ZX Spectrum/Trivia
Trivia about ZX Spectrum includes:
- Clive Sinclair was an electronics enthusiast, but wasn't all that bothered about making computers. The ZX line came about because he saw a gap in the market, and wanted to raise money to fund research into his real passion, sustainable transport.
- A lot of original 48K Spectrums actually contained 80K of RAM, of which 32K was defective and unused. The Spectrum's RAM was treated as 2 banks - the lower 16K common to all early Spectra, and the upper 32K in the fancy-pants 48K machines. In the very early 80s, memory manufacturers were switching to 64K banks, but at first the new chips had a high failure rate. Sinclair saved money by buying chips that were known to have faults in only one half of the RAM, and using these to make up the 32K bank - with only the good half of each chip being used.
- Coders soon noticed that routines ran faster in the higher bank, because the lower bank was contended - the graphics chip grabbed screen data from the same bank, and the CPU had to wait its turn.
- 128K machines mostly used two 64K banks, one of which was contended. Some clones used different configurations with more or less, or occasionally no, contention.
- Being shipped without a gamepad meant that all games had to support keyboard controls, and the arrow keys weren't in the best positions for game playing. Instead Q, A, O and P soon became the unofficial defaults for up, down, left and right. These keys would eventually wear out, cre*ting *uite * dem*nd f*r re*l*cement keyb**rd membr*nes.
- The CPU runs at 3.5MHz, which sounded fast compared to its more expensive rival, the Commodore 64, whose processor putters along at 1 MHz. However, Clock Speed isn't a good way to compare processors. For a start, the Z80 needs 2-3 times as many "ticks" per instruction, so it really isn't that much quicker; and the C64 has better graphics and sound chips to share the workload. The best we can say is the Speccy's CPU is a bit faster and significantly more busy than the 64's.
- One of the reasons ROM cartridges weren't popular is that they only hold 16K, which restricted their possible game catalogue despite advertising saying "you can run them all on 16K RAM Spectrums, even if they were originally written for 48K machines." Hacks have since been developed to overcome the limit.
- Amstrad stopped making Spectra in 1990. Games and magazines continued to be sold for a few years after. The main UK mags at the time were Crash,[1] which, err, crashed in 1992, Sinclair User,[2] and Your Sinclair,[3] both of which managed to hold out until 1993.
- Your Sinclair (YS) was brought back in a one-off tribute edition a few years later.
- The Sam Coupé continued to be sold until 1995, when its third and final manufacturer went under. It sold 12,000 units in those 6 years.
- The name ZX80 came from the processor, the Z80, with the X representing "the mystery ingredient". ZX81 and ZX
82Spectrum sounded like logical progressions.- The Z came from chip manufacturer Zilog ("Z Integrated Logic"), whose founder, Frederico Faggin, said the Z represented "the last word of integrated logic", and the 80 from Intel's 8080, on which the Z80 was based.