Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros Reg Hardware Retro Week Logo Those were the days, my friend. And, indeed, we thought they'd never end, as we hopped, skipped and blooped our way through Jet Set Willy's mansion, traded between distant worlds in Elite and yet still found time to hack up our own arcade clones in any of a dozen variations of the Basic …
Nobody ever seems to mention the Mattel Aquarius in these reviews.
Up to 20K RAM (4K standard), Microsoft Basic, even a colour printer was available.
Had bright blue, Spectrum style 'dead flesh' keyboard and Spectrum style one key press to enter the Basic keywords. My Dad bought one from Tesco and was the first computer I ever tried programming on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel_Aquarius
"an excuse to link to the oric emulator I wrote from scratch"
Does it faithfully reproduce the hugely irritating click noise I seem to remember the machine producing with each keypress?
These are not often mentioned, but they had quite a following. It was a neat machine, with Z80A and 128kB of memory expandable to 4MB, two asics controlling memory, sound and graphics. The memory worked at twice the clock frequency of the CPU, so the controller and CPU did not interfere (one had the even clock ticks, the other the ODD. Nice machine to play around with. Decent Basic, and word processor on board, very expandable. Linked it up to my Dad's daisy-wheel typewriter (what a racket that was
So you were the one! But seriously, the Elan/Flan Enterprises were vaporware for so long that most people gave up and bought something else instead. By the time it came out, there wasn't much to separate it from the competition, and in any case the home computer market was starting to dry up by then.
I recall lusting after the Lynx and the Memotech MTX512 (as featured in "Weird Science", trivia fans).
Acorn Atoms were still being used to drive experiments in the first-year physics labs at the University of Kent into the early 90s - I wonder if they're still there?
"Acorn Atoms were still being used to drive experiments in the first-year physics labs at the University of Kent into the early 90s"
BBC Bs were still in use in the Oxford computing labs as late as 1994 (when I was buying my Viglen 486 PC).
Admittedly it mostly seemed they were used to play the second processor version of Elite.
Actually I had an Enterprise 64, purchased from the very hands of Gary Bracey, whom many of you recognise from elsewhere, but back then, he ran a computer shop called Blue Chip Computers in Liverpool!
It was a nice little machine crippled by a lack of decent software, with a few far between decent games such as Sorcery and the immortal 3D Star Strike. This motivated me to start to do 'stuff' with it. I fondly recall playing with a more interesting than usual soundchip on there,
In spite of the main company going bust, the remaining stock of Enterprises were sold off to Hungary and it had quite a decent afterlife and still supports an active user community out there.
Try http://www.ep128.hu/ for a lot more info and nice things.
The original machine has long gone away but I have managed to get a replacement from EBay, (one of the more reasonably priced Hungarian models, not the massively "L@@k Rare!!" overpriced EBay collectors sales over here.) I've even managed to score a scart lead and joystick adaptor, and the emulator loads tape images in real time to the original hardware, once I'd tweaked the latency settings properly. So yeah, I'm pleased.
Nice hardware, dreadful software. Who in their right mind thought that double precision FP only on an 8 bit CPU was a good idea? Worse still it was buggy. I crashed one with a simple DIM statement (I used to use a Sieve of Eratosthenes as a performance benchmark, 8 byte variables meant it didn't have space for the array, so helpfully it crashed).
You missed out the one made by the makers or arcade games.
They knew how to make gaming hardware.
A sound chip that could do drum beats, and could be configured to high accuracy for pitch.
A graphics chip with a sophisticated display list (so you could scroll play fields using pointers), and superimpose 4 sprites (players) as vertical columns and missiles, represented in contiguous memory.
The players and missiles had h/w registers to indicate collissions between objects on the playfield and sprites and missiles.
That meant no programming of coordinates to detect collisions was required.
That meant the 1.79MHz 6502 could do more.
Play fort apocalypse on an atari and it was an experience. Play it on a commodore 64 and it was laggy.
I *really* wanted an Atari 800 - after realising that I could never afford an Apple II - but weren't they something like £399 in early 1980s money. Then along came Commodore with the C64 which I think my mum and dad picked up for £220 in Rumbelows complete with the cassette drive.
Naturally it was for 'education'.
Yeah the Atari 800 and later the XL series were my fans back then. Never could get past the 400's membrane keyboard.
I didn't realize they weren't as popular in the UK as the US. I guess the C64 outsold them but in my programming circle in the US the Atari 800 was very popular.
I had already experienced some computer programming by the time the ZX81 was launched - in COBOL of all things. But for 18th birthday I was given a ZX81. I loved it. It too me about two weeks to exhaust the BASIC programming capabilities of the 1K machine. And I never looked back.
Over the years I had an Atom, an Oric Atmos, a Lynx, a Dragon32, a Z88, an Amiga, I even had a couple of the MSX machines for a while.
But the ZX81 was always my first love.
Like most schoolboys, I won't be revisiting this old love though, my finger ends couldn't take the pain of the keyboard now (he says using an android tablet).
Yes, left me with a tear in my eye. Am I the only one sad enough to remember the serial numbers of my VIC 20 (#1274) and my Commodore 64 (#1918, early model with the VIC 20 "square key" keyboard, died so replaced with #6776 with the standard "rounded" keys)
Ahhh, those were the days...
I remember them all. When it came for me to buy a computer for helping my computer studies at school, I had the choice of a BBC-B, a few on this list, a Tatung Einstein (IIRC BBC compatible) and I went for a ... Sharp MZ-700, a machine with hardly any games, character graphics and you had to load the OS from tape every-time you wanted to use it. Mine had the built in tape drive & plotter. But it was £2 cheaper than the BBC-B \:-|
Not BBC compatible except in as much as you could get BBC Basic for it. The hardware was much more like the MSX machines, but the software was unique. Being fitted with at least one floppy drive as standard, it had a proper operating system -- supposedly CP/M compatible -- rather than relying on the BASIC command interpreter in ROM. Which is just as well, as there wasn't one: BASIC was loaded from floppy. Instead the ROM contained a "machine monitor" which was a command-line system debugger.
Failed to set the market alight, probably 'cos it was too expensive, but towards the end Dixons were punting them out very cheap, especially for something with a real keyboard and a floppy drive, so that's why I got one. Fantastic machine for hacking, using the machine monitor and a book of Z80 op-codes. I used it to patch in a REPEAT/UNTIL construct that was missing from the supplied BASIC interpreter.
Happy days.
-A.
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I had the Amstrad CPC464 with the green monitor. My mum and dad must have got that software bundle mentioned in the advert too, because I did get a shedload of tapes including all those games. :)
A few of the tapes didn't work, including Roland on the Ropes, but it was a nice introduction to both computing in general and gaming.
I had exactly the same. I almost shed a tear reading this article as it brought back so many memories!
Amsoft, Roland on the Ropes, Roland takes a running jump, Pyjamarama, Tombstowne, Oh Mummy, Harrier Attack etc. etc.
Read Errors A and B, turning the keyboard / cassette deck upside down when loading for better reliability....
Build me a time machine and let me go back!
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