LGR - Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k Computer Review
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- Опубліковано 20 сер 2024
- Name the top computers of the 1980's... okay, if the Spectrum wasn't on that list, you need to read up on your history! From an American gamer's perspective, is Sinclair's 48k wonder worth getting today? How about all of those PAL / NTSC problems? This video covers the newcomer bases in this review of:
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16k / 48k microcomputer
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Growing up in the 80's in a 1930's house with no double glazing OR central heating I've fond memory's of how my faithful Speccy +2's underslung heatsink used to keep my lap warm during late night Rebelstar sessions...sniff I miss ya little fella.
TheBuccaneer1975
LUXURY!
@@anonUK
VANITY!
@@Ropetupa
ua-cam.com/video/VKHFZBUTA4k/v-deo.html
Jet set willy and manic miner
Rebelstar was simply awesome! Great for 2 players too.
This was my very first system ever back in 1982 ( the 16K ) and I actually learnt BASIC on it. I remember at some point upgrading the RAM to 1MB ( I think by then I had the 128 machine ) It costs 400 Dutch Guilders or roughly EUR 350 Based on those prices an external 4TB HDD today would cost about EUR 1.600.000,-
Same! But there were very few games for 16k. I got my mom to get me the 48k upgrade for Chrismas the next year ^_^. I learnt Basic and even a little of machine code eventually.
Whole Eastern Bloc ran on clones of these machines, that is how I got mine in mid-80s, because my country was in that kind of party. I still love how ZX Spectrum is small and compact in comparison with Commodore 64 or even Amstrad CPC, it has much less power but I remember how I just put my ZX to bag and took it to my friend with some games on tapes, we programmed some basic things and of boy, so much fun. But Atari 600XL clone is my number one and first computer which my family ever own.
Yes, but they forget to spend a nice soundchip in it. Sounds terrible in my opinion! Commodore SID Sound is the besg of that era
@@pc-sound-legacy 128k actually had a dedicated soundchip (AY-3-8910 or analogs) Which is also why it wasn't popular in the Eastern bloc. Getting actual Z80 CPUs was difficult enough, the rest could be built/worked around with Soviet-produced chips, even that custom one built just for the original Spectrums. )
@@nebufabu Z80 was actually manufactured in Eastern Germany as U880D. Most clones in eastern europe used this CPU.
@@bezbotek I didn't know that, and I have one with an actual Zilog Z80... It was made sometime closer to mid-90s though, so it's likely the imported chips were much less of an issue then.
@@pc-sound-legacy The music from the 2000's shows the possibilities of AY well above SID.
its insane how much work you have to put in to play on the spectrum, I have one in my wardrobe, luckily i'm in the UK so i can just plug it straight into my tv and start playing
If you sent it to me, i too won't have problems here in India. You know why! Only your plugs, but they fit using adaptors.
@@Crazytesseract
I am from the UK and you are welcome dude!
It is amazing you don't have problems there in India!.
@@outsidethepyramidBtw India is a strange country. The very rich have way too much, and the poor have almost nothing.
Same for Australia, different mains-plug but otherwise compatible.
My first computer was a VZ-200 - a sort-of TRS-80 knockoff. With orange! chicklet keys and a whopping 6k of RAM! (actually that was pretty puny for the time).
But I mostly grew up on a C64 which was the only affordable decent option in Aus back then (climate too hot for BBC Micros, they found, and the only Apple II owner I knew of was the kid who's dad was the regional Apple reseller, but those were well out of my price range anyway).
@@Crazytesseract isnt that the result of the caste system? Need to fix that, it sucks.
My earliest memory is 3-4 year old me staying up late at night with my dad while he typed in programs from a magazine, only for 90% of them to not work or to suck. Good times.
First off, as someone from the UK thanks for pronouncing it as Zed Ex rather than Zee ex which I agree just sounds wrong.
The Speccy was the first home computer I ever owned and I still have a very nostalgic view of it today. yes in comparison with other systems at the time it came up short but for its limitations the games were surprisingly good.
As for whether to buy I would say possibly. it seems that an awful lot of extra expense is required to use a model in the US and its possibly easier to use an emulator like Spectaculator or ZERO (which is the one I use).
