
Sinclair Zx Spectrum: absolutely better than Commodore 64 (2005) - grujicd
http://www.alfonsomartone.itb.it/fztsmo.html
======
Razengan
Watch it. Wars were started for less.

The Spectrum was my first ever computer, and the Commodore 64 my second.. Or
rather, _our_ computer, as it was shared by the adults in our family and their
adult friends, who only let me use it with supervision so I wouldn't break
anything. :)

My best memories from that era are the MAGAZINES.

The art, the wacky reviewers (some of them fictional characters), the slang,
the in-jokes, the readers' letters, the tips, the maps, the type-in programs,
the pull-out posters, previews, developer diaries..

It really was a great time to be growing up, and computers and video games
were the best hobby, because there was never a period when there wasn't
something NEW.

There was always something to be amazed at. Always something to look forward
to. New software and new hardware were constantly coming out. All other
interests seemed so _dull_ and uneventful. Ooh, 16 colors! then ooh, 32! then
omg, you won't believe this, 256!!

Entire genres being born right before your eyes. Sound channels were also
increasing, music the kind you didn't hear anywhere else, speech synthesis to
call your friends naughty words with, mice like they used in posh offices,
game controllers like in that arcade your parents never let you stay long
enough in, new operating systems... what's an operating system? Why do we need
one? Computers run just fine without it..

I wouldn't pick any other childhood.

I fantasized about owning an Amiga but the C64 was good enough too. I still
remember the very first game I played on it and its music:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slBHx5_8fms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slBHx5_8fms)

~~~
yodsanklai
I had the exact same childhood. Somehow I feel that the limited resources of
the computers back then made the games more fun and original. There was a lot
of creativity. People would come up with new concepts all the time, you never
knew what the next cool games would be like.

Another notable point is that not everybody had a computer (at least where I
lived). Something like 10-20% of the kids were actively using their computer,
so you could be part of a tribe.

It was also easy to get into programming. The OS presented itself as a basic
interpreter, and any manual that you would buy with your computer would
explain how to write simple programs.

It was definitely a particular era. I wonder if there is something equivalent
today. What do 8-years old kids do nowadays? besides watching youtube videos.

~~~
UncleSlacky
There's quite a big community around Scratch, also with Python on Raspberry Pi
(at least in the UK), but nothing on the scale of the 80s.

~~~
walkingolof
Sure, but it's hard to compare that to the home computer era, we were the
first generation with a computer of our own, and grown-ups had literally no
clue. The systems where very limited and the gaps had to be filled by the
imagination. It was a magic time in history that won't return.

~~~
Razengan
> _It was a magic time in history that won 't return._

That is such a true and sad realization..

I guess it applies to other fields of technology which have rapid progress at
the start and there's a lot of room to explore and few visible boundaries.

Like seafaring. When people first invented boats they had literally the entire
world made open to them, that they could previously only imagine.

Personal computers were like the invention of seafaring for the mind.

I guess the next frontier like that is space, where literally the entire
universe is waiting to be discovered. :)

------
jacquesm
Hilarious story. I repaired both for a living at the time for Cafka (when they
were still small), an Amsterdam computer store that did great business until
one day the owner went to his accountant and upon returning shot himself. He
never factored in paying taxes.

The C64 had pretty good hardware, but absolutely terrible software. The BASIC
it shipped with was just good enough to load machine language from disk to run
it, compared to let's say BBC Micro basic it didn't stand a chance, so it
isn't all that surprising that the Spectrum ran rings around it when it came
to basic (pun intended) functionality.

Both the Spectrum _and_ the C64 were left in the dust by the BBC by the way,
but it cost a large amount of money so that shouldn't be a surprise. It was
also built like a tank and came with a ton of expansion options. Pity it
wasn't a three way match :)

~~~
zabzonk
And yet the C64 (and VIC) far outsold the BBC Micro and the Spectrum.

And yes, BBC Basic was a very nice language, but it wasn't very fast for real-
world tasks. Way back then I implemented the KERMIT file transfer protocol
(and a VT100 terminal emulator) in BBC Basic and it was very slow. I re-wrote
it in 6502 assembler to make it really usable. So for anything serious you
needed to do on the BBC Micro, you needed to write it in assembler.

And don't get me started on that "reset" key that could be hit by accident at
any time. Or the crap DFS disk file system.

~~~
jacquesm
Ah, but the assembler was built in, for other computers that was extra, and
the 'reset' key (aka the 'break' key) was annoying _but_ the BASIC interpreter
had the 'old' command which would usually - but not always... - restore your
code.

Still, to make that key a keyboard key right next to a function key wasn't the
best UI decision, to put it mildly.

