surprised if porting would be much of a challenge, that's for sure.
@Alex I have two of these Polish models, one with the standard keyboard and one with 'real' keys.
I also have this TS2068 and the TC2068. In fact, I have about 30 different Spectrum compatible machines 😁
beta.collectorsbridge.com/collections/425?page=5
@@bobsobol Sadly, I think it predates the use of the standard audio port of the 128k. Some early AY addons for the 48k existed that used wildly different addresses. Most modern AY sound cards will use the same address as the 128k.
In theory it might be easier to patch individual games to use the 2068's AY address than phsyically mod the 2068.
16:45 Looking forward to see the electric """car""" in action!
The Sinclair C5 was mega-hyped in the UK as a "revolutionary transport device" (much like the Segway), but proved to be just a very underwhelming, lame electric scooter intended to suck up Welsh govenment subsidies.
@@haweater1555 : You beat me to the Segway comparison!
It looks like a less dignified Little Tykes Cozy Coupe.
Right?! It looks so 70s future I love it.
@@haweater1555 From my memory, it was ridiculed before it was produced and after it was produced. The media in the U.K. decided to let it fail before anyone had had one. It was a great idea let down by the technology of the time and the "open" design. These are the memories I have as I was around as a geeky teenager at the time :)
The Sega master system uses something similar to the AY called the Texas Instrument SN76489. Being it has 3 channels only capable of playing square waves, and one more dedicated to noise. Although, the third channel and the 4th channel collide with each other. Artists had to get creative when it came to percussion. Being forced to use a limited noise macro option if they wanted the third PSG channel. Even then, it was pretty limited. So they used it for harmonics or bass usually. But basically, it is just a dummied down version of the AY. (This is a huge oversimplification)
I had the TS2068 and got it from Electronics Store "Pedro Benavides" in Caracas Venezuela. Nice Computer in that time many magazines had programs and tricks to implement with the computer I sold it and got my first PC an Equity from EPSON.
11:50 I'm getting goosebumps. Jet set willy was probably the very first game I played on a spectrum back in 1986 or so, along with Psssst and Jetpack.
As a 12 year old I got used to the keyboard entry system right away, and could type listings in pretty fast within months and I previously had used traditional keyboards on other computers. One thing to remember is that the UK versions had a colour coded system on the keys, which did help to speed up the learning of that entry method.
something else that's not always appreciated is that most of the function assignments make some sort of sense. P for PRINT for example. LOAD isn't on L, which is given to LET, which is an incredibly important command for declaring and assigning values to variables in BASIC. Instead, it's on the nearby J. K is closer, but is given over to LIST. another important BASIC command.
of course, this is all sidestepped in the later 128K Basic which allows letter by letter entry and is preferred on emulation. These machines exist in a particular vacuum of time where the software was expected to be used on these machines.
You know what's cool? Since every ZX Sprectrum software is stored in a sound file, this means that you can load a game from pretty much anything. Phone? Yes. Computer? Yes. Walkman? Yes. Kinda cool ngl.
Farts? Yes
It's literally digital analog conversion, nothing more. You could store anything you want on a c64 on a cassette, hell, you could do the same for your current pc... (even if your pc needs software to do that)
Unfortunately, Apple ended that
Pretty much all home computers from the early 80s used cassete tapes as a storage medium.
A C64 costed $600 at release while the 1541 floppy drive was $400.
It wasn't until the mid 80s that floppy drives dropped in price, though they caught on earlier in the US compared to the rest of the world.
@@erebostd The 8-bit computers ALSO needed software to do it, it was just built in.
Let me say it, your content is probably some of the best you can find on UA-cam, period. The dedication put to the videos, the research, the edition... Everyting is so polished that I can't complain. There's not a thing I can objectively say 'this can be improved'.
Congratulations, David. You deserve a place in history, for bringing history to us.
You'd be amazed how many UK games programmers started their careers with the ZX Spectrum, including me. The display RAM layout isn't that weird - if you're not crossing one of the boundaries, all you had to do in machine code to get to the next line down was to increase the high byte of the address.
Definitely need to make a bigger EPROM for those 2 ROMs, with a switch on the top address line to switch between them so you dont have to swap out chips to go between modes!!
ROM switchers are quite popular on 8-bit Ataris and Commodores, not to mention on the Atari ST. [I'd imagine Amigas have them too].
@@TheJeremyHolloway Yep, Amigas have them too! They were especially needed when the A1200 came out so that you could switch to the old Kickstart ROM, otherwise a lot of older games wouldn't run on the A1200. Even the Amiga500+ and the A600 would have needed a ROM switcher, methinks, due to the Kickstart 2 ROM in those models.
Those shortcut key commands were no problem at all for me back in the day when I was 12 years old. Great computer. It taught me assembler programming and I ended up writing an emulator for it on the PC later on. The ROM in it is very good.
Me too. I bought a new 25 MHz 486 in 1993 just to be able to write the emulator in my beloved high level language, instead of in 286 assembly. But I'm older, I was 17 when I bough my first ZX-80 and 81.