Or calling ZZ Top Zed Zed Top.
i think i love you
If I'm remembering correctly (from my days working in an independent computer shop here in the UK back in the early 80's), the Spectrum came out in the UK before the C64 did, so it managed to get a good user base ; the Atari 400/800 systems were already available, but they weren't really moving so much at the time, and then the C64 came out and it became the defacto system for so many! The Spectrum though gained a vast user base by then, and so competition was fierce - Speccy, or C64?
That really was the beginning of the 'console wars'....Spectrum or Commodore.... and then it later became Nintendo/Sega....
However, the Spectrum was a landmark home computer at the time...! :-)
In USA, it was called the Zee X. Is LGR from Britain?
@@AmbersKnightha ha of course 🤣🤣
What spectrum programmers crammed into 48k of memory was utterly incredible games like Tau Ceti and Elite where not just little sandboxes but entire worlds in simulation.... Utterly amazing accomplishments of programming. An efficiency we don't see today
Damn dude ! You were really determined to play the Spectrum LOL. Hats off to your dedication !
Those UHF connectors are called Belling-Lee connectors. They are more prevalent around the world. The connector you showed that is used in the states is called an f-connector. They are mainly used for satellite dish connections.
He knows.
Back in the 80s, the Stamper brothers formed a company called ULTIMATE PLAY THE GAME - they were responsible for some of the best Spectrum games ever made, including ATIC ATAC, SABRE WULF, JET PAC, LUNAR JETMAN, COOKIE, ALIEN 8, KNIGHTLORE & UNDERWURLDE. Another developer called Matthew Smith was responsible for two of the other legendary spectrum games - Manic Miner & Jetset Willy
Holy shit!! Wow..... man you really went to a LOT of trouble to get this thing working!!! I hope it was worth your trouble, This was my first computer when I was about 10 years old!!! Believe me I was absolutely OBSESSED with it at the time! Nice to see that people are still interested in them! The keyboard was the death of mine after a couple of years tho, I was very sad to see it go. Cheers for the video! Well done.
+Liberation 8 The keyboard failures are very common, hopefully you didn't chuck it out! they still make membranes for them and the newer ones do not fail like the old ones.
lol!! Yeah I'm afraid it went in the bin many many years ago! With hind sight I would have kept it but when your a kid and your toys stop working its not long before they are thrown away!! Its a shame but thats how it was! Cheers.
Liber 8 if I had that keyboard, I’d kill myself too.
Jk, still a great machine, despite that poc keyboard.
Manic Miner...the best👍🏼
Lots of people are still interested. Believe it, people are even trying to learn the Z80 Assembly today. I am one of those, using some facilities we have today (Basinc, SpecOS, etc).
The humble Spectrum. The very first real computer i experienced, both at school and at home. At school we learned to program (most of the time); at home we played games. This is what all normal English kids from working class families played and was also the subject of ridicule for posh middle class Commodore 64 owners. Unique system with unique games. If you didn't want to purchase the game on cassette, you could actually buy the program in print and type it up yourself. Can you imagine kids doing that today, lol...
mate i can't imagine kids today even waiting the tape load time....or trying again and again when the load fails. and they'd rage at the thought that sometimes the game wouldn't load at all, so we'd go outside on our bikes :D
I never could get the type-ins working. luckily cassettes were only £1.99 or so each. I used to buy them from my local news agents every Saturday as soon as I got my pocket money.
Me too
How was this "in print & type" option? Like they were different priced and sold at the same shop? Of course I know this wouldn't be for all the games. I am just curious about.
@ Most software was released on tape only. However, there existed books and magazines of BASIC listings which you could type into the computer. Some publishers also offered these type-ins on cassette, as a convenience, but generally, the worlds of tape and type-in remained fairly separate, and there were few who offered the same program in both formats.
As a Brit with fond memories of the Speccy it is totally awesome to see one make it over there to the States. And thank you for pronouncing it as a "ZED EX" Spectrum.
RIP Clive Sinclair, gone to silicon heaven.