As for speed, it wasn't very fast in absolute terms, but it was very fast
compared to other BASIC implementations, and pretty much bug free (only one
bug was ever found in the code, which I think is absolutely amazing for a ROM
that size).

~~~
zabzonk
The built-in assembler was really not suitable for anything other than writing
some small snippets to be called from Basic - the KERMIT/VT100 implementation
I wrote, which was quite full-feature, was written using a 3rd party disk-
based assembler, which was much easier to work with.

~~~
jacquesm
I wrote my own, didn't have money for 3rd party stuff, already did a 6809
version together with a friend so it was relatively easy. Even so, the built
in assembler was a bonus item and it worked pretty good to bootstrap new stuff
including ROM images and proper assemblers.

------
juskrey
Side note: ZX Spectrum was my first computer, and since then I have never ever
experienced such a joy about working with new gadget.. I even thought it was
some childhood effect, never to be repeated again. Can't describe in words, I
think everyone here know what I mean.

Until I have made a Tesla test drive..

~~~
stevekemp
I grew up in the UK, and my first computer (shared with the family) was a ZX
Spectrum.

The fact that we couldn't load games over hte christmas period, because the
cassette player was broken, was the reason I started programming:

[https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html](https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html)

~~~
regularfry
The jack socket on my 48k+ had a fault where you needed to hold the plug at a
specific angle or it wouldn't make contact. You had to do that and remain
motionless for the entire loading cycle. Something like 40% of the tapes I
bought never actually loaded, and I was never sure if it was because I wasn't
holding it right, or they were faulty out of the box.

And no, I never had the confidence at the time to take the lid off and see if
I could fix it. It was just too precious to take the risk.

------
speakeron
First program I ever wrote on a Sinclair Spectrum was to spin a disk on the
screen.

I was disappointed with the performance, so for the second program I
precalculated the sin/cos values and stored them in an array (and learnt that
all programming is an exercise in caching).

I was still disappointed with the performance, so the third program I wrote
was a hex loader so I could poke machine code straight into it (had to run
down to the local electronics store to pick up copy of the Z80 assembler
manual). I then was happy with the speed.

That kickstarted a career in software development which I still derive immense
enjoyment from.

~~~
alok-g
Oh my! Your story is a very significant overlap with mine!

I started programming at an age of 11 years, when I did not even know the
meaning of sin and cos.

The spinning 3D ring I had created was slow like yours, speeded up by caching
sin and cos values like yours. The final one had entire frames precomputed in
memory and cycled by hand-written machine code into the video memory space.
That last one was when I was when 14 years of age.

------
karmakaze
The Zx has a Z80 3.5 MHz where the C64 has a 6510 1.0 MHz. With this
difference it would take major limitations in the graphics/sound hw of the Zx
to come off worse.

Edit: I had an Atari 6502 1.79 MHz and I wouldn't say it was clearly superior
to the C64 because the C64 had more flexible sprites and sound. What I would
say is that the Atari peeps I met were more hacker-like than the C64 folks who
were more like users/gamers.

~~~
mrob
> major limitations in the graphics/sound hw of the Zx

That's exactly the case. The C64 had hardware sprites and scrolling, and one
of the best sound chips of all time with the SID. The Spectrum had a memory-
mapped bitmap display with low resolution color, and a CPU-controlled beeper.
And the Spectrum's CPU advantage wasn't as much as the clock speeds suggest,
because the 6502 could get more done per cycle, and the Spectrum's CPU had
wait states when accessing the 16K block of RAM containing the graphics RAM.

I played a lot of Spectrum games as a child, but looking at it objectively,
the C64 is a far superior machine. However, both systems were crippled by the
single-button joystick standard of the time. The greatest feature of the NES
was the B button.

~~~
karmakaze
I never really thought about the joystick button limitation at the time. The
original Atari 800/400 had 4 joystick ports so someone could have used two
ports 10-bits of input per player for a 2-player game. Each cardinal direction
(NSWE was 1-bit with pairs being closed for diagonals).

------
mbroncano
Everyone knows MSX were the truly superior computers at the time

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX)

~~~
lstodd
Nah, I had a C64c and access to YIS503II MSX.

MSX is nowhere near a C64. It's just.. bland. Also ugly.

------
Marazan
Title is factually correct. Article is superfluous.

------
christkv
The craziest c64 thing I've seen recently is this 48Khz audio player
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYAf_awh5XA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYAf_awh5XA),
blog post here [http://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-
musi...](http://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-music-player-
for.html).

Its quite outstanding what you can do with the SID chip.