@@herrbonk3635 "Beloved high level language".... Turbo Pascal?
READ THE SMALL PRINT "You pay only $397 when you order." To get the $197 you have to send to them another computer or game console, and the other $100 is a manufacture rebate. So not really $197 is it.
I don't know if it's the same on the 2068, but on the original ZX Spectrum line you could get the sound output simply by connecting to the MIC socket as the tape output and speaker shared the same I/O port. While it might have been the last US Sinclair/Timex machine, Sinclair did go on to produce a 128K Spectrum and the QL (targeted at business) before being bought out by Amstrad who released the +2, +2A, and +3 Spectrum derivatives. Amstrad also released the Sinclair PC 200, a CGA PC clone that didn't really have much impact. Under the brand Cambridge Computers, Sinclair also sold the Z88 which was a portable and I think Sir Clive's last computer product.
The C5 = Sinclair's Doom!
Speaking of ROMs, you can find one or two online that implement a regular keyboard input (similar to ZX Spectrum +2 implementation).
Anyway, very nice video!
''This Old Bird has crashed more times than a Sinclair ZX81 '' ....Kryten
Emma Bentley good old starbug 👍🏻
The boys from the Dwaaaaarf!
@@Becka_Harper Awwwwww................Extrodinary!
You’re such a space nerd. Beautiful
I'm SUPER excited to see your upcoming video on the Sinclair C5 car!!
A recumbent tricycle, powered by a washing machine motor, made IN a washing machine factory...
An australian guy already made one. Under the hood it's really horrible.
@@DavidLee-df888 Actually it was made in a vacuum cleaner factory(Hoover). And I don't think the washing machine motor is strictly true, because washing machine motors are 110AC or 230VAC, and the C5 was 12VDC. It basically ran on a car battery, which likely wouldn't have lasted very long. Because lead-acid vehicle batteries are not really designed to handle repeated, charge, discharge, cycles.
How about the: SAM Coupé computer, the best 8-bit computer I believe and the last(?) to be released?
It wasn't the last and it wasn't the best. The Spectrum Next is the SAM Coupe we should have had.
@@jezz2k SAM released in 89, Spectrum in 2017 can really not be compared. I meant among the computers that challenged the 16 bit ones. Spectrum Next is a nostalgic release. I never had one (SAM) so I wanted to know more. Which of the 8-bit computers pre 90 was the best then? Or pre 95? Not newly designed stuff. You can build an improved new T-ford today - I would never buy one.
Commodore 64 vs 48k Spectrum was THE school playground rivalry for us British computer kids back in ‘83. We don’t count the BBC Micro because only the rich kids could afford those.
Hey 8-Bit guy check out ‘Micro Men’ on YT, it’s a retelling of the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn, and the heat to win the contract for the BBC Micro. But it also shows Sir Clive Sinclair’s obsession with the C5. Great original intercut real TV news from the time about how the U.K. was gripped by the micro boom.
In the UK the Spectrum was a lot cheaper, I think the games were much better than the VIC20 due to the extra RAM too. There is no question though, the C64 was better than the Spectrum :D, it was still more expensive but the C64 was much better. Of course when we got to the Spectrum 128k it became a lot more competitive against the C64.
That bit with the game loading with the commentary over the top of it - did anyone else imagine the loading sounds in their head while they watched it? :-)
Njäääää....Screeeeetch...Screeeeeeeeetch...
Ooh yeah, as a child of the 70s who grew up in the UK the 48k rubber key speccy was my first machine.
Had the sound from Guru Lary's videos.
Shouldn't the loading have been silent, since tape players mute the speakers when the headphones are plugged in?
@@stevethepocket nope
The Spectrum was my first computer in the UK, loved it. BTW that's one of the many mods of Jet Set Willy, not the original
We used to spend ages in computer club at school playing Jet Set Willy. It was a marvellous game!
The video on the TS2068 is more advanced than the ZX Spectrum. It has more video modes and some have a higher resolution. Also, the "ULA" is called the "SCLD" instead. It also had a full memory bank controller and the Spectrum did not. I coded on the TS2068 for many years. I even made hardware expansions.
Be careful with hardware modifications. The SCLD is extremely sensitive and I would avoid connecting anything directly to it. Also, Timex had disk drives and other companies had streaming tape drives.
Hi tech guy do enjoy your videos thanks for all the Sinclair coverage. One advantage of the "keywords" on the Sinclair units, was each had its own "sinclair custom ascii" code. So for example storing the command PRINT only took up one byte in memory not five. Having space savings like this helped allow much larger BASIC programs to be written into the somewhat limited memory.
When you will record about Commander X16?
He isn't providing any more updates in his UA-cam channel. He's only doing so via Facebook - makes it much easier to rake in the cash.
11:30 - I almost fell out of my chair when he pulled MacBook and just put mini jack into it and ran games that way.
lol. Pretty common trick for systems that stored anything on tape, because the tape is just regular audio tape.