Its the reason we started a podcast, we cant help talking about the rubber keyed box of wonders even after all these years, thanks for the video.
You inspired me to get one, it just got here from the UK. One of my several Sega 16bit era power supplies (black colored male lead, not a yellow one) along with a cheap coax adaptor was all I needed!
You sir, rock!
No, I didn't get my first computer until the windows 95 era. I will def check those out!
I don't know about Australia but the ZX Spectrums in New Zealand are tuned to VHF since we never had UHF until our third TV channel came along TV3 in 1989
I would say pronouncing it Zee-ecks is like pronouncing ZZ Top "Zed Zed Top"
its just wrong.
But ZZ Top is American and ZX Spectrum is British. You just localise your dialect for that particular thing
Betaman yea its British I call it the Zed Ecks as not only is that how I speak, it’s also the correct pronunciation
@@betaman7988 I think that was his point. Or else he's trying to counter the American habit of Americanizing every word they can: like "aluminium"
@@squirlmy I've just re-read the comment I replied to and you're completely right!
For a french Zed Zed Top is the correct pronunciation :)
Thanks for paying homage to the speccy with this video :) I just happened to find a Spectrum ZX + in a second hand store for 15 pounds when I was over in the UK. Its such a great little system. I'm sorry to hear that its so hard to setup over in NTSC land. If you ever do more reviews of games on that system may I recommend Dan Dare. The presentation and graphics really test the limits of that little 48k wonder. LRG we salute you.
There is a Japanese concept called *wabi-sabi* , meaning "flawed beauty" or perhaps "rustic imperfection".
The Spectrum has *wabi-sabi* in truckloads. I love it.
Wabi Sabi also makes my sushi taste better
Great, thorough and honest review, thank you. You’re right about that UK programmers (known as Devs these days), I hear even the company behind Grand Theft Auto V can trace it’s roots back to programming the ZX Spectrum here in the UK.
It's really nice to see the hard work you put into getting the humble speccy up and running. Sir Clive would be proud :)
The problem with using emulators is that ZX Spectrum games were designed with CRT televisions in mind, which had amazing natural ability to un-dither graphics, and create a convicing appearance of having more colors than Spectrum actually supported.
None of the emulators I tried can faithfully replicate this vital effect, which is more than just mere upscaling. As result, we get pixelated, raw, "naked" looking graphics which don't resemble at all the picture I used to see on my TV and in Spectrum-based arcades.
The magic is gone, when everything looks dithered and every pixel stabs you in the eye.
+GR Unless you use a CRT monitor but it still isn't the same
Sony Trinitron
I use a CRT monitor. It doesn't emulate any of the TV effects.
Bit late to reply to this but the excellent Spin emulator allows you to set the display to show scanlines (emulating the TV) effect and this smooths out the pixels.
FBZX emulator on Linux has a scanline effect set up by default. It looks pretty convincing but you can always use good old VGA CRT monitor to make it look even better. I think that having cleaner picture is actually good for readability of the text if you fiddle with basic, some programs or play text adventures. Many people back then had lousy, TVs with blurry, smeared picture instead of monitors and they think this is how the picture is supposed to look. But I think it's nice to be able to read stuff and have nice, crisp colors instead of washed out mess. 🤷♂️
Having played Sinclair computers on distorted CRT TVs BITD, I am quite happy to leave out these distortions and just watch the beautiful colour graphics without ghosting, dancing pixels, noise and scanlines.
Not read all of the comments, so I might be duplicating, but one of the main reasons that the Speccy never took off in the US was due to the square-wave pollution its sound chip caused.. You could tune a nearby radio into it and listen to the sound (albeit not perfectly but recognizably). While the UK had relatively few radio stations, and it didn't seem to hit their frequencies - so this wasn't a problem there - it was in the US, who would sell off bandwidth to everyone with a chequebook. Therefore, the FCC wanted changes made to eliminate this, and by the time they got their Timex Sinclair thingummybob ready to go, it was out of date and Commodore, Atari and Nintendo already had the lions' share of the US market, so it was doomed to failure.
wartmiller I don't think the original Speccy had a sound chip, i think it was all CPU driven through a one voice speaker
Dubsy 102 There wasn't even a speaker, just the audio part of the video signal, which was probably mono at the time, since stereo TV didn't get a pan-european standard during the analog age, only a bunch of local standards such as the German A2. VHS players just hooked up directly to your living room sound system if you wanted to enjoy the full sound of movies.
