LGR Oddware - Sinclair RAM Turbo Interface
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- Опубліковано 1 жов 2024
- Overview, installation, and demonstration of the Sinclair RAM Turbo interface for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home micro computer.
Many thanks to UKRetroGames for the interface!
/ ukretrogames
Also thanks to potsy5656 for the Commodore 1802 monitor!
/ potsy5656
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Blimey, what a blast from the past. The turbo was made by RAM Electronics (Fleet) Limited, Fleet Road, Hampshire. They had a high street shopfront there, and we made various peripherals in a portakabin out the back of the shop. Production then moved down to Church Crookham with a larger premises. Thousands of those damned things must have passed through my hands. Quite pleased to see there are still a few floating around though.
But do you know the secrets of the Yellow Button?
greggv8 : it’s a non Maskable interrupt.. nmi.. useful for hacking, or making copies of whatever is in ram
@@greggv8 its a reset
@@Simon-ui6db Guess you just guessed what it was.
I had this interface and loved it
As much as emulators allow you to enjoy the games, you just can't replace the experience of working with the original hardware, putting it together and getting the thing to work. Priceless!
I hate tape drives! It was annoying to go over to this one guy's house to play computer games and have to have an actual conversation with him for five minutes.
I always put up with him until he said, "Try this game. It's worth the half-hour wait."
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.
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.
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It was a blank tape.
That is why i never played on my spectrum again, despite nostalgia. But on the other hand you had accsesible illegal games way before the internet.
At 1364 baud, a 48K game took slightly under five minutes to load. Most games were less. And booting the computer took all of two seconds. You can probably boot a modern PC and game in under that time, but not by much.
@@diederick76 Let's not discount the price difference, either. £1.99 vs £14.99 for the cheapest games of each format. I could buy a new game every week.
Kids -- Don't circumcise your Jet Pac. It cannot be undone! Listen to the man.
Connector condom! :D Hurray for safe gaming!
its Durexs attempt at computers XD
After your floppy becomes a hard drive, protect each other before you RAM
@@jakebodnar2797 hehe, good one :)
LOL @ 1:07
ok you make reviews of THIS kind of hardware... Subscribed
Cassette Tapes are wonderful, it sure beat the heck out of punch cards.
Until the tape chewed...
"Cassette Tapes are wonderful, it sure beat the heck out of punch cards."
"Getting your hand jammed in a revolving door is wonderful, it sure beat the heck out of getting hit with a train"
There were two reasons why the cartridges didn't catch on: the fact that only a small subset of spectrum owners had the zx interface 2 (or equivalent), as you say, but also that the cartridges were only 16k, whereas many tape games used the full 48k.
Well, it was 48K minus 7K for screen memory and systemvariables.
actually that 16K limitation was a huge failure. on the other hand someone broke this limitation and can produce ALL the cartridges on one ROM
www.thingiverse.com/thing:1887326
I’d say it’s more to do with the fact that offering convenience to Spectrum users was like offering healing balm to a masochist.
Ahhh Jet Pac the first Speccy game I ever played and still one of the best that I enjoy still to this day! ;) Awesome piece of kit shame as you said it was wasted. Have you ever heard of the Opus disk drive that's what we had and it doubled as a joystick interface, very tricky to get to work but when you finally did it was win biscuits! ;)
Wow, I was suprised to see how well this Sinclair has lasted throughout the years :D the game play is rather fluid, and it still looks like a fun high quality game!
There was a pretty high amount of dross on the system but Jetpack is one of THE games for it.
Most of the best games were very simple concepts like JetPac, I put hours into this game when I was a kid!
I spent many hours of my childhood loading games from tape. Still got my Spectrum. Love your videos man. From a fellow geek in the UK.
Had the Sinclair ZX came out in the USA the same time it did in the UK and had good distribution and was sold much cheaper than Commodore, Apple, TI, Radio Shack etc it might have been a hit over here. It looks like a very basic and fun computer.
