Hong Kong says goodbye to a capitalist crusader
David Webb was quick to get his hands on the ZX Spectrum or 'Speccy', a computer launched in 1982 with up to 48 kilobytes of memory and rubber keys. Before he turned 18, he had written a book, 'Supercharge Your Spectrum', showing how to get the most out of the contraption with his favourite machine-code tricks and techniques. What set him apart from other tinkerers was how he spent the royalties. He would cycle to his bank in Oxford to place an order in London for some shares. ('Which stock, young man, do you want to buy?')
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Economist
22-05-2025
- Economist
Hong Kong says goodbye to a capitalist crusader
David Webb was quick to get his hands on the ZX Spectrum or 'Speccy', a computer launched in 1982 with up to 48 kilobytes of memory and rubber keys. Before he turned 18, he had written a book, 'Supercharge Your Spectrum', showing how to get the most out of the contraption with his favourite machine-code tricks and techniques. What set him apart from other tinkerers was how he spent the royalties. He would cycle to his bank in Oxford to place an order in London for some shares. ('Which stock, young man, do you want to buy?')
The Guardian
06-12-2024
- The Guardian
The Spectrum review – a tactile trip to the 1980s
The first time I played on a ZX Spectrum was at the Stockport branch of Debenhams, which in 1983 had an impressive home computer section that quickly turned into a sort of free creche for bored 13-year-old boys. You could hang out there for hours, typing rude Basic programs into an array of machines while the harried staff rushed about trying to stop them running. Some of the computers, however, ran games for customers to try – and this was where I encountered Manic Miner, the legendary platformer with its strange flashing visuals and surreal enemies. Speccy games looked utterly unique thanks to the machine's idiosyncratic way of restricting 8x8 sprite maps to two colours, which meant moving objects on screen were usually collections of coloured pixel patchworks, leading to an effect known as attribute clash. Somehow, it was both ugly and beautiful – and it still is. Unpacking The Spectrum, the latest piece of modern vintage hardware from Retro Games Ltd, is an astonishingly nostalgic experience. It looks exactly how I remember the original machine: a black slab with rubber keys, each one displaying not just a number or letter, but also a Basic programming command. 'Rem', 'Rand', 'Gosub', the mystical words of the home programming era. There is a USB cable to plug it in (though you'll need a USB plug of your own) and an HDMI lead, but no joystick. The machine is compatible with most USB gamepads – you just need to configure the buttons yourself, which takes a little time but is worth it if you can't bear using those rubber buttons to control your games. Loading it up, you get a modern homescreen showing a carousel of built-in games. There are 48 to choose from, ranging from classics such as The Lords of Midnight, Head Over Heels, Manic Miner and The Hobbit, to modern titles produced by contemporary coders in the Speccy fan scene. These are fascinating projects, including top-down sci-fi blaster Alien Girl: Skirmish Edition and tomb raiding romp Shovel Adventure. If you exhaust the built-in supply, you can also download Spectrum game Roms from a PC on to a USB stick, plug it in and run them here – though if you're looking for classic Speccy titles rather than modern open-source fan-made games, then you're in shady legal territory. As ever, there are a bunch of screen settings so you can add a CRT effect to give a more authentic 1980s television experience, though honestly nothing is going to diminish the wild discombobulation of playing Horace Goes Skiing on a 55in LED display. What amazed me is how these games still carry so much visual charm. The pupils and masters wandering the halls of Skool Daze are filled with character, from the hulking bully to the decrepit history teacher. Sandy White's Ant Attack retains its stark beauty, the geometric walls and scuttling giant ants providing the same old sense of alienation and terror. Ocean's relatively sophisticated isometric adventures The Great Escape and Where Time Stood Still pack so much detail into their largely monochrome worlds. It is lovely to see them again. As with most other retro consoles, there are modern gaming additions such as save points (a little finicky to work, but they do the job) and a rewind function that whizzes you back to seconds before you were inevitably run over by a car in Trashman. But I also love the fact that each time you select a game you get a few seconds of the original illustrated loading screen; these pictorial delights were a key part of the initial experience as you'd be staring at them for up to five minutes as you waited for your tape to finally load – it matters that they have been preserved. Also preserved are the original computing abilities of the ZX Spectrum. If you select the classic mode, the console switches to ye olde worlde boot screen and you can actually program it. It's a feature I have taken full advantage of. Who is this for? Obviously the target audience is people like me who were there at the beginning and remember playing a lot of these games 40 years ago. Sure, there are free Spectrum emulators available online if you know where to look – and you don't mind risking a malware infection every time you search a Rom site. But part of the nostalgic gaming experience is seeing a reproduction of the machine you remember sitting in front of your TV; and with The Spectrum you also get those legendary rubber buttons, feeling them squidge beneath your fingers as you hammer the leg sweep button in The Way of the Exploding Fist. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion In the digital age we sometimes forget how much of memory is about feel. Many of these games were designed with keyboard controls in mind as joysticks were an optional extra and out of the price range of a lot of families in the early 1980s. The Spectrum revels in the tactile appeal of this seminal computer and its springy buttons. It will remind you of how odd Speccy games were, and how they forged their own path beyond the Japanese arcades and flashy American home computers. The days of hanging out in the computer department of Debenhams all Saturday afternoon are long gone, but the games, and the way we played them, are here again. You can come back any time you like. The Spectrum is available now, £89.99