The only common system this fails with is the Atari microcomputers, because they use a dedicated tape drive over the SIO connection.
For the longest time I thought this was just for the sake of being proprietary...
But it turns out it's a cost cutting measure for the computer. (at the cost of making the tape drive do some of the work.)
SIO is used for a wide variety of peripherals, including purely digital ones.
So it turns out that the Atari has a DAC, but not an ADC. That means it can put out an audio signal (which it uses when saving to tape), but it can't accept one.
To get around this with the tape drive, the drive itself actually has two band pass filters tuned to the frequencies used by the tape, and... Feeds the result through the digital input lines...
Ironically the Atari uses stereo tapes and has an audio passthrough, so you can play cassette audio in sync to your program if you write your tape correctly.
(think of it as a much clumsier version of CD audio in games.)
Rarely used, but it's an interesting idea...
@@KuraIthys It also doesn't work on the C64 because of the dedicated datasette, unless you have some kind of adaptor.
That's a MacBook Air.
@wargent99 Yeah. To this day, the new ones still have a Headphone/Microphone combo jack.
You can even do it with your mobile. Every old fart nerds does that nowadays.
Nostalgia. In my childhood, I had a ZX Spectrum (Leningrad) clone assembled by my uncle.
How could you write the comment so early !?
о, у меня тоже такой был
@Hutti06 if you're on his Patreon you get the videos early
I went for the BBC Micro Model B after working all summer to afford it, and then waiting several months for it to arrive! One of my roommates at uni had a Speccy though, and I remember playing a bunch of Jetpac on it.
Yep, back then in communists states people used to say "if you don't steal you steal from your children". So because export of high-tech electronics to comm-countries was forbidden, and it was cheaper to steal than to develop own computers, they (mainly ZSSR and CSSR) stole and copied 1-1 the ZX design. In Bulgary they stole Oric Atmos design. There were few exceptions, in the former Yugoslavia they were making Oric Atmos by legaly buying license and parts. They also made few of theyr own computers like Galaxia, Orao, Iskra Delta... Hungary has also legaly imported some Enterprise 128 computers...
man the idea with the MacBook Air, wave file and audio cable - priceless!
My 1st computer! Made me so happy to see it in action after all these years. Those shortcut key commands were pretty annoying...I would program for hours every day as a 12 year old, and never really got fast using them.
Remember that the ZX Basic language was tokenised, so took up less memory than other computers of the time, where you typed the whole word in, plus meant fewer typos. In your example, PRINT took one byte, whereas on other computers it was six bytes (P, R, I, N, T & SPACE). It also meant that runtime interpretation could be quicker. It very quickly became easy and fast to use.
Huh. Good point. At a time where every bit counts, that would be a good way to compress space.
i believe c64 basic is also tokenized, but it will tokenize when you hit enter, parsing the whole line and replacing cmds with tokens
The only computer of the time that I know of which didn't tokenadise its basic was the Acorn Atom, though it did allow abbreviations to cut down memory usage.
The CBM PETs (and later), Apple ][s, Acorn BBC all tokenadised their programs. Apple's parser was extremely heavy handed in tokenadising every token it could find - useful to avoid entering spaces (which is added back around every token on listing) but a pain when it found a token in the middle of a "long" variable name (IIRC the Apple ][ along with the PETs allowed any length of variable name but only recognised the first two characters).
PRINT is a bad choice of keyword; both the Apple ][ and CBM machines allowed it to be abbreviated to "?"
The Acorn Atom and BBC allowed "P." as an abbreviation.
The CBMs also allowed all keywords to be abbreviated due to how the tokening routine worked - you typed the first few characters and then shifted the next. eg GOSUB could be abbreviated to GOs (with the S shifted, usually producing a heart symbol); when listed the full keyword was there as the token was expanded.
This did lead to confusion with some people. Specifically the # of PRINT# and INPUT# was part of the keyword. Trying to use ?# as an abbreviation for PRINT# looked ok, but generated a syntax error on running as it was the print token followed by a '#' character. The correct abbreviation was Pr (P followed by shift-R).
As the # needs to be checked to change the token, INPUT# proceeds INPUT in the list of tokens. Thus "In" generates INPUT#, and there is no abbreviation for INPUT.
The AY sound chip was not used in the master system, that was a SN76489
He may have confused it with the BBC
It was also used in later models of Spectrum like the 128, +2 and +3.
@@AmstradExin It's quite a big jump between the two. But possible. I immediately said "uh, no it wasn't" having programmed said chip in the past, ah well lol
Hm.. there was also something like Melodik: zxspectrum48.i-demo.pl/aymusic.html .. normal 48k spectrum could play 128k songs.. it was a huge leap..:) There is also now this: hw.speccy.cz/melodik2.html .. so if you have some time.. GO FOR IT :D
Nobodys mentioned the Amstrad CPC
Awwww I was hoping you'd do more on the Sinclair computers, especially the one I had, the ZX Spectrum 128k+ (the grey one with included / built in cassete player).
