ZX Spectrum: Difference between revisions
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{{Useful Notes}}
[[file:ZXSpectrum48k.jpg|thumb|200px|A 48k ZX Spectrum]]
[[Trans-Atlantic Equivalent|Britain's equivalent]] to the [[Apple II]] and [[Commodore 64]].
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The Sinclair '''ZX Spectrum''', [[Fan Nickname|or "Speccy" to its fans]], is a masterpiece of early 1980s computing [[Minimalism]]. Everything is as simple and cheap as possible. Because of this, it became famous in Britain and Spain in the 1980s, and eastern Europe and Russia in the 1990s, as a game-friendly home computer for people who otherwise couldn't afford one.
== History ==
The Speccy is based on a couple of earlier computers, the ZX80 and ZX81. These were little more than a Z80 processor, an incomplete 4K version of BASIC, 1K of RAM, and a membrane keyboard — the first releases were sold as kits. The Z80 drew the text-only screen (when it wasn't busy), video output was to a TV set, and programs were stored on audio cassettes. The primitiveness was deliberate — the ZX80 was designed to be the cheapest computer on the market, and the ZX81 made the original design even cheaper. The ZX81 was only £70 (or $100) in 1981, and sold over a million units. The Speccy, designed to be the cheapest ''color'' computer on the market, improved on the ZX81 with a 16K almost-complete BASIC, 16K or 48K of RAM, a video chip, a beeper, and a rubber keyboard.
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Amstrad bought Sinclair in 1986 and continued improving the Speccy with a full-travel keyboard, an internal cassette drive, and finally with a disk drive in 1987. But these later models have backward-compatibility problems.
=== Play it Again, Sam ===
The demise of the Speccy in the early 1990s isn't the end of the story. Because it's so simple, it's easy to clone. The first Speccy clone was an authorized version by Timex (yes, the wristwatch company) for the United States, Portugal and Poland. Unauthorized Speccy clones started appearing in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, followed by several countries in eastern Europe, along with India, Brazil and Argentina. It's still made today in Russia.▼
Speaking of backward-compatibility problems, the SAM Coupé was released in 1989 as a next-generation Speccy. Inspired by a terminated project at Sinclair Research and designed by former Sinclair employees at Miles Gordon Technology (MGT), the SAM had better specs than any Spectrum - but without the intellectual property that now belonged to Amstrad there was a limit to how compatible MGT could make it.
The fansite [http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ World of Spectrum], which is officially endorsed by Amstrad, offers various emulators for the system and most of the original games for free as memory dumps or tape images. <ref>(If you don't want to [[Gannon Banned|get flamed by the Spectrum community]], ''never'' refer to any Spectrum game as a "ROM"...unless you're referring to an Interface 2 cartridge, of which only six or so were released. Arcade and console game images are called "ROMs" because that's literally what they are; as already mentioned, almost no Speccy games were ever released on ROM.)</ref> The site has gone all out to ask the original producers of the games for permission to [[Abandonware|distribute them freely]] (permission which has been granted in the majority of cases, the exceptions mostly being games published by companies that still exist who fear that they compromise the integrity of their current catalogs by allowing free download of something that ceased to be profitable to them in 1993). Nevertheless, the site has about 90% of the computer's software library up for free legal download.▼
The SAM could be made to run most 48K software with a bit of hacking, and its games got regular slots in the big Spectrum magazines. However, despite having as much RAM as an [[Amiga|Amiga 1000]], it was still an 8-bit machine in an increasingly 16-bit market, and never made it commercially.
=== Clones & Emulators ===
▲The demise of the Speccy in the early 1990s isn't the end of the story. Because it's so simple, it's easy to clone. The first Speccy clone was an authorized version by Timex
Then came the retro scene: Of the numerous [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZX_Spectrum_clones#Unofficial Speccy clones] listed on [[The Other Wiki]], at least half a dozen were released in the '10s or '20s.
▲The fansite [http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ World of Spectrum], which is officially endorsed by Amstrad, offers various emulators for the system and most of the original games for free as memory dumps or tape images. <ref>(If you don't want to [[Gannon Banned|get flamed by the Spectrum community]], ''never'' refer to any Spectrum game as a "ROM"...unless you're referring to an Interface 2 cartridge, of which only
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<tabber>
Processors=
* Zilog
* Semi-custom graphics chip (off-the-shelf logic array with custom functionality).
* Spectrum 128 and Amstrad models: General Instruments AY-3-8912 sound chip.
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Memory=
Not very expandable, except kits were sold to convert the 16K model to 48K.
* Spectrum: 16K or 48K.
* Spectrum+: 48K.
* Spectrum 128 and Amstrad models: 128K.
* The [[Operating System|OS]] is stored in [[Read Only Memory|ROM]] - 16K for the 16 or 48K Spectrum, more for later models. Some add-ons could swap in some RAM in its place.
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Display=
Output is to a TV set via a built-in UHF modulator. A composite signal is also available from the edge connector.
* 256x192 resolution.
* 8-color palette, with two brightnesses per color.
* Two colors per 8x8 pixel block (both had to be the same brightness, as the Speccy's display was famously idiosyncratic — each pixel block was represented as 3 bits of foreground color, 3 bits of background colour, 1 bit for brightness, and 1 bit for flashing...a total of 8 bits, or 1 byte).
* The display area is surrounded by a border that can be any one of the 8 non-bright colours. Carefully-timed machine code routines can make horizontal lines appear in the border - this is done by the
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Sound=
* Spectrum and Spectrum+: Beeper, controlled by toggling a single output bit to make it vibrate. Can cover 10 octaves but takes CPU time.