@@johnfrancisdoe1563 The 16/48k speccy had a little speaker on the motherboard, the 128k and up had (mono 3 channel) sound modulated on the tv signal. Nicam was pretty standard in the UK and most of the vhs systems and tellys i owned outputted nicam stereo, dont think any computers did though.
@@maxwelsh6121 Dunno about the speccy but my UK Amiga 500 blanketed the AM band and a chunk of the FM spectrum with noise if the radio was less than 2 feet from the machine.
There's another way to pronounce ZX, the Slavic way - Zed-Eecks
Oh man. I've never heard "Under the Coke Sign" used so well.
You seem to be really into IDM and the like, the taste is mutual.
Thanks! And yeah I very much am, anything along those lines is awesome.
I'm a Dutch IT student and I just bought myself one of these. Absolutely love it, and I already had a tv and cassette player that supported it!
Your early videos rule! You should make one in "old style" for a channel milestone of some kind . . . .
ZX Spectrum is a cranky little blighter in North America.
I've never really understood why the US TVs were almost never PAL compatible. In Europe, just about everything made since about 1990 is NTSC compatible. It's SECAM that brings problems, and even then anything made by the French Thomson company was SECAM compatible as well. Thomson = RCA...
Jason james That's what I was trying to get my head round. Even my vcr from 1993 played ntsc cassettes. Btw at least we could still watch secam in black & white lol
Because NTSC came out before PAL, and most people in the US would ever use a PAL feature if it was included there was no reason to spend the extra money.
@Stefano Pavone Not true. The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg all used PAL. Only France, the Eastern block and some African countries used SECAM. And many countries in the Eastern block switched over to PAL after the wall fell.
Jason james Well speed and picture quality differences.
I'd imagine there was just no consumer demand for it, so no manufacturers spent the extra money to make it happen. I grew up in the US and it never even occurred to me that there were other television standards. Even people I knew in the 90s who were extreme enough to import electronics seemed to only do so from Japan and that stuff generally worked fine on our power grid and TV systems without conversion or modification.
I used to have one of these, a 48K, got it at Christmas '82. It had some great games (when the cassette worked) and was easy enough to program in Basic, and later Assembler. It was the start of my obsession with computers which later became a career! Your videos are very well presented and informative. Just wanted to say well done - and keep up the good work!
I love going back and watching your older videos. It really shows how far you've come. Keep up the great work and thank you for all the great content. P.S. you should cover the TI-99 someday
Boards of Canada in the background
TheRoboteer But which song though?
That's "Heard from Telegraph Lines" from Trans Canada Highway. (A month late but)
Guillermo Lorenzo thanks man, late or not I wasn't sure if it was BoC or not
Guillermo Lorenzo A godsend, thank you so much.
Only marginally easier than building a tardis to go back to the UK circa 1984 😁
From across the pond, thank you for correctly pronouncing “zed” X Spectrum 👍🏻
I can't believe this is LGR.
This style of video is So Different from today's LGR.
"I don't know why, but I really like this system" - Yea, I know what you mean. Something very lovable about the humble Speccy.
Some of the game's music sounds like me after eating gas station sushi.
Zachary Gustafson Or discount store sushi.
Some notes: people make power bricks for the Speccy these days that plug directly into US walls, no need for a big converter box, and pretty much any LCD monitor with composite video inputs will understand both PAL and NTSC, it's just cheaper to have 1 converter chip for both than different ones for different regions, so you can avoid any sort of conversion device if you just get an LCD monitor with composite video inputs.
I don't really know why but I loved the fact that this was such a complete ball-ache to get working and you just ploughed ahead with it regardless. And then all the cables and adaptors when you finally do have it working: it's just beautiful.