Maybe... I feel like the US market was already a little too full for it to edge its way in.
the problem is they licensed Timex to distribute clone systems for them in the US, it was no handled well
For the time, it wasn’t basic. It was compact but feature-rich, which helped it blow away the competition.
I have several TS-2068's that I still use today and a few Spectrums - I've always been a fan of the Sinclair machines.
@@GameHammerCG What do you mean? It was extremely basic :) Although with a descent processor that made it possible to program pretty good games (despite practically no assistance *at all* from the unusually simplistic hardware).
well, those cartridges were great invention.
Unfortunately they had two major problems:
-They were limited to 16K size. Because of that more complex games did not fit, although the loading time was the longest with THOSE. A huge game's loading time VS cartrige's instant start (ELITE? anyone?) would make it a real offer. Also, no business SW may fit into 16K, so it was OK purely just for simple games. The plastics, PCB and electronics are the expensive part, the bigger EPROM would not increase the price of HW significantly).
-Very very expensive. not only now, but back to the 80s it cost 3x more than the tape version.
I saw recently, that some smart guys made this with bigger ROM, programmable, even applied loader screen+ SW selecting menu. Too bad, that this nice HW did not show the full potentials, especially a good business SW or some big multiloading games would make people buy more adapters.
The 16K from the cartridge paged into the lower 16K of the Speccys memory, which was the Speccy ROM, so basically it replaced the speccy ROM with the games ROM. This limited the usability since you couldn't make any calls to the Speccy's own ROM, so any program that relied on a call to the Speccy ROM wouldn't work on cartridge without major rewrite.
@@hex2bin I do wonder if it would have been possible to actually load into the higher ram from the rom, much like a tape does but faster?
@@smartroadbiker no need. developers could've easily implemented bank switching. even atari 2600 cartridges did it.
Just looked up JetPac on Ebay, in this format it sells for £150... I own a copy and it's been sat in a box for years in the original packaging :D I'm sure someone else will get more fun out of it than I will! That's going up on eBay! :D
That’s insane! Jetpac was always a bit of a simple repetitive, boring game even back in the day.. only reason I ever played or was my older brother convinced me there was a level on mars later on
R Tape loading error, 0:1
+1973Washu A rare sight in all those years I used tapes on my ZX Spectrums ;-)
Oh,No!!! Cheap Radio Shack tape recorder! LOL!
Agree. It worked extremely well.
A fortunately rare occurrence, usually because the volume was set incorrectly on the cassette deck.
Ah yes, that brings back memories. Once you got a decent tape recorder they tended to go away. The one good thing in the Amstrad Spectrums was they had a built in cassette player and you hardly ever had loading issues with it.
That's the fastest boot I've ever seen. Holy crap.
I love the way the rocket has an old marine diesel engine.
Damn 8 years ago, the thinkpad T420 sitting next to me was brand new when this video came out, amazing how far you've come
*checks ebay for rom cartridge prices*
£60 for Jet Pac
£80 for Hungry Horace
You can buy a whole Spectrum for that with about 100 games.
You should run that industrial fan in the background on all your more recent gameplay videos Clint.
@matawin2 Sounds like an external mic on the table.
So in JETPAC you land on a planet, repair your ship, take off, land on another planet and repair your ship again. Over and over.
Didn't know No Man's Sky was already released in 1983.
that was begining of gaming so THANKS whoever made this stuff ))) lgr u are NOT geek u are man with good hobby )))
I was really hoping you would show us the old tape cassette loading haha, I've never seen it done and I enjoy your videos. Oh well, this is nearly 4yrs. old now so it's probably out of the question to request that. Great video nonetheless! Jet Pac is awesome!
Jetpac was the first game i played, must have been mid to late 80`s. But it was on a different model Spectrum.
It was the Spectrum made by Dk`tronics, it had a much better keyboard.
