am on the lookout for zx spectrums

[PMC]

Rubber keyed speccys make excellent coffee mats.

That may sound a little sacreligious, but given that retro computing rarely lives up to nostalgia I'm happy to simply emulate my speccy/c64/amstrad experiences.

Amigas on the other hand are a different matter entirely...

Back in 1987 I had a +2.  There was a lot of stuff bandied about in the press about supposed incompatibilities between the +2 and other speccys, but I almost never had an issue with mine, the only programmes which I recall failing to load were "Brian Bloodaxe" and "Falcon Patrol".  

I can play Speccy Elite for hours, but like every other piece of speccy software, the realisation that everything I do is limited to eight garish colours begins to really hurt my eyes.  Then the incessent bleep/fuzz noise of the AY begins to make my ears bleed but at least it can be turned down, hehe.

I remember my local shop had two SAM coupes back in 1990... Probably the largest gathering of the mythical machines since they left the factory :lol:

[PMC]

Well, my +2 needed opening up and having the noise output adjusted because of the incessant buzz of static drowning out the sound and it wasn't by any means the only +2 which required such fine tuning.  

As for the tape heads, mine needed a little adjustment but were fine for ever after once tuned correctly.  And with a very few exceptions, it managed to load almost every program I attempted to run.

Full marks to Amstrad on that score, however the garishness of the 8 colour display and the fact that on a TV screen the colours used to bleed into one another (not to mention the awful colour clash) meant that I'd have swapped the bleepy AY for a less migraine inducing display.

[PMC]

NoFastMem wrote:

'Course, Amstrad then made its own mistake in going with 3" floppies after the 3.5" had been established.

Actually, Mr Sugar had cut an excellent deal on a bulk buy of 3" drives - as low as £10 a unit IIRC.  Naturally, they became the defacto standard for Amstrad so it was only a matter of time before Speccys had them fitted.

There was a device called the +D (I think!) for the 128K speccys which allowed the fitting of a 3.5" disk drive.  A friend had one for his +2, which made loading games a breeze.

[PMC]

InTheSand wrote:

As for the Microdrives and ZX Interface 1... What about that lovely syntax to load and save?!

Anyone remember LOAD *"m";1;"program" and other such nice commands??!

 - Ali

Yeah, but to be fair the speccy wasn't the only one:

Load "*",8,1 (C64)
Run "Nebulus (CPC)

It's why emulators exist, haha.

[PMC]

Vincent wrote:

And at least the Speccy+, +2 and +3 had Tape Loader where you just pressed enter then started the tape.  Or in 48k/128k mode it'd be Load "".  You didn't need to type the program name at all.  It just loaded the first basic header it could.

There were a few games that used Load "" CODE.

The tape loader was handy, but many games needed to be run in 48K mode, which presented it's own issues:

"Which bloody command shortcut is on which bloody key?"  (+2/+3 keyboards only had PRINT/RUN/LOAD commands printed on the P/R/J keys respectively).

I mean, typing J""....