To be honest, what surprises me more than anything else is that you have a working Spectrum because they were so dreadfully unreliable. My first computer was a Spectrum 48K+, which was the plastic-keyed version of the same machine and, although I loved it, it went wrong all the time. It spent more time away being repaired than it did at home. The situation didn't improve with an upgrade to the +2A either. They were both awesome... and they were both complete nightmares. In the end (and this is after about 3 - 4 years of these machines constantly going wrong) my mum - ordinarily shy and mild mannered - completely lost her rag in the middle of Currys and scared the manager into giving us a full refund, which ended up being for the +2A that they'd given us for free to replace the 48K+ because it kept going wrong.
With the money I bought a Commodore 64. Only had it for a year before upgrading to an Amiga but it never went wrong in that time, which was a revelation to me (and the Amiga never went wrong in the 12 years I had it). The Speccy's a fun machine but, honestly, you'd better buy yourself another half dozen of them if you want one left working in 5 years time. I'm genuinely shocked there are so many working examples left.
The best game was Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.
this is not a lie!!!
Heard Through Telegraph Lines and SimCity 3000.... your musical taste is awsome !! (YEAH!)
As soon as I heard the music, my eyes lit up.
There was only one rule in the computer room - you could only play a game if you wrote it yourself. And the three or four people who had Spectrums all scored an "A" in comp sci by playing games right thru the final year of school.
Here I am, in 2019, watching screen caps of PAL video (576i... I think?) downscaled to 480p, on a 2160p monitor. :-) Glorious.
It's only after watching these old LGR videos that I understand what the L was for. Classic stuff and still interesting to me
Dude, you have been one of my favourite content creators for quite a while now, after seeing this, and especially your insistence of proper pronunciation of ZX has elevated you to God Tier. And you refer to it as a Speccy. You sir, are a scholar and a gentleman. I doff mt hat 😁
I just got one of these for the first time ever! I am in the USA as well. I received mine with a Harlequin motherboard upgrade which really helps with achieving a better display and running 128KB titles. It is still PAL (although the Harlequin can be set up as NTSC...but who wants that?) so there are still "things" that you need to connect to an NTSC TV, but IMHO it is totally worth it. This is fast becoming one of my favorite vintage computers. It is just so different than what I grew up on...and in a really great way. Happy to own one of these!
As a 22-year-old American who just owned a ZX Spectrum this year in 2022, owning a ZX Spectrum 48k is more convenient than ever before. All of the issues that you've addressed have been improved for yet-to-be-Speccy-owners in NTSC land.
- The RF to composite MOD is still a common thing with Spectrum owners, but you could just solder in a capacitor that will give you a composite PAL video output. It's a rather simple process and it requires a 100uF 25v to get it to work. I suggest watching the composite MOD video tutorial from Noel's Retro Lab if you're interested in performing the MOD.
- After you're finished soldering the capacitor, you can now use a capture card and load it into OBS, unless you have a TV set that allows a PAL signal.
- Instead of buying a voltage step-up power converter, you can buy a universal PSU from The Future Was 8-Bit, and the Speccy will work fine using that PSU. I don't know how safe it is using the Sinclair PSU that came with the Speccy because I've heard in a video that the PSU was faulty at launch.
- You can run cassette-based Spectrum games using a tape loader from your smartphone for convenience instead of pulling out the tape recorder.
Also, while you're at it, you might want to invest in a custom housing shell from ZX Renew. They have a great assortment of custom colored housing shells, faceplates, and keyboard mats if you want to give your Speccy a nice outer makeover. Shipping costs may vary depending on where you're from but for me it was worth it because of how worn out the case in the original Spectrum's faceplate was. Either way owning a Speccy is great, it's a nice little computer with great games and great demos from the demoscene.
Also, great review, Clint! Interesting to see how different it was to own a ZX Spectrum in the US back in 2010.
Wow America really have trouble running our stuff apparently. This... Oddly amuses me.
Knuxfan24 Different power standards. Different broadcast standards, thus different display standards. You'd have the same issues trying to run our equipment.
