calendar check....
No, still not April 1st...
P.
Sinclair is back with the Spectrum Vega ... just as rubbish as the ZX
The Spectrum fanbois at Retro Computers have enlisted the help of Sir Clive to launch a new crowd-funded Spectrum clone. The Sinclair Spectrum Vega is a console that plays games from the '80s – complete with piezo speaker-generated sound and attribute clash. The Vega is being marketed by Retro Computers Ltd, a Luton-based …
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Tuesday 2nd December 2014 20:09 GMT DiViDeD
Re: calendar check....
"Blu tac/velcro/cable ties or any leading brand of two-part, industrial strength adhesive"
None of which ever worked, as I remember only too clearly!
Although the firmware that decreed that the RAM pack would only wobble just before your 10 minute save to tape had completed was pretty impressive for the time.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2014 15:03 GMT Lamont Cranston
Re: "held on by BluTac"
A loose internal connection meant that my +3 (I know, and I'm sorry) was fixed by jamming a Rubik's Snake between the Multiface and (I think) the video cable.
After I sold it to my more technically-minded friend, he popped the case off and soldered the connection back together. I still think that folding the Snake to exactly the right shape was the more satisfying solution.
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Thursday 4th December 2014 11:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: calendar check....
"Of course, it will have problems that can only be fixed with the addition of a dongle."
And slightly more seriously - a proper keyboard and Basic interpreter. Just wheeling out a spectrum clone as nothing more than a games machine completely misses the point of 80s 8 bit machines.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2014 09:14 GMT Dan 55
Re: calendar check....
Although Sir Clive's definition of "28 days" in "allow 28 days for delivery" was more flexible than his customers', even he never managed to stretch it to a year.
Also, I take exception to the article's tone (I'm cancelling my subscription, etc...). He's not making it himself. It's easy money, he gives it his blessing and if it sells he gets a cut, if it doesn't sell or the project folds then he's not really any worse off. If he decided to make life difficult for the project then that would generate bad publicity and people might not forgive him when he comes out with his portable jetpac(k) or whatever's next.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2014 17:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
f it's a true clone, it'll start shipping in July at the earliest
And supply will be severely restricted due to unanticipated excessive demand. The opportunity will be taken by someone selling a clone of the old BBC micro to push a few units.
This will also educate a generation of kids whose idea of a low level language means assembly and copy protection schemes are not thwarted by the always online internet DRM.
Now we only need a flamewar between Spectrum, BBC and C64 owners to complete the trip back to those golden times.
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Thursday 4th December 2014 12:39 GMT Steve Evans
Re: f it's a true clone, it'll start shipping in July at the earliest
"And supply will be severely restricted due to unanticipated excessive demand. The opportunity will be taken by someone selling a clone of the old BBC micro to push a few units."
Why would I need a clone? The original one still works!
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Tuesday 2nd December 2014 21:17 GMT JassMan
@james 51
They should have done that 'cos there is already a Raspbian remix which allows you to emulate loads of old hardware. Then you could actually run all that old already paid for software.
In fact they would have gained a lot more credibilty by just selling the spectrum lookalike case with a decent keyboard. The 2 things which really let down the the ZX were the crap keys which only responded to 1 in 3 keypresses and as noted above, the crap video. Ignoring of course the overall reliability, the data storage systems and almost everything else about them.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2014 15:17 GMT Psyx
So... no actual content, yet?
Let me get this right:
They're making a thing, but they have absolutely nothing to put on it.
and they're hoping a few suckers will hand over rights to old game gratis on the promise that *some* of the profits will go to charity.
hey: If you give me a tenner, I'll give a quid to charity! Aren't I nice?
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Tuesday 2nd December 2014 15:21 GMT Andrew Oakley
RCA? Pah. Young 'uns know nothing
The original Speccy used an RF modulator (analogue TV signal), not RCA. You had to tune your telly in to the signal, just like any of the other 3-4 terrestrial analogue channels. If you were *really* lucky, it wouldn't clash with the channel already used by your video cassette recorder.
Not that I care, because I was a Commodore 64 lad, and we all know that the C=64 was better than everything. Also, only brats owned a BBC.
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Tuesday 2nd December 2014 19:48 GMT VinceH
Re: Kewl!
"Do you know if the BBC trademark is still being used, so maybe we can revive the Acorn BBC micro?"
Yes, I believe there's a broadcasting company around here somewhere that owns the BBC trademark (Acorn were using it under licence).
The Acorn trademark is also not available - that's still owned by a French geezer who's name I've forgotten, and used here. (I have a recollection that they were punting PCs and laptops branded as Acorn, but it doesn't look like it now - but my disabled Javascript might be preventing me seeing the full site.)