I know ZX Spectrums weren't that famous in the US but I was still hoping you'd do a video on them eventually... oh well...
I saved aluminum can money and bought my first computer the Tymex Sinclair 1000, memory expansion and chess game. I program a lunar lander game for based on a magazine article. Met Steve Jobs 6months later when he delivered some apple computers to our high school.
Oh, my God! I had one of these. Talk about a blast from the past.
My father bought me one from Kmart in 1983, of all places. But, I graduated to an Atari 800XL soon afterward.
You're incorrect about "All Sinclairs" having no option to type commands without using the shortcuts, the Sinclair 128K model introduced 128 BASIC which allowed normal typing. The 48K+ and all subsequent Sinclair branded models also had a vastly improved keyboard, it still wasn't perfect by modern standards but it did the job. When Amstrad took over they improved on the keyboard still further and retained 128 BASIC. In any case, once you got used to the weird shortcut layout you could program very fast, I still remember all the shortcuts decades later!
He also seems to have forgotten the Sinclair QL which used a much more structured basic and no keyword entry - you had to type the who lot...mind you it used a 68008 processor, not the Z80 of the previous machines.
Rumour has it the 68008 was chosen over the 680000 as it was cheaper when designing the machine, but when production was started the 68000 was cheaper. Though it does cut the data bus required in half so would make the PCB cheaper...
Well, all Sinclairs up to that point is what he meant. This was very much a history piece.
Well given the Vic 20 was dreadful (I had one for years, thanks), he doesn't understand why the screen layout works the way it does (hint, learn some z80 assembly and think about printing a line of text), he doesn't get the additional screen modes and uses poke rather than plot to make a point and doesn't understand how you read a character at a screen position even though it's in the manual, gets the master system sound chip wrong and uses an assertive tone throughout it seemed much in the same vein as the previous retrospectives on the subject. Sure, come to it with C64 love, come to it thinking that the ViC 20 was a half decent computer (seriously?). But at least ask questions and shoot later.
Typically I make a rule of not watching 8 bit guy on anything non Commodore as it's so depressingly inevitable. I broke that rule like a fat person going for the Pringles.
I should have known. Great on many subjects, but sadly this time struck out. But so many people like the video so that's cool too.
@@cigmorfil4101 More like he focuses on the variants that made it to US shores. The sad thing is that European nations imported way more from USA back then than the other way. So living in Europe you got quite familiar with both local and US computers. But the other way round is not really the case.
You could notice this in his summary video on storage formats, where the barely touched on the 3" floppy used by Amstrad (Nintendo used a very similar, but incompatible format for their famicom btw).
@@cigmorfil4101 I think the most significant factor in choosing the 68008 for the QL was that it allowed the designers to use standard 8-bit wide memory and support chips, plus that it simplified the layout of the circuit board quite a lot.
The most feel-good intro on the entirety of youtube! :)
14:20 how much would a RAM expansion cart for VIC-20 cost in 1983? I realise a fully expanded VIC-20 would still have less RAM than a Timex Sinclair but it'd be a lot closer than the 5K of the stock system
14:40 even with an emulator cart, wouldn't availability of software be greater for the VIC-20 unless you'd resort to importing software from Europe?
The comparison the VIC-20 is irrelevant because the TS2068 didn't reach the market until November 1983, by which time the C64 was already selling below $200.
I remember buying my 16k expansion cart for the VIC 20 for around $40. I think you could get it cheaper through mail order but I was 12 at the time and had to rely on what my local Commodore store had in stock. Also I think the expansion's original price was $79
my boy dave cruncing out content for us to watch during quarantine, mad respect bro
Very nice!! Would love to see an episode about the BBC Micro. Born and raised in the US I had heard little about this but became fascinated upon reading 'Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer' and learning about their national computer literacy project and the BBC producing their own easy-to-use and program computer. Compared to all the PEEKS and POKES I had to put up with as a kid I was shocked to learn how the BBC made the included BASIC easy to use for graphics , music, sounds and thus games. Even the manual (which I recently downloaded to read) was easier and more friendly than either the VIC or C64 manuals; including coding projects to make your own custom charters and code for a lunar lander type game as just one example - wow!
1:36 Correction! Regarding the Sega Master System, it used a Texas Instruments SN76489 PSG and not the General Instrument AY-3-8912.
Even as it wasn't co-marketed by Timex, there is one more computer that was sold in the USA. The Sinclair QL. Heck you could even say there was yet another Sinclair computer, the Cambridge Z88 (based on the Z80) which was made by Cambridge Computer, the new company that Sir Clive started after he sold Sinclair Research to Amstrad. Both were sold in the USA but very few of each were sold. So saying the TS2068 was the last in the line of computers of Sinclair Research sold in the USA is not completely true. Timex left the market after the TS2068 but Sir Clive fumbled along for two more computers in the USA. One more thing. The Sinclair QL was sold as a 32bit computer (it used the Motorola 68008 processor designed to work with 8-bit memory systems.)