Trilkin Oddly enough quite a few of the old CRT tv's here in the UK supported NTSC for some reason, and it's not uncommon for us to run power tools on 110v for obvious saftey reasons so it probably wouldn't be too much of a problem. That said who the hell still has a CRT kicking about?
+TheBuccaneer1975 What do you mean who has a CRT kicking about? I've got several! Two I use daily.
+Sony Trinitron Well looking at you name I'd never have guessed ;)
+Knuxfan24 Yeah, my old Swedish CRT works fine with both NTSC and PAL.
Music on background: Boards of Canada "Heard From Telegraph Lines"
I just love it :)
So great to see an American embrace the speccy.
It made me become the dev I am today.
I learnt to code on that rubber keyboard and the fun of it stayed with me.
It was better when there were no deadlines...
Fantastic computer that defined my childhood.
Great video.
Thx.
Luv and Peace.
Watching this review almost 10 years on... Awesome to see the chonky resolution, Clint! Fits well with a Speccy review.
if someone ask for the music at the beginning... it´s called "Heard from Telegraph Lines" by
Boards of Canada
I LOVE YOU FOR THIS. THANK YOU.
For a lazy gamer, you sure went to a lot of effort. Good review!
It's strangely satisfying to see you guys across the pond have more problems with your retro machines than we old worlders have :D
we don't have problems with "our retro machines" we have problems with retro european ones because you guys use a different tv signal and voltage, like he said in the video..
Speccy was my first ever computer in the 80's. still feel myself lucky to met with this engineering miracle. still love it and have it in my closet in a box. also waiting to receive my the Spectrum Vega+... :)
Keyboard Controls: QA-OP-M
I got one from a market in Germany.
Didn't know what it was since it was heavily altered.
It had a full keyboard with on off keys for the different KEY functions.
There was also a thing call a micro drive fitted into the case.
It also apparently could work floppy drive but I never saw one.
It must have been built by a mad genius like the Doc from Back to the Future
Lithuanian Scot
Clive Sinclair was Emmett Brown's British cousin, pretty much.
I learned to program on a ZX48 with Kempston Joystick (IN30 and IN31) plugging the TV out straight into my TV set on channel 35. ah, memories!! As I recall, the printer was crap! Programs saved to tape on a bog-standard tape recorder, connected to the MIC jack. Being in the UK, 50Hz PAL and 240V (ac) was standard. Then I got the Plus 3 with disk drive, and eventually the Amiga 1Mb. Now my son is an IT engineer, working on state-of-the-art internet systems.
1983, my dad bought this for me with several really cool games. It was my very first video game, and it was the most fun I ever had. Ever since I have been trying to chase that same fun, to no vail. Thanks for a great review.
Wow. So glad I'm British watching this...
Then again, never got a Sinclair.
Doesn't it get annoying the screw things into the back of your TV? I hate screwing my Satellite cable, as the thing holding the screw to the wire always breaks.
I get dark side of the moon vibes from the design
+Garnet Bezanson PINK FLOYD!
Simon Andersson yep good album have the poster in my bedroom
With the Paranoid album cover as your avatar too! Great stuff \m/
That had never occurred to me but when you think that floyd and Sinclair were based in Cambridge. I went to a college in Cambridge, not the prestigious Cambridge university but the terrible one on the poor side of the city, if you ever needed to use a computer to do home work then you was went in the Sinclair building which was originally the Sinclair head office and is pictured in old adverts, if you walk towards the old part of town you see the phrase 'reality check point' graffitied everywhere as a tribute to Syd Barret, and the dark side album is pretty much a tribute to this old band member
Pink Floyd are awesome, most of my favorite old school bands are British. Floyd, Zeppelin, Queen, Iron Maiden, Stones, The Who, etc.
Hey men! This was my first computer. With this video I went back exactly 35 years. Those were good times. Thanks for video.
my dad was a window cleaner, he worked damn hard. It will never leave me when I got my zx spec in 1986. That was it it, full stop, period. great games. You could even get magazines with demo games for £2.99 so I got a paper round at 9yo.I loved my 48k although I had to keep replacing my cassette recorder every couple of months...
I didn't know you had different RF cables in the US!