The other reason for it's lack of success, apart from everyone having tape access, was it had a maximum game size of 16K - check the catalogue of carts. Oh and level 5 on Jetpac is the easiest there is. Head up and stand on the top platform, they cannot reach you and every bad guy that dies give you points - even if you didn't shoot them. Pop out, grab fuel, drop it on rocket And once it's full, sit and wait for a high high score to roll in.
Wasn't the yellow button to POKE code into memory (the way to enter cheat codes on the Speccy) because you don't have access to the LOAD "" function.
I owned the RAM turbo when it came out and I loved it. It was superb for multiple joysticks and the reset button was an excellent feature given that the only other way to reset the Speccy was to pull out the power lead which never was a good thing.
Hmm... Jetpac looks like a cross between joust screen layout and defender playstyle... I like it. :)
Quickshot Joystick! I remember those. God, I am old.
That red one is actually a Quickshot Turbo. What crappy switches, mine broke in a month.
Did you know? The common Anglo-Saxon "Z" is "zee". The French brought the "zed" when they took over the throne of England in 1066. So it has always been the commoner in England who used "zee" and the higher mucky-mucks who used "zed".
Awesomeness
You should check out Micro Men, it's a one off BBC comedy/drama about the rise and fall of Acorn/Sinclair, and everything in between. Well worth a watch, probably uploaded to UA-cam by now :)
Isn't Ultimate the company that became RAREware? Something in the back of my head is telling me it was. Sadly Microsoft happened to them. *sigh*
BLASPHEMY! Commodore monitor was used! :-) (from a C= + Speccy fan)
Jetpack is a great game, but you could get so good you’d never be able to die.
It's impressive how it looks so modern and actual. I mean it looks like a wireless keyboard you would use hooked up to your Television.
Brings back memories of my old Cheetah 125+ joystick
+Michael Parker Mine took one hell of a battering during Hyper Sports competitions with my brother. Good suction cups lol.
TheWomble001 It was Daley Thompson's decathlon putting mine through Hell, but still survived close to a decade of abuse.
Mark is a legend, such a generous guy. We need an Everdrive type cart for the interface containing every Speccy game! That'd be cool :)
still better than any game rare has put out in the last 10 years
Is it just me, or does anyone else want one now just to press that button?
Zedrackis I have one on the table in front of me, yet I still can't press the button - mine is the older model that doesn't have one
I want to get twenty and plug them into each other in series
I love the loop that protects the Speccy from being powered on when you plug in the Ram Turbo, but nothing protects it when plugging in a Rom Cart.
Is it ok if I enjoy watching this if I'm not a geek like you? 👉👈
Speccy connected to a Commodore monitor? That's like the 1980s equivalent to connecting a Windows PC to an Apple Retina display!
Well except for the fact that the two actually work with each other, unlike an Apple Retina on PC... Also a lot of Brits and Aussies I know had both the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, but only a Commodore monitor. Which was fine apparently. Also two old stand alone 8 bit computers I want again.
ehhh more like plugging a mac mouse into my pc
Is that a PAL monitor or were you using a PAL to NTSC converter?
instant load time! none of this booting crap or tape
Hey I know it's an old video but still enjoyed it!
That red rubber boot around the connector on the ROM cartridge is 'probably' an electrostatic discharge protector. You might want to take your DVOM and measure resistance of the actual red rubber. It may be resistive (conductive) to drain away any static shocks that might otherwise hit the terminals of the ROM cartridge. This would prevent any one terminal from getting individually zapped and damaging the ROM chip.
We had the RAM Turbo interface for the Sinclair Speccy. It worked well. (Still got it somewhere, I suppose. We bought some of the cartridge games for it, too. Got them cheap.)
I remember seeing these in magazines, but no one I knew had one and you didn't see the cartridges for sale much either.
That price sticker explains that £14.95! Im sure games on tape were only £2-3.
75% off does seem like a bargain though :)
Old vid ive found myself watching, didn't see this before..... I take it that monitor will display PAL then?