------
jascii
Except that pesky -used chewinggum- keyboard..

~~~
nickt
Just get a Spectrum+, a better keyboard than some modern laptops... :)

~~~
amiga-workbench
Apart from when you hit a key at just the wrong angle and it sticks.

~~~
nickt
Ha, didn't have that problem with my A4000 keyboard.

------
tluyben2
I love the Z80; it was my second (the first was a luggable IBM XT clone; it
truly sucked compared to the home computers of that time) CPU experience
beginning of the 80s and it was great. I couldn't imagine anything better and
I have not found anything better. I do a lot of embedded asm coding now with
modern CPUs and it is just not as nice to me as writing asm on a Z80 system
is. Probably because I did so much of it at a young age; it is still fun and
fluent. No manuals/internet needed on msx or spectrum, which is also fun; if
anything tells me it is not only nostalgia, it is that; being able to write
programs without needing to look everything up or download libraries. Not
practical these days (mostly because everything has to be modular, so almost
nothing ships with batteries included anymore), but still preferable in my
opinion.

~~~
stevekemp
I'm reliving my youth by programming assembly which is running on a real Z80
processor, driven by an arduino mega.

~~~
tluyben2
I collected old (60s-80s) machines for many years when they were still free or
very cheap. So I have all kinds of ZX spectrums and MSXs and others (very rare
dual cpu Z80) to play around on reliving my youth. With Symbos [0] it is a lot
of fun.

[0] [http://www.symbos.de/](http://www.symbos.de/)

------
nickswan
If you can find it, MicroMen is a really good watch you’ll all enjoy (this is
just a link to the trailer)
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fGiGrf2YyZE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fGiGrf2YyZE)

------
zzo38computer
We can see then, there are some advantages and disadvantages each one.
Clearly, ZX Spectrum has a better included BASIC software; will allow you to
make large strings, screen pausing automatically, and the Commodore 64 system
software must take up too much RAM that only 38911 out of 64K is available for
BASIC (or maybe it is due to bank switching; I don't know). But because they
compare disks with tapes we cannot compare the loading speed properly, and do
not know which is better.

------
Razengan
For those who're interested in the 1980s "micro wars", BBC's Micro Men TV
movie (2009) is a nice dramatized glimpse of it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM)

Though it does paint Clive Sinclair (the Steve Jobs of the UK) in a somewhat
unflattering light.

------
Causality1
Just from a usability standpoint, what is it about the ZX Spectrum that could
possibly make up for the horrific rubber keyboard?

~~~
enneff
They released a Spectrum+ that has a much better keyboard.

~~~
Causality1
It went from horrific to merely bad. That model also had a 30% unit failure
rate.

------
kresten
I wish I knew back then all the technic knowledge I have now.

I really had zero idea what was going on inside the machine and no-one to
teach me.

~~~
stevekemp
I was lucky enough to be able to get a couple of books from the local library
with coding examples. Usually these would be the usbourne books - which had
BASIC listings for multiple home-computers at the time.

I did come across a couple of books that briefly documented assembly language
stuff, and of course the (orange) manuals included with the computer contained
a lot of good information.

Even now I have my Z80 books, they've moved house with me and even emigrated
to a whole new country.

~~~
carey
Do you mean the Usborne books? For some serious nostalgia, you can read them
for free at [https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-
codin...](https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-coding-
books/).

~~~
stevekemp
Yup, thanks for the correction.

------
cromwellian
Can the Sinclair do nearly full-screen 16fps video and 8khz digital audio
streamed and real time decompressed from a floppy? Demoscene shows how vastly
more capable the C64 was. Look at the hi-res ultra-color art in this demo.
(watch from beginning to see some of the art)

[https://youtu.be/FTtKHLZTbtA?t=653](https://youtu.be/FTtKHLZTbtA?t=653)

------
rasz
"..for BASIC"

and as everyone should know "It is practically impossible to teach good
programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

------
desireco42
ZX Spectrum of my childhood. Some of greatest moments spent thanks to it.
Determined my career.

And superior to C64 :), except turbo loader was just a thing we couldn't have
properly.

Raspberry Pi could become something similar with a little love and support.

------
vardump
Silly ZX Spectrum people.

Of course breadbin is better! ;-)

------
sys_64738
The Commodore 64 is the best selling 8-bit computer in the world. Nobody
really used the Spectrum outside the UK and eastern Europe.

~~~
KC8ZKF
It was sold as the Timex Sinclair in the USA.

I was planning on buying one, but ended up with a used VIC-20 instead.

~~~
Someone
The Timex Sinclair was a variation on the ZX81, not a Spectrum.

~~~
UncleSlacky
The Timex Sinclair 2068 was the US Spectrum variant:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068)