Why is this show called Lazy Game Reviews? He doesn't seem lazy to me...
+DayTripperID because that sinclair and power converter are still sitting in the same spot.
His early early videos where kind of lazy, and sloppy, plus they where done using an old VHS camera plugged into the USB Video cap device that he had in his hand during the video, so Clint got it from the fact he was too lazy to get proper gear for his videos(money was also a factor), and so it stuck, but in recent years he's just shortened it to LGR.
I had a modem for my Spectrum. A MODEM. The Spectrum was like everyone's first car; flawed, slightly embarrassing, but gave you cherished memories.
6:50 - OMFG - Microsoft Sidwewinder 3D Pro joystick! One of the best ever MS devices!
Timex released these in the US and don't require all the hassle with mods and extra gear. Also, Commodore joysticks have the same interface as Atari and are generally better to use.
525Lines I prefer 625 lines :)
Wow what a pain to get a 'Speccy' working in the US lol!,,, Still got mine in box with all accessories & games, good old Speccy!
Fond memories from this machine (and later the +2) from my childhood. Props for correct use of "Zed-Ecks" as well!
man.... nostalgia ftw. I grew up in Poland in the 80s and in our school class only few people had a computer/console. I had a C64, another dude had an Atari ST, my best friend had an atari console (I think it was an Atari 7800) and there was one person with a ZX spectrum. after school we chose where to go and there were a few of us playing pixely games and having tons of fun. The poor ZX guy almost never had any visitors tho... oh and I will never forget the thrill of getting pirated cassettes with like 20-30 C64 games at a local store, adjusting the datassette head and trying them out only to find out only like 1/3 of them worked. but hey, there was the joystick killer (decathlon), archon, giana sisters, pit stop2, boulderdash and river raid - enough to play all days and nights long until the TV blew up. good old times..
Thank god i live in the UK and not having to modify it
That easy cap capture card is absolute garbage and trash, never buy it!
best spectrum games not covered include: highway encounter, skool daze 1 and 2 and finally spy vs spy, these were my favorites, match day was also great
Hearing "Boards of Canada" music always gives me goosebumps, I love it :D
RIP Clive Sinclair
I love Boards of Canada too.
WOW!!! just WOW!!! the detail and effort of this review - INSANE! thx man! I mean that.
The old intro is gold.
can you update this video please ...
There are far too many fart sounds in that game segment
oh ya that's mature....not
The spectrum was my first electronic drum machine...I bought an expansion that plugged in the back that had real drum samples, and with the supplied software you could compose 1 channel drum tracks
My first computer! And now I am a computing professional. Thank you for being so nice about it. The great rival in the 80s was the C64, and I hate to admit it, but that machine was technically superior. Of course, it was also more expensive.
One correction. Kempston joysticks did not emulate key presses. They posted different values depending on the joystick position and fire buttons pressed on I/O port 31. I remember writing some very crude code to read the numbers from the joystick and print them on the screen as I waggled it about.
While the C64 was indeed technically superior, the game programers often did not take advantage of the hardware. I've seen many of the 8bit Wars videos which clearly demonstrate this.
Would it be possible to just buy a small-ish monitor-sized UK TV from the 80s online and use it with the direct RF output? Its power would have to be converted too, but that would seem to bypass all the video issues.
It's easy enough to modify it to work on composite, you just cut the power feed to the modulator and disconnect the resistor (I cut it) and connect the video feed wire to the port to be used as composite.
Removal of the UHF modulator is generally done as a matter of course these days, even by Spec-chums in the UK. While it's integration was a great point in favor of the machine back in the day (and doesn't really cause too much impediment to it's use if left intact), the slight faff of digital tuning and visual downgrade of RF from Composite makes it a no-brainer.
Of course with later Speccies it's often easier to simply get a RGB to SCART lead.
Sometimes I just let youtube run LGR videos on autoplay while I am playing games. This comment is the result of one of those sessions.
Can we just take a moment to recognise that this video is 12 years old.
I cannot believe what you went through to use that Spectrum! Amazing. I had an original ZX Spectrum 48k, then and still have a ZX Spectrum +, followed a few years later by a Spectrum +2, though why I bought that I don't know. Great video.