Back in the day people were pissed off with this as it implied it has RAM added which would have increased the RAM of a 16K spectrum when it had no ram inside.
You mean I spent hours loading up these games when there was a means of instant loads!!! Curses sinclair!!!!
I remember my uncle telling me about a custom ZX Spectrum he built with an actual, real, non-rubber key keyboard.
Apparently he found a cheap keyboard that used internals that were super small, and he just put the innards of the ZX Spectrum in that, because they fit.
Linksbro I did the same with a Dragon 32 shell and a Spectrum :)
+Linksbro It's easier just to buy a Spectrum 128K version. It has a normal (hard) keyboard. Although the keys seem to be on springs or something like that. They don't click so much as squish down.
Also, it has a built in tape deck! SUCH TECHNOLOGY.
+DGneoseeker1 but they have certain compability issuses
Dekki Gaming
Really? What kinds of problems arise?
with certain software and games due to different hardware being used in 128k
competition pro joystick. The joystick to make you feel like your'e a professional in a competition!
The spectrum is so cute.
I just found one today at the flea market. Early model, without the reset(?) button. Works perfectly For about 2.5 USD equivalent in HUF, I think it's a bargain.
I wonder if someone can tell me the Name of a System I saw once at a friends house and never again. I dont remember much since I was young, but a Friend had a big onepiece Computer that was white and reminded me a bit of the Amiga. It had a cartridgeslot at the top and the only game I remember him starting up was about a rabbit collecting carrots and there was what looked like a robber on top that threw bombs. It certainly had those cheap Atari graphics, so I know it probably wasnt a Commodore or Amiga. Mind you this was in Europe where these things seemed more popular.
This ram adaptor is just simply the best expansion module not onlydoes it add more ram to the system but also adds 2 joysticks port and a cartride input, but the best part is that you can still use other addons to it via it’s passtrough input suck as a printer, lightpen or an sd card addon etc,,,, and with it’s ‘reset’ switch you can reboot the system without having to pull off the plug, theres even a hole for that ac plug,so it's an awesome must have gedjet for zx spectrum users!!!
I'm here tonight as I've just set up my old spectrum and couldn't remember which joystick port on my ram turbo to use, Thank you.
Dec 2022.
Anyone else remember playing this game through Donkey Kong 64? Gotta get that Rare Coin.
The Zx and the A600, i think are the definition of "eye candy" on computers..
You said it "kills the computer" if you plug it in while it's on. Do you mean that doing it even once will more likely than not be enough on its own to destroy it? Or is it the usual situation where it's not the end of the world if it happens once or twice, but you'll probably do some damage if you make a habit out of it?
Cartridges are quicker and more reliable to load than tape, but a lot harder to pirate. I think that’s why cassette tape remained the dominant format for software in the UK until rewritable floppies and the associated disk drives became cheap.
Had one as a kid and got one again recently, and neither had the yellow button. It came as quite a surprise to see one. Also with my quickshot pro 2, and my whsmith data recorder, I spent many a happy hour gaming on the speccy
A friend of mine had one of these. Very exciting until you discovered that the only games on it were 16k ones
6:27 "It loads!" Well, not really :) The whole point with a game in ROM is that you don't have to load it.
Nope, it still needs to be loaded from cartridge ROM to computer's RAM.
Jet Pac is indeed rad
Someone has probably told you this, the button on the side was a reset button
I've got one of these tucked away in a drawer somewhere. Would be fun to drive around in a C5 with this thing mounted on the steering wheel. People would think you're all green and shit.
John Klein And why would they think that?
"it's freakin jetpack; and jetpack is rad"
--LGRism
That LGR comment had me nodding in agreement so enthusiastically that I hurt my neck. Rad indeed, good sir!
Very cool! This looks like a very useful device. It's a shame it didn't receive more support though.
Obviously Cart is generally going be more reliable than tape, but as you said, ten carts vs over 1000 spectrum games on tape. So now I challenge you to do a tape loading video showing the same game on several systems of the same game, over and over again. See which one is fastest and most reliable, because it will not be any Atari's or Commodore's....