I recall that the QL was marketed as a "16 bit computer" - not 32 bit?
[edit: I've found snippets where employees said they would have preferred it wasn't described 32 bit at the launch/pre-launch. archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1984-06/page/126/mode/2up Wow! Talk about stretching the truth! I think they feel back on 16bit as more plausible - in Atari nomenclature it would be an ET 8/32 😆 ]
You're right of course about the 68008 being designed with the 8 bit memory bus. This was whilst other computers such as the Atari ST, Amiga and Macintosh all used the 'full' 68000 to start with. The ST was named after the 16/32 bit buses on the 68000. Later the TT was 32/32 when they moved up to a true 32 bit chip 68030.
archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1984-06/page/170/mode/2up
Computer companies have long cheated with odd 'marketing math' to mislead the uninformed public, such as the '64 bit' Atari Jaguar that had 32 bit CPU and a 32bit DSP (alongwith 64 bit GPU) to make it 'the first 64 bit console'.
I used to think that the Sinclair line was rubbish back in the day but honestly the manuals and documentation of the time was far superior to anything that came out for the Atari (until something like De Re Atari). I mean, what other computer had the ROM disassembled and printed in a book that you could buy at a bookstore? Very few, save for the Atari Basic and DOS, which were created by Shepherdson Microsystems (Later OSS). Also it's one of the few platforms that is legal to ship the ROM code with an emulator (Clanto's C64 notwithstanding). Lastly there is an excellent book describing the ULA (The ZX Spectrum ULA: How to Design a Microcomputer). I've become a late fan of these computers in part because while there was literally no corner left uncut they still managed to make something usable that wasn't too precious about hacking into the internals.Perhaps the only other computers of the day that were more "open" were hobbyist computers like the H-89, the AIM-65, and the IMSAI 8080 / Altair 8800.
Ah yes. That's something that's easy to overlook.
Documentation.
Atari was notorious for terrible documentation.
Even the Jaguar was partly taken down by terrible documentation.
And for the 8 bit micros Atari even started with the point of view that the general public didn't deserve to have any development documentation, which certainly wouldn't have helped any...
Not just poorly made documentation, but actively withholding information...
Yeah, great thing to do with a microcomputer, huh. XD
I still have my copy of the 'ZX Spectrum ROM Disassembly'; used it to write some fun little routines in machine code.
I do remember acquiring in a "dumpster dive" some technical manuals for the IBM-PC -- which included a wealth of technical information in several binders -- including ROM listings but also schematics. Of course these weren't included with a purchase of the IBM-PC -- you had to order them separately (I do vaguely recall they weren't cheap -- but then again, if you could afford to spend $5,000 or more on the IBM-PC, a couple hundred more for these manuals probably wasn't a huge deal -- especially if you bought the computer for engineering purposes).
I do recall that the manual that came with the Sinclair ZX-81 was pretty good -- it was mostly a tutorial BASIC as implemented on the system. Another decent manual for learning programming was found with the TRS-80 for the Level 1 BASIC interpreter. What was presented in these manuals, it was indeed possible to become "self taught" in BASIC. Most other systems had BASIC manual that was more a reference manual than a tutorial for BASIC. Though I "cut my teeth" on the "Trash-eighty" and using the ZX-81 seemed a step backwards, I did know enough to have an appreciation the level of minimalism of the Sinclair ZX-80/81 represented.
@Craig Maloney You've probably seen magazines publish "head-to-head" comparisons of various computers, but here in Denmark, a magazine even published a head-to-head review of computer MANUALS! Needless to say that the manuals for the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum were head and shoulders above the rest.
The keyboard is scanned in an amazingly cheap way - 5 row bits read via the ULA port and 8 rows controlled by the high byte of the address bus. Thus 40 keys max.
This comment is about the speccy vs. C64. As an 8 yr old, the C64 didn't have any graphic commands or commands to make sound. The speccy had lines, circles, and beep commands. As an 8yr old, this was so much easier. I never understood C64 sprites till I was an adult many years later, but did understand "UDGs" on the speccy and also how to make your own fonts. I also thought Z80 was easier than 6502(10) as a 10yr old (though didn't spend much time on C64 assembler, but spent a lot of time on Z80). Main reason for using the speccy is because all of my friends had them. I the UK, there were a ton of peripherals for them, more so than the C64 - different kinds of disk drives, many different printer interfaces, many different joystick and multifunction interfaces where you could store a snapshot of the RAM onto a storage device (tape or microdrive). I do agree that technically, the C64 was the better machine, but as an 8-10yr old in the UK, nobody had a C64, but I knew 10 people that had a spectrum. I never knew anyone that had a Vic20. I don't remember even stores having them.
Feels like it's been a while since you've published a video. Super happy to see that you're in good health and spirits. Solid video, as always.
If all goes well, the car episode is gonna be one of the next videos....and we're tapping our fingers a year and a half later ;-)
@@ericsills6484 Still tapping
@@mrb5217 he said at one of the vintage computer festivals that the car didn't work out.