BBC News
24-11-2024
- BBC News
‘It was our rock'n'roll' - How the ZX Spectrum became a 1980s icon
The ZX Spectrum was a 1980s icon which played a starring role in the revolution that brought computers into the UK's homes for the first time. The 8-bit computer arrived in 1982 with its distinctive rainbow stripe, rubber keys and the high-pitched electronic screech as games loaded. More than five million were sold, giving people the chance to dabble in computer programming and play games like Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. The device was manufactured in Dundee, where The Speccy - as it was affectionately known - helped inspire a generation of games designers. Now its story is being told in The Rubber-Keyed Wonder, a new documentary which looks at its impact. Created by Sir Clive Sinclair and his team, the ZX Spectrum hit the high street in April 1982. It followed the hugely successful, if more technically-limited, ZX81, which had been many people's first encounter with home computing. The ZX Spectrum's games were downloaded via a cassette player and displayed on a TV screen - and they were in colour, unlike its monochrome predecessor. It cost £175 for the 48k model and £125 for the 16k version, which put it on many Christmas wish lists. "If you go back a few years to the 1970s, you've got a time where home computers didn't exist," said Anthony Caulfield, co-director of the new documentary. "Computers were in mainframes with air conditioning and cost many millions of pounds or dollars to create. "The whole concept of having a computer in your home was a completely new thing." Designer Rick Dickinson's rainbow design and rubber keys made for an eye-catching product, which was an instant success. "The Spectrum brought the arcade to your home," said Mark Ettle, who is now head of Dundee-based games designer Cobra Mobile. "There was a plethora of games you could play from the arcade, but there were also original games. "The Spectrum opened up a world of dabbling in computer programming and very basic graphics." With games selling for as much as £15, a lucrative black market trade in copies got under way in playgrounds across the country. Mark Ettle said: "If you came from a background that didn't have a lot of money you could take a tape and copy a game. "Copying became a fine art, because you had to have two tape decks wired and cabled in a particular way." Games like Manic Miner and its sequel Jet Set Willy, Ant Attack, Skool Daze and Sabre Wulf became instant classics. "I was particularly good at Sabre Wulf," said Mark. "I was one of the first people in the UK to complete the game and was sent a free game as a reward." The computer was manufactured at Dundee's Timex factory. Sinclair chose the Timex factory to make his computers because it needed the work after watch-making stopped, and he needed a skilled workforce. At its height, Timex produced a computer every four seconds - although not all of them ended up in stores. Mark Ettle said people in the area got access to Spectrums in the shops as well as through "the back door" of the Timex factory. "It got these computers into the hands of people who wouldn't necessarily get access to them," he said. "It kick-started the imagination of what the world could be." One of those who fell under its spell was Mike Dailly, one of the founders of Dundee-based DMA Design - which produced Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto. He said: "My mum's work wanted a database written so they bought a Spectrum for me to work on. "It was just good fun tinkering with it and making it do things. "I did play games but I spent most of my time writing stuff and seeing how far I could push it." He said the Spectrum's influence on Dundee as a world-renowned computer gaming centre was "huge." He said: "The whole of the original DMA Design pretty much started on Spectrums." DMA Design co-founder Dave Jones worked at Timex and when he took redundancy he bought an Amiga computer. Mike Dailly said: "That kickstarted DMA and the whole of the Dundee industry. "So the whole of the gaming route comes from the Spectrum." Anthony Caulfield, who co-directed The Rubber-Keyed Wonder with his wife Nicola, said the Spectrum's name "came up continually" during their previous film on the history of the British gaming industry, From Bedrooms to Billions. He said: "The baby-boomer generation have got rock'n'roll, a new thing that exploded and evolved for them. "In a way, for many born in the 1970s or early 1980s, the microchip revolution was our rock'n'roll. "We kept hearing all these different experiences of when people got their first Spectrum and what it did for them. "So many people went off in different directions, that we thought it needed its own space to tell that story." Later Spectrum models - there were seven in total - failed to capture the public's imagination in the same way. Sir Clive's ill-fated electrically-powered tricycle the Sinclair C5 bombed, costing the inventor millions. He sold most of Sinclair Research to Alan Sugar's Amstrad for £5m in 1986, and the Spectrum was discontinued in 1992. Sir Clive died in September 2021, aged 81. Mike Dailly said retro gaming events starring the Spectrum were still hugely popular, with new models based on the computer still being produced by enthusiasts. He said the Spectrum Next was a fan-based version of what the Spectrum could have been. "So it's not just people of my age, there are lots of younger folk coming because they like the games," he said. "It's always been about the games."