ZX Spectrum 48k - the most timeless design. No obsolete ports, new interfaces still being developed. One day there will be an add on with USB ports supporting USB gamepads & more than just ONE BUTTON (big issue of all this DB9 8bit stuff) + integrated flash storage file system... mark my words! (keywords: Kmouse Turbo 2011, ZX Matrix, DivIDE)...
"Don't you hate when money and marketing gets in the way of good ideas and good games"
Me as a Linux gamer: why yes, yes I do
My first gaming experience was JetPack on a Spectrum, but my Spectrum looked much more primitive than this one. The case was a bit bigger and it had turning knobs on the top and no letters on the keyboard. My blind father (yes he was blind) cut out a larger slot for the joystick extension... Oh the memories!, JetPack and Alleycat!.
About the yellow button: I do recall a "TURBO" cartridge for my atari 800xe had similar button on it as well, and it did something else when held while powering the computer up. Now I can't recall exactly what it was, it was more than 20yrs ago... But it loaded two distinct programs I believe...
Just to get something straight about the original Speccy: the keyboard was a pig to type on but we had no trouble playing games using the keys for several years. Many games needed only a handful of keys, generally Left, Right, and Jump, sometimes with Up and Down and Fire. At the most five or six, with many games and very easy to manage. Joysticks are essential for flight games, such as Elite, but we still managed.
The problem with ROM cartridges was the relative price of the interface and the price of the cartridges, plus the lack of games available for it.
Back in the late 80s, we just wiggled cables around and hoped it would load from the tape. Back then we didn't have beer to kill time with. This video is the first time I'm seen a cartridge for a 48K rubber key Speccy.! Now if you could find a SAM Coupe...
Yes! Jet Pac by Ultimate play the game (turned in to Rare) is RAD! one of the best games EVER ! simple yet awesome. even my 11 year old son loves it.
And you're using the best joystick for the speccy, the competition pro, this Englishman approves :)
I used to own a ZX spectrum. I was learning gw basic when i was a kid back in the 80ies. I remember endless hours of typing and looking for typos... God... Of course once the zx was off my programs become void!
We've been going from magnetic storage to solid state since the early days. SSDs are a decades old idea.
+JohnnyNismo Remember when USB flash drives were 16 to 32 MB
+Lutz Peyton Still got a 256 somewhere, that's some next level stuff
+Mike Creed I have a bunch of 128mb micro sd cards I use to ubgrade the rom of older devices
+JohnnyNismo On the early ARM processor machines that ran RISC OS you could use your RAM as an SSD if you had enough. I remember in the early nineties we had an ARM7 machine with 32Mb (which was loads back then) and used ~16Mb of it for temporary storage because it was silly quick.
+That Linux Gamer ram disks ? not new plenty made on the Atari ST. many of the cracked games were better than the originals because of the packing and use of ram disks to explode the data
IIRC you could get kempston interfaces for much, much cheaper than an interface 2, and as the joystick port was the main reason for purchasing it didn't really make much sense to buy the Sinclair version (or this third-party one). That's what killed them.
I had one of these. It was mostly great, but I believe that it used up a small amount of memory. So if you had a game that needed all the available memory (I assume) it would reset when the game loaded. If you unplugged the interface the game would load fine. I think it only happened on 1 or 2 titles.
I think the problem with the RAM Turbo and addons like it was not only that it was rare and not cheap in itself, but the cartridges themselves were a lot more expensive than tape based games - it was the same thing that stymied the NES in the UK, why buy a Nintendo and pay £30 (at least) for a cartridge when a tape for the Speccy, '64 or Amstrad was, like, three quid or something...?
Oh and after the red/black Kempston Competition Pro I bought a Powerplay Cruiser which was an improved version, with suction feet; a flatter base and a adjustable ring around the stick with three levels of stiffness. For waggling games I set it to the stiffest setting and used the palm of my hand across the top of the stick. For everything else I used the more slack setting. Best joystick ever and I still have it; more tough than an army general!