@@ericsills6484 :(
3:36 Look Commodore boy, you don't get to complain about shift and 0 to delete when Commodore couldn't even be bothered to include four directional arrows. :D
6:33 It's less likely a cost saving measure: It seems like it's designed to make it very quick and easy to plot 8x8 characters to the screen. The system is about one mental leap away from having a tile graphics generator.
7:19 There were third party solutions for disk drives. Sinclair intended to use endless loop tape drives, called Microdrives as a storage medium, but it was unreliable and never really caught on. Had the Timex Sinclair caught on I imagine most of these periphericals would have turned up in due course.
5:45 technically speaking, most modern computers still have a text mode which is mostly used in Real mode or beginning stages of Protected mode and can be accessed with bios interrupt commands.
Came here to say this. Even UEFI has a text and graphics mode.
But you wouldn't be using it to watch the video, and you would never go into it after booting your GUI. Unless you forgo X (or other equivalents) and use aaxine or something!
Ben Hood haha Linux go full-screen terminal. BTW you can also browse the web and watch videos on that.
What you call the most annoying feature of any Sinclair Computer is in fact the thing that makes all Spectrum childs like brothers. We all love that way of typing in BASIC in the Spectrum. No one needs to "find" the command you need. You just know all the positions as anybody that knows typewriting knows where any letter is without "having to look for it".
Fun nostalgic video. Was the Timex Sinclair librarian in Toronto. Went as far as the Sinclair QL. We used small tape drives. Spent many nights programming and playing with the whole line of Sinclair computers. Sent my computers to a PC museum in Madison. Still have 2 Sinclair A bikes.
I'm always fascinated to see the American perspective on Sinclair's computers. I was a Commodore 64 head (still am) anyway, but it's still interesting.
It would be really cool if you could get hold of a BBC Micro - a very popular (and powerful) British home computer that was mostly used in schools and sometimes industry/business.
Chris Curry claims the only American who has ever understood what Sinclair machines were intended to do was Jack Tramiel because he intended the Plus 4 to fill the same niche.
The Sega MAster System didn't use the AY-3-8912, instead it used an integrated version of the SN76489.
Quite correct however it is the same chip found in Atari ST computers.
@@enigma776 That was a YM2149, functionally identical though.
Okay I feel like you’re attacking a good video for one mistake
@@onyourjackjones Correcting a mistake is not "attacking".
Joseph Davies I’m concerned about too much negativity on this video because I’d been asking for this for ages and he’s done it, loads of people said there was a backlash to the last Sinclair video and I was like don’t be silly! But there are a fair few snipey comments on here.
When Sinclair released the Spectrum 128k in 1985 it came with with the AY-3-8912 sound chip the 128k BASIC mode had a normal keyboard typing system.
It’s great you can bring back the joy we had in those times, thank you
I actually got one of these a couple of years back for $10 with 2 brand new Sinclair 1000's, but the 2068 had no power supply. I thought I had one, plugged it in, and a second later BOOM! I was looking everywhere I could to figure out what chip I blew up and couldn't find it due to every image on the internet being that of a different board design, but your's is identical, and it turns out it was the sound chip! Thank you!
“the C64 beats the Timex in every category” ... except in the quality of its BASIC, of course!
Poke, poke, poke, poke....was the only command it seemed to understand... basic, my a..... XD
Never mind how slow it is. :P
@@Phantom8Bit Loading from Tape or Disk?
The TS2068 could display a higher pixel resolution than the C64
Yup. The C16/Plus 4 also had better BASIC than the C64. However, with that said, The old Acorn BBC Micro had probably the best BASIC I've ever used on an 8-bit computer
I weep for the pour souls that would've had to use that keyboard for their typing class.
In the UK, the BBC micro was used in schools instead of Speccys. (Much to the annoyance of Sir Clive apparently). The BBCs has really good keyboards.
Around about that time, every school kid I knew was learning typing on OG typewriters. If any school had a computer, they had a C64 or some Acorn system with a decent keyboard.
@@spodula Speccys were quite common in primary schools. After Sir Clive protested, and Spectrum became an official computer for UK schools, in addition to the Beeb and RML-380Z.
Sure the main problem with the Speccy in schools, due to small size it's likely much easier to steal than a BBC Computer or 380Z
People didn't use it for typing. It was for writing software, edutainmet (your parents hoped) and playing games. Printers were extremely exotic, expensive, noisy, or used awful silvery thermal paper, so serious typing was usually confined to mechanical and electronic typewriters.
The only computer I ever saw in a school prior to High school with dedicated IT classes around 1994, were all Apple II systems...
Then again I didn't go to any British schools...
05:17 It is possible. For instance, PRINT SCREEN$ (11,16) will print the character on the screen at 11,16.
I think it will display the screen colo(u)r attributes of that position, not the character itself.
@@MarcKloos
No, it's the character SCREEN$ returns. It worked by comparing the bitmap on the screen with the bitmaps for the character set in rom. To get the colour there was the ATTR(...) function.