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Wednesday 3rd December 2014 18:18 GMT Chika
Re: Kewl!
Ah yes. No doubt you are referring to that business with the Brown Boveri Company who took umbrage at the use of the term "BBC" to describe Acorn's beast back in the day, hence the hasty redesign of the logo on the Beeb. I think that company were taken over a couple of times since then so their use of "BBC" is likely to have lapsed by now.
As somebody else pointed out, however, there's still Auntie.
HEY!!! Who's been taking all my umbrage?
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Wednesday 3rd December 2014 00:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: RCA? Pah. Young 'uns know nothing
"it was when it came to PRO music (not shitty trackers)....."
That was only because the Atari ST came with built in midi ports, which are nothing more than serial ports with an opto coupler built in. A $15 box or $1 worth of parts and a soldering iron would fix that as well. It made it slightly easier to develop a midi sequencer on the ST and sell it knowing it would run out of the box.
As far as rock solid timing is concerend the amiga beat the ST hands down with it's two built in hardware timers. Add 4 hardware sound channels, 4096 original colours, 8 hardware sprites, hardware scrolling and a handful of custom chips to drive all that and more, and you leave the ST in a crackly squeeking pityful mess, calling for its mommy.
Oh I forgot to mention the pre-emptive multi tasking OS.
Just sayin' O:-)
(Just sucks the amiga crowd, or what's left of it, is such an insane bunch of freaks no one in their right mind would want to be associated with them...)
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Wednesday 3rd December 2014 14:08 GMT Michael Strorm
MIDI keyboards costing thousands sounded great... Atari ST itself sounded *dire*!
ST owners are always rather keen to argue that their machine had better "sound" because its built-in MIDI ports allowed one to *control* a keyboard costing hundreds- if not thousands- of pounds that may have sounded better than the Amiga's *internal* sound chip!
Let's disregard that one could do the same with a dirt-cheap serial-to-MIDI adaptor on the Amiga (*) and point out how odd it is that they never compare like with like (i.e. the machines' own sound capabilities).
Okay, so I lied about it being odd- the reason is quite obvious! :-) The ST's internal sound chip- ironically- was utterly primitive by 16-bit standards. It was a barely-improved version of the square-wave AY-3-8910 more commonly found 8-bit machines such as the Oric 1, Amstrad CPC and 128K versions of the Spectrum... and sounded like it too. Sample playback was only possible with processor-intensive "bit bashing" which wasn't practical in games, or indeed most apps (**).
Nope, it couldn't even play the much-derided sample "tracker" modules while rubbing its stomach at the same time.
(*) Credit to Atari; it was a clever move by them to include a MIDI port. The ST's poor internal sound didn't matter in that case, and the fact that the Amiga was expensive in its early days (and didn't have MIDI as standard, even though it was a cheap add-on) meant the ST gained traction as the first computer both *affordable* and *powerful* enough for GUI-based sequencer use off the shelf. But that was as much right-place-right-time as anything inherently good about the ST.
(**) The improved Atari STE supposedly had improved 2-channel Stereo sample support, but apparently didn't do it well. (Jez San, writer of Starglider wrote at the time:- "Stereo sound has been extremely lousily implemented. Only a few fixed sample rates are possible. Maths-intensive software routines will have to be applied to sample data if other frequencies are wanted.") The already-established Amiga didn't have this major limitation. Atari botched any chance the STE of gaining support by selling it at extra cost instead of making it the new base model anyway.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2014 10:28 GMT AbelSoul
Re: PRO music (not shitty trackers).....
I lost years of my life to trackers, or rather a tracker: the wonderful OctaMED
8 bit sampler connected via the Parallel port, MIDI gear sequenced via the serial port and external MIDI i/f that you lucky Atari folks already had built in.
I still have all that gear. Nostalgic silliness preventing me from getting rid.
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Wednesday 3rd December 2014 08:26 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Re: RCA? Pah. Young 'uns know nothing
And from the left field comes the Elan Enterprise 128. I still have fond memories of the little joy-sticky thing with the at least half-decent full size keyboard, and a WHOPPING 128 kB of RAM. Even managed to program a discrete Fourier transform on it. It worked, ...., if you were very patient. Won't claim it was better than any other out there, but it shared several features with the Spectrum: Z80 processor, and only appeared WAY after the promised date. What was very nice is that like the Acorn Atom and Electron (we used many of those in the labs) you got the entire schematic, and many ports were properly buffered, so you could add your own external devices without risk of frying the computer.
Regarding this project: More keys might of course be added if they exceed their target by a sufficient margin
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