* Spectrum 128 and Amstrad models: Three channels, square or noise waveforms, 10 octaves, programmable ADSR, 8-bit sample playback.
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Ports=
Connectors were kept to a minimum to control costs and speed up the initial launch. Other ports became available via add-ons.
* 3.5mm "Mic" and "Ear" jacks (actually line-out and line-in respectively, as they were meant to be plugged in to the same-named ports on a cassette recorder).
* 9V DC in.
* TV out (coaxial providing an analogue UHF signal).
* Edge Connector/expansion bus - literally the edge of the motherboard, sporting a double row of printed tabs. Exposes enough functionality to "do almost anything with a Spectrum that you can with a Z80"<ref>according to the original Spectrum BASIC manual</ref>.
</tabber>
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Thousands upon thousands; conservative estimates hover around the 11,000 mark <ref>and that's only the games which were commercially released; there were also countless thousands of homebrew games, magazine typeins, and many others</ref>, while the [http://www.worldofspectrum.org World Of Spectrum] library contains around 9,000 of them.
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* ''[[Star Control]]'' (unofficial port, very inferior to the original)
* ''[[Turrican]]''
* ''Amaurote''▼
* ''Fairlight''
==== [[Adventure Game]] ====
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** ''Sweevo's Whirled'', an extended 128K version of the same game.
** ''[[Hydrofool]]'', the only sequel.
* All of the ''Wally Week'' series except ''Automania'' (below).
** ''Pyjamarama''
** ''Everyone's a Wally''
** ''Herbert's Dummy Run''
** ''Three Weeks in Paradise''
* ''Rasterscan''
==== [[First Person Shooter]] ====
* ''Combat Zone''
* ''Starion''
* ''Tau Ceti''
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==== [[Platform Game]] ====
* ''[[Chuckie Egg]]''
* ''[[Manic Miner]]'' - which was the first game to include in-game music ''and'' sound effects using only the beeper, a feat many had considered impossible.
* ''[[Manic Miner]]''▼
** ''[[Jet Set Willy]]''
*** ''Jet Set Willy 2''
* ''[[Jetpac]]''
* ''[[Video Game/Technician Ted|Technician Ted]]''
* ''Automania''
* ''Magic Tokens''
==== [[Simulation Game]] ====
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==== [[Third-Person Shooter]] ====
* ''[[Video Game/Exolon|Exolon]]''
* ''Trantor: The Last Stormtrooper''
* ''[[Zub]]''
* ''Stardust''
==== [[Wide Open Sandbox]] ====
* ''[[Elite]]''
== Add-ons ==
▲==== [[Miscellaneous Games]] ====
Sinclair released several add-ons to extend the Spectrum's functionality, and numerous other companies got in on the action. The ZX printer, already released for use with the ZX81, could plug straight in, and the burgeoning games market allowed several competing joystick adaptors to thrive.
▲* ''Amaurote''
All Spectrum add-ons are plugged in to the "edge connector" or "expansion bus". Some devices include a duplicated edge connector for daisy-chaining, and for the rest, "expansion doublers" could be bought.
Attachments included:
=== Hacker/debugging tools ===
* Various external ROMs, including one in...
* Romantic Robot's "Multiface". Allowed any running program to be frozen and inspected, using its own buffer memory to run user code. Magazines frequently published "Multiface cheats", which were mostly memory addresses to be zeroed to get infinite lives in various games.
=== Joystick interfaces ===
Some of the earlier joystick interfaces included ROM cartridge slots, but the cartridges never caught on. Sinclair tried to start the ball rolling with 10 official cartridges<ref>[http://www.fruitcake.plus.com/Sinclair/Interface2/Cartridges/Interface2_RC_Cartridges.htm List here.]</ref> but they were all discontinued within months. Later interfaces sometimes shipped with empty spaces on their circuit boards for the cartridge slot.
* ZX Interface 2 - The official one, sporting two joystick ports and the original ROM cartridge connector. The joystick part was built in to the Spectrum +2. Joystick movements simulate number key presses (1-5 for the left stick, 6-0 for the right) to make life easier for game developers.
* Kempston - the most popular, launched before the Interface 2.
* Cursor - which emulates arrow key presses instead of number keys<ref>Although the arrow keys are technically shifted number keys</ref>.
* Protek.
* Fuller.
* RAM Turbo - one of several attempts to combine multiple joystick protocols in one unit. At least two of the protocols worked, and it had a reset button - a feature that was missing from rubber-key Spectrums.
=== Printers ===
* ZX Printer - Sinclair's spark-gap printer, printing on 100mm-wide rolls of aluminium-coated paper.
* At least one electrically-compatible clone of the ZX printer was spotted in the wild, printing on larger, more ordinary-looking thermal paper.
* Other printers could be attached via the Interface 1.
=== Others ===
* ZX Interface 1 - released by Sinclair shortly after the first Spectrum. Provides an [[w:RS-232|RS232]] port and connectors for Microdrives<ref>A midget data tape produced by Sinclair</ref> and a proprietary network.
* Several mice and floppy drive controllers, including...
** MGT's Disciple: a floppy drive controller that, unlike the Spectrum +3, used common disk sizes. Included a printer port and the ability to snapshot the Speccy's state.
** +D, a cheaper successor to Disciple.
* Fuller Orator, a sound box using the AY-3-8912 (the same sound chip that was built into later Spectrums).
* Mikro-Plus: Puts 16K external RAM in place of the ROM, so it would also count as a hacker tool - but this was marketed by games publisher Mikro-Gen to allow bigger games to be loaded.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Videogame Systems]]
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