@@shaunhw Ahhh, that's why it couldn't read user-defined graphics.
@@K-o-R It actually compared it with the character set pointed to by a system variable. By default that was in ROM, however you could create your own character set in RAM, point the system variable at it - and SCREEN$ would then work with a custom character set.
ZX Spectrum is a legend. So many kids became programmers because of it, including me.
In ex-USSR countries, ZX Spectrum clones with floppy disks were a thing (TR-DOS). Btw there is a strong community that still makes cool ZX Spectrum games and demos for tape and TR-DOS (ua-cam.com/video/XkKPuWZw8wg/v-deo.html - ua-cam.com/video/8c0nteoocd0/v-deo.html - ua-cam.com/video/oohkJ-Uc4tk/v-deo.html - ua-cam.com/video/8LWDFVCjtmg/v-deo.html).
Timex's NTSC colors kind of suck compared to the original ZX Spectrum.
The strong point of the Sinclair computers was the pretty easy way to write assembly and make the hardware work exactly as we wanted. That was not the case with all the other computers at this time. When the first "real" PC came on the market, that all changed. However, we have developed hard- and software on the Sinclair which is used still today. With new chips of course, but the ideas we had then, were ground breaking!
Those days, I miss them.
Amen
As usual: UK People: "Sinclair is the bees knees I learned programming and such stop hating", 8 Bit Guy and US People: "C64 is Superior."
Although probably not least because the Spectrum in the UK is better than the US Timex. Never owned a Spectrum, but my dad had (still has long disused) a ZX81, but moved on to the Oric instead. I knew plenty of people who had Spectrums.
Yeah the C64 was superior but it was also more expensive. In November 1982 a Commodore 64 would've been £299 whereas a 48k Spectrum was £175. A year on, the C64 was now £239 and the ZX was £129. Essentially, it's clear you get what you pay for, but both computers were very good
We called it ZX spectrum, it was different, and cheaper, also quite a few had mechanical keyboards
MSX.
Can't wait until you review some of the gazllions of Spectrum clones from eastern Europe and south America , like the Harlequin and Pentagon 128 etc.
Another awesome video 8BG... Thanks for all the content.
Loved the ZX Spectrum as a kid. My dad bought an upgrade kit to give it a more normal plastic keyboard as apposed to the rubber keys.
8:50 So THAT'S where Guru Larry gets his transition card templates from!
HELLO, YOU
@@pigfish99 Owing to inflation, the list should now be 7.12 Things I Put On Me Bum.
After 2 years I guess we can say the C5 never made it.
The game audio will also play out the cassette MIC jack.
Really?! I never thought to try that. I never saw it mentioned anywhere when I googled for how to get line output from a Speccy. I'll have to try that and see if it works on this machine.
@@The8BitGuy Yep. ua-cam.com/video/Y_Rx3FCODP8/v-deo.html
@@The8BitGuy I had a Sinclair Spectrum 48K and used an external sound amplifier connected to the MIC. In fact, internally the speaker, the MIC and the EAR connections all went through the same ULA pin. Internally the ULA could set that pin to three voltages: one was 0 volts, and the other two were used the lower one for "MIC only output" (to ensure that the speaker didn't make sound while storing a program in the tape), and the bigger one for "MIC and Speaker output". At software level there were two bits in the port 254 for the sound: setting both to zero would set the voltage to 0 (and allow to read data from the EAR connection); setting the MIC bit to 1 would set the pin to low voltage, and setting the SPK bit would set the pin to high voltage. To play a sound, the bit must be changed on-off quick using software.
@@The8BitGuy I can't believe you didn't try that just because of common sense
@@MatroxMillennium Thinking about it, it was actually a common trick back in the day to get amplified sound from the 48k using the tape deck, but it kind of fell out of favour later with the rise of multiload games and later models sending audio through the RF. IIRC, You'd swap the mic over to the ear, press pause and then play and record, and the tape deck could be used as an impromptu speaker.
From my old days I still have Unipolbrit 2086 in its rarest (meaning, fully featured) version (with AY chip, 8255-based parallel port and ZX Spectrum Emulator cartridge, all of those things were optional to cut down the price of something already considerably cheap at that time). It wasn't a secret it was based on Timex Sinclair 2068 (American version) and Timex Computer 2068 (European version) and from your video I can only see it even behaves the same way (with regards of those annoying two black colors). The only obvious difference is the lack of the second joystick port (and the color of the case, Unipolbrit 2086 is black and looks more like overgrown Timex Computer 2048). Personally, I've found addition of 8255 chip a nice touch, I started to use it for small electronic projects. Eventually I wrote some piece of Z80 assembly and a bit of PC DOS software capable of loading games (those that could be cracked appropriately) directly from PC using parallel port in a matter of seconds. Anyway, your videos always bring a lot of memories!
I might have mentioned in your TS1000 video that the while I hardly ever used a TS1000 (it belonged to my brother who didn't want me to touch it) I think I owe part of my software developer career to Timex putting the programming keyboards (and graphics) right on the keyboard. Seeing these enabled my 12 year old brain to unlock the possibilities and wonders of programming.