Glad to finally find an American that can speak proper English.
Now can they learn the word "Aluminium"
HAL,is that you?How did you survive?
I live in the UK do I have to do any of that?
Nope!
+Lazy Game Reviews Thank god
hey that picture of your username is same of the icon of a game i saw? are u a developer?
no one...
PAL TV, check!
240V AC power supply, check!
3 pin UK socket, check!
You're good to go.
At 2:50 here in Argentina the Timex Sinclair 2068 was very very popular even though we use PAL here. And it was 99.9% compatible, I only recall the game Asteroids having a small video issue but the other games did not have any problem. You should consider it a 99.9% Spectrum compatible, maybe even before the PC Clones. Thanks for the video!
After VCF Southwest I decided to finally pull the trigger on the ZX, now I'm just waiting for it to get to the US from Ireland. Was surprised to find an old LGR review on it but was a good watch!
im lucky! i live in italy :P
+Tails64DS NT Channel Most of Europe should be lucky.
And Australia.. we are PAL too because we are owned by the Queen loll...
I always wondered why the f*** Americans have to have this god awful RF port,which is awful to unplug. But that might be because I grew up with the UHF port
The very first computer I was ever exposed to was the ZXspectrum+3 (integrated disk drive) and holy hell, is that thing ever awesome! It was my dad's and I now own it myself, so you can imagine how heavily loaded with nostalgia the thing is for me. The thing has been broken, repaired, had pieces utterly replaced and kludged together with some small parts from a VCR at one point.
Nice to see an American recognising our part in the 80s home computer boom, by the way. :)
Oh, an unrelated note. If you haven't played it yet I highly recommend Viking Raiders by Firebird. It's a simple but deep strategy game with enormous 'party game' potential from an era before party games were even a thing. Many's the time we would sit around a clunky, tiny CRT tv with cans of various drinks, soft and otherwise, chanting "Chin 'is castle!" (translated; "Do violence upon that fortification, sir!") as a tiny coloured viking warrior flailed spastically at a different coloured and equally tiny fort to some seriously disjointed sound effects. Good times.
It was my first computer and I am still in love with it!
Unlike the Commodore 64, Sinclair were actually honest about only counting the total RAM (48 Kbytes total, 41 KBytes user, 7 KBytes video and system) and not including the ROM (16 KBytes). The Commodore 64 also had 48 KBytes of RAM (38 KBytes user, 10 Kbytes video and system) with 16 Kbytes of ROM. Aftermarket sound, video image capture (a digital camera kind of), keyboards, floppy disc drives, robotics, virtual memory expanision systems, CNC machine tool adaptors, etc. were available to upgrade the humble Spectrum, so it created a lot of businesses for hardware support hence why it is better than the Commodore 64..... it created other industries!!
+Andy Reid False. Commodore 64 had 64 kB of RAM and 20kB of ROM, and you had to switch pages in order to access everything. By default, it launched with all the ROM enabled, so you couldn't access all 64kB immediately, but if you threw away Basic, Kernal and the default character palette, you could do whatever you wanted with all the RAM.
+vytah interestingly it was theoretically possible to kick out the Speccy ROM for a custom one too. While the carts of the Interface 2 were only 16k in size, it's because they were mapped into the first 16k of address space, overwriting the ROM. If you had a custom tape loading routine at that address you could then theoretically fill the RAM from tape and begin execution of your own program.
It's basically the same principle as the failed "Shadow of the Unicorn" game that sunk Mikro-Gen, though that used a custom dongle that plugged into the edge connector rather than the Interface 2 for maximum compatability.
rip
I had a 2068 timex, and for zx compatibility I used a cartridge(included) that emuleted the zx rom and all games worked fine
Hi, Thanks for accepting my How to mod video as a video response and much respect for going to the major trouble of playing games on a real Spectrum in the USA. It seems America got a better deal when it came to consoles (Particularly with the 60Hz Genesis/Mega Drive) but Europe got much more when it came to gaming computers.
Oh and I love your channel, you have some great hardware reviews that must have taken you an age to put together.