4 May
2010
4 May
'10
7:38 p.m.
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 8:03 PM, Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Yes, the Spectrum was a great machine. I had the 128K +2 model. Gameswise I
had a mixture of homebrew stuff (M. Batty and &e7 (Andy Severn)) spring to
mind, but most of the big games I bought were arcade ports.
Soundwise, it had a unique music style which I still love today and the few
games that seemed to have digitized sound effects showed what could be done
with the sound chip. In a similar vein that Robocop Vs. Terminator showed
that the Megadrive/Genesis could produce decent quality (digitized) speech
compared to what most games had (poor quality speech which was often just
mumbling something you struggled to understand).
You do have to get used to the controllers for each machine, but today's
controllers have come a long way. Racing games are excellent when played
with a steering wheel or a controller (usually with the trigger buttons as
break and accelerate, and one analogue stick for steering). Many
first-person games use two analogue sticks for movement (one for the
direction you face and the other for your movement), leaving the other
buttons for special moves and weapon select.
Oooh, that was a flashy one, that, with a proper keyboard, sound chip,
weirdly-bastardised joystick ports and everything! I just got one of
those last year, actually - must see if I can resurrect it. The sound
chip did help games soundtracks a lot.
But the thing is, the golden age of the Speccy was already mostly over
when the 128 came along. There were some good games after then - and
some clever coders managed a best-of-both-worlds thing, fitting the
game into 48K & making it able to run on either model, but produce
vastly better sound on a 128 machine.
My personal great regret was that when Sinclair designed the 128, they
didn't start from the American Timex-Sinclair 2068 machine, which had
notably better graphics and a superior bank-switching scheme making
CP/M viable. The Amstrad Spectrum +3 did eventually get CP/M, but with
a 32-column screen & less than 64K TPA, it was rather crippled.
And if Sinkers had been smart enough to find a way to make the QL a
superior-specced Speccy-compatible, they'd have probably sold a lot
more of them and not foundered and been sold off to Amstrad...
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508