Just one thing to note: there are like 24,000+ ZX Spectrum titles on World of Spectrum. So I think the reason to own a Timex would be to replace the ROM and explore that library.
But how many of those games are 128K only? The 128K Speccy had all the extra hardware features that the 2068 had and the 48K didn't, but only 48K RAM while the 128K Spectrum+ had 128K.
Any Spectrum games that could use the 2068's hardware features probably wouldn't run because of the lack of RAM.
GeoNeilUK Good question. Probably at least half I’d guess.
@@GeoNeilUK Would you be able to swap the RAM chips?
@@GeoNeilUK It's quite astonishing how many of those 128k games are actually just 48k games that load all at once. It was really quite late in the life of the system that genuinely 128k only games that couldn't work on 48k at all started appearing.
FYI, WOS usually lists both 48k and 128k versions on the same page.
@Lassi Kinnunen Actually, it gets you more loading, unless you're really good at the game and are likely to get through the entire thing.
The 128 versions tend to preload all of the level data, resulting in a longer initial load, the tradeoff for which is that there's no need to multiload later levels.
Trust me, you can become really fast on a Sinclair keyboard! All those different shifted keyword combos become burned into your memory. Also, good machine code sprite drawing algorithms were easily obtainable (and not too hard to figure out for yourself). BASIC _was_ horribly slow but we soon ditched that, for the most part. PS: The VIC-20 was despised in the UK. Awful screen modes, tiny RAM.
And that "weird" screen organisation is pretty handy for drawing characters or sprites if you now how.
I thought "true" Speccy programmers used a TRS80 (Matthew Smith) or other custom hardware (Sandy White) to program on?
If only Sinclair would have added Hardware sprites and scrolling and included the AY from day one. It would have been "Goodbye Mr. Commodore." To this day though, the Spectrum still on occasion outshines the C64, becoming a sum of more than its parts.
Actually, you know what would have made a MASSIVE difference? The ULA is a gnat's wing away from being a fully featured semi-autonomous tile generator, and that would have massively reduced the amount of work required to create scrolling titles.
And a SID chip perhaps.. and more proper keyboard.. and a higher price..
I should have said this years ago, but your channel is so good that even though I am not into neither know anything about vintage computers I always enjoy your videos
Good vid. Having been an owner of a ZX81 and moving to a ZX Spectrum back in the day it took about 3 months to get used to the majority of key combinations. That resulted in much faster programming for sure. I moved to a C128 after the Spectrum and found the programming on the C64 and C128 to be much more complicated.
Wow, I didnt even know I was still subscribed to this channel! Havent received any of his content on my feed for god knows how long
Ikea Sinclair 7:00
thank you for saying zed ecks instead of zee ex, it means a lot to old British computer nerds
just needs to work on the zee 80 .....
@@ukdashcamguy500 agreed
I love the MacGyver job you did with the ROM and audio output!
ZX Spectrum 16Kb was my first computer in 1983. What a machine. The bright palette and nice resolution made for some incredible games, despite the colour clash.
12:26 - The 8-bit Cat!
I think you made an audio mixing mistake, Dave.
Jet Set Willy's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" rendition did not make my ears explode and bleed.
Visits to the local computer shop in the mid-late 80's - a shop full of commodore 64 / VIC-20s all playing different versions of 'Axel F', all out of sync
1:54 I actually have a device that pulls a very similar trick here, the Psion Organiser. I was lucky enough to get one of these things complete in box and it advertises itself as having "14K memory" but if you look it up you'll find the original Psion Organiser only has 2K static RAM onboard. You may think it has a 12K ROM then, but no! It only has a 4K ROM. The remaining 8K then? That's an 8K non-rewritable EPROM memory stick that they bundled with the unit. Hence 2K static RAM + 4K ROM + 8K EPROM = 14K!
Interestingly, Psion were actually responsible for some of the earliest software released for the Spectrum, too. The "Horace" series and "Chequered Flag" spring to mind, but there were others.
@@TheTurnipKing
And the office suite of word processor, spreadsheet, database and "business" graphics for the Sinclair QL - these were later ported as the exchange suite to the PC.
The last thing I expected you to be getting a hold of was a C5. Can't wait to see how it all turns out, along with the rest of the studio build!
The input method for Sinclair BASIC did obviate the need for a parser in the BASIC interpreter (thus saving some space in the ROM) -- also by "forcing" input of only specific command/keyword at specific times also meant that you also didn't have to worry too much about syntax errors. I also vaguely recall a few interesting "features" such as the VAL() function going beyond what was typical for most other BASICs -- in most other BASICs if you typed:
PRINT VAL("1+2+3")
the output was typically 1 (the parser stopped at the "+"), while in Sinclair BASIC the output was 6.
One minor annoyance was that Sinclair BASIC (at least on the ZX-80 and ZX-81) didn't use ASCII