am on the lookout for zx spectrums

[Karlos]

Off Topic:

@Vincent:

Who ate all the pies?

Your avatar?

[Vincent]

Yup :-D

Speaking of eating a lot...

Siouxsie was out on Tuesday afternoon with uni buddies and there's one guy, Cam, that takes the mickey out of her (just like I do).  They decided to have an eating contest to see who could eat the most.

Siouxsie won because Cam couldn't finish his fruit salad at the end.  He couldn't bend over either :lol:

Siouxsie's prize?  Winning and being able to rub it in to Cam that he's a loser.  As well as having the luxury of not having to eat on Wednesday!

Back OT again... kinda.

Apparently Sir Clive was on Celebrity Poker on ftn tonight.

[A4000_Mad]

Yes the floppy is 3". I Think I've only got a few blank disks, Batman and Gauntlet II.

Has anyone seen a good Air Traffic Control simulator (preferrably for Heathrow) for any other platform than the Speccy?


It's a real shame but to be honest 'Kennedy Approach' and 'ATC' for the Amiga were more like kids games than simulators. But 'Airbus 320 Volume II' sure is great fun. I paid £15 for my new boxed copy, but the charts and airway maps alone would have cost much more than that  :-)



A4000 Mad

[InTheSand]

A4000_Mad wrote:
...a boxed, fully working +3 with floppy drive that I managed to sneek up into the loft   :lol:

Any idea of its value now?

Hi,

It's unfortunately probably worth less than you'd hope... It helps that it's boxed, but I'd guess at somewhere in the £40-£100 range...

Much better to keep it!

 - Ali

[NoFastMem]

I was gonna say £30.

The Microdrive was introduced with the QL and was another typically ill-fated Sinclair baby. It was marketed for the Speccy as an Interface 1 add-on but by the time the +3 came along it had already proven itself horribly unreliable.

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

[Vincent]

The +3s are usually rarer (not R@RE as eBay would have it, proper rare) than the rest of the Speccys so the price is usually higher for them.  I've seen them go for £30 to £100+ (£100 is usually boxed in mint condition).

NoFastMem wrote:
It was marketed for the Speccy as an Interface 1 add-on but by the time the +3 came along it had already proven itself horribly unreliable.

A week after they were released for the 48k they proved unreliable :-P

They have to be the most awkward, clunky and slow tape devices ever devised.  They got chewed up a lot aswell.  No, not by the dog :-P

[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.

[NoFastMem]

Vincent wrote:

They have to be the most awkward, clunky and slow tape devices ever devised.  They got chewed up a lot aswell.  No, not by the dog :-P

Tutor: "Let me guess, dog ate it?"
Student: "No, I saved it on a Microdrive (TM)"

[Vincent]

PMC wrote:
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.

Good memory!

Info page

Advert

Loads a 48k speccy game in 3.5 seconds apparently :-D

I always wanted this though.

@tpg
:lol: I did think about making the homework joke.

[InTheSand]

Vincent wrote:
I always wanted this though.

Me too!!! But IIRC, it required a small loader program to be loaded in from tape before the CD's stuff could be accessed!!!

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

[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.

[nadoom]

I used to have a +3, most of the games were on tape though so you had to plug in a tape player to get that sorted.

I remember scouring high and low looking for those bloody CF2 disks, and they were about £2.50 a pop, thanks alot mr sugar.

Those were the days,

[Vincent]

InTheSand wrote:
Me too!!! But IIRC, it required a small loader program to be loaded in from tape before the CD's stuff could be accessed!!!

I didn't know that.  Kinda defeats the purpose then really.

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

I couldn't remember it when I last posted, but I do now!  Kinda simple really when you think about it.

*"m" means microdrive
;1; means the first drive in the chain (that chain can be up to 14 IIRC)
"program" is the prog you want to load and it *must* be specified unlike just Load "" from tape.

@PMC
You might want to take out the "[quote]Vincent wrote:" line in your last post ;-)

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.  Androids being one of them, no not Android One, just Androids).  Still one of my favourite games to this day.  All in 16k!

[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""....

[InTheSand]

Vincent wrote:

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

I couldn't remember it when I last posted, but I do now!  Kinda simple really when you think about it.

Simple for the likes of us lot! perhaps! But not so great for less techie people!

IMO, the "m";1; should have been made optional (after all, how many people had a ZX Net and/or loaded/saved programs via the RS232 port?) - and not many people at the time had more than a single Microdrive!

Then it could have just been LOAD *"program" - much neater!

at least the Speccy+, +2 and +3 had Tape Loader

Sorry to be picky, but this was on the 128, +2 and +3 - the original + didn't have it as this was basically a standard 48K machine in a new case but with the same old ROM.

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

IIRC, this was done as a form of "copy protection" (yeah right, all were futile on tape-based media!!!) where the whole 16 or 48Kb of RAM was loaded in from tape, including the display, system variables, stack, etc - and once loaded, the stacked return address from the ROM's tape loader routine would point to the entry of the game's code and start execution that way.

PMC wrote:
I mean, typing J""....

Heh! But after a few years of Spectrum use, the positions of most of those keywords were committed to memory! Even now, nearly 25 years on, I still remember at least where all of the primary keywords are (the unshifted letter keys in "K" mode), and most of the punctuation! Perhaps I should get out more!!  :-)

 - Ali

EDIT: one of the early Spectrum emulators was called JPP for that very reason!

[Vincent]

InTheSand wrote:
Sorry to be picky, but this was on the 128, +2 and +3 - the original + didn't have it as this was basically a standard 48K machine in a new case but with the same old ROM.

Whoops, my mistake.  I should've realised that.  There's no point in having a menu on the 48k+ with "48k mode" and "tape loader".  To be picky myself - didn't the +3 just have "loader" as it had the floppy instead?