An article by Uncle Clive, http://www.edge-online.com/features/making-zx-spectrum And get watching the Spectrum Rock'n'Roll years... Don't see a post icon for a Speccy, died a little inside.
Worth watching the 1989 one: You'll piss yourself laughing at the late late conversions of Power Drift, Strider, Chase HQ, and Ghouls and Ghosts. Time to get a Megadrive on import son.
Chase HQ on the speccy was a very good conversion, even got the highest review mark all year (next to Super Mario 2) in the UK mag C&VG. The Speccy was a class machie and had excellent conversions of games like Virus (Zarch on the Archiemedes, a game that David Braben said that would be impossible to do on the Atari ST and Amiga...) and Carrier Command. The Spectrum by the early 90s was basically a dead machine though. All dreams about the Loki or the Sam Coupe doing well were dead in the water. Still 8 years was not a bad innings about as long as the general time of a computer / games console and it is still being supported. So long live the Spectrum! And here is how you do an historical archive site right, so it isn't about having lots of ROMZ... http://www.worldofspectrum.org/
Managed to find a moderately cheap 128 +2 a few days ago, arrived today, having some fun playing around trying to get tapes successfully recorded and played
Tapes are fun, but listening to schreecy beeps for 5 minutes and getting a crash or R:Tape Loading Error is not my idea of fun. DivIDE is better and I believe there is a firmware that will load images as if they were real tapes. One thing about playing a lot of Spectrum games is that like most 8 bit computers, a lot of games really have aged badly with a lot of arcade conversions being nothing more then rose tinted nostalga. Although there are some great games (mainly original games...) on the system like Deathchase 3D, Ant Attack, All or Nothing, Skool Daze (and Bak to Skool), Manic Miner, Head over Heels, Fairlight, Turbo Espirit, Tau Ceti, Trap Door, Wheelie and others.
sugar saved it in my eyes and gave the system another year got my first speccy in 83 and my last in 90 happy times