I tried playing this game with a Kempston joystick and quickly learned the error of my ways! Joysticks are best for waggling type games and for everything else, the keyboard with redefined keys gives full control and precision ;-) The game Jetpac never ages or becomes jaded, it really is a true classic! I cannot remember which level I got to, maybe about 6 or 7 I dunno, but it got insanely difficult. Wow is it really 28 yrs since I first bought and played Jetpac!!!? Yes! :-o
Jet pack very good game had to get it on xbox live its has the updated version and the spectrum version aswell one of the achievements complete all 16 levels on the retro version thats too hard
I'd completely forgotten about the Ram Turbo that I used to own, until seeing this one.
So the completely forgetting wasn't completely completed !
Enjoyed the review :)
Well done for getting hold of the rom cartridge, I've never seen them in the wild
Roms were far and few and many didn't work
Remember the c64 and even the Vic 20 had a card slot and joystick ports out of the box
Commodore rules! Spectrums suck
wow, the one thing that made the ZX Spectrum just the tiniest bit less shitty and theres only 10 games for it.......Europe, you got so royally fucked in the 80's when it came to gaming and my heart goes out to you all who had wear Rose Tinted glasses as thick as plexiglass to see this computer as anything more then adequate.
It is great that on power up you have your game ready. However, I actually really like playing tape and listening to those screeching loading sounds. Guess that It's also part of the retro excitement. Also there is waiting for intro screen. I have always wondered with what kind of loading screen I will be greeted every time on first game loading. :D
If I'm not mistaken I seem to remember the yellow button being for the purpose of rescaning the expansion bus. That way you could plug different things in that didn't have a pass through and hit the button to rescan the bus to use the new device. It was a long time ago that I used a Sinclair so I'd check into it further before you try it. As you said, the machine can be seriously damaged by plugging or unplugging things while it's on.
As you said, the Interface-2 was a bit of a commercial failure. Most people bought a Kempston interface and just got their games on cassette. Later Spectrums had the joystick ports built in but lacked the cartridge port.
The zx spectrum always seemed like the cheaper option for people who couldn't afford more capable systems with extra conveniences, so I imagine anyone who wanted something with fancy ROM cartridges and whatnot at the time, probably had systems with higher specs, and price.
How about this for odd. When I was a kid our car was stolen, it later turned up abandoned and bizarrely there was one of these things sitting on the back seat and I still have it somewhere! I had no idea what it was at the time, clearly something to with the spectrum with joystick ports but I didn't really know what it was for. Now I do :)
We used tapes here because of price. Budget tape games were £1.99, a budget disk game being £5.99 and there was no such thing as a budget cartridge. Crappy loading times and load fails were well worth being able to get a new game every week.
i had this back in 87 (from 83) and me and a mate wanted to do a newspaper for the flat we lived in.. needed a printer and that particular connector for it lol i still have the sinclair zx spectrum with all of 48KB of memory LOL and a ton of tapes with games on them. the best computer ever.
Watching this old vid of yours on which you spent a sizeable portion of hte second half of the video simply playing without really reviewing anything was quite nice. Perhaps you could do some oldware let's plays with an introduction and review or nothing at all and just go into some gameplay.
05:50 - I like the prices on the game from ...is it Brett & Ogden? (never heard of them) £14.95 reduced to £7.00 reduced to £3.50!! How many Interface 2 games would you get from ebay for any of those prices now?
Priced: £14.95 ... £7.00 ... £3.50
If you go on eBay nowadays you can pay £50 or more for these suckers!!
I've no clue what this thing is or does, it looks boring as hell...... but since it's one of your vids I'll watch all 15:10 of it with an orgasmic grin :3
man I really wanted JetPac on a rom pak back in the day. All I got was a flaky Atic Atac which would glitch out after a couple of secs. JetPac was the BEST. So nice to see it again.