That's a great story and I am glad things worked out for you.

Thank you. It was a life changer for me.

Agreed - great story!

I learnt to code on a ZX too when I was a kid, beautiful machine! :D

You realise that beards are not uniform, solid objects, right?

it's a transparent texture

beardControl.Renderer.Alpha = 0.25

Boooooooooooooo :)

OMG, COBOL! I spent about a year writing COBOL programs on - get this - punched cards! Horrendous!

Same path as me Mark. I haven't got any in the loft tho but I do have a BBC Master, monitor and disk drive, might get them down and have a play one day.

I bought an Amiga A500 whilst I had my Atari ST. I have an Amiga 1200 somewhere. I still have an Atari STe and Atari Falcon setup but have not turned them on for about 4 years.

Different game I think. The original version was a verb noun text adventure.

I played Wonderboy a lot in the arcade. Great game! They renamed it for Adventure Island for the home port for some reason.

* put them in the description I mean

+Ichabaud Craine I think I did.... >Sean

if you're up to date on the official KZfaq app, it has annotations now :D

Exactly, think I've got 3 here - plus white 3kb ram pack

ZX80's have been a higher second hand price since the 80's! lol

not everyone has loadsamoney.

Wouldn't POKE require an extra parameter? In addition 12345 is ROM space, so you shouldn't be able to POKE it even with the extra parameter. even randomize throws a wobbly, which is the traditional method for executing machine code. Interestingly Print seems to lock up the machine quite well though.

They might've contained filtering circuits to limit the frequency response a bit. I did have one and it was always considerably more reliable for loading than your bog-standard cassette deck.

Nick B Interesting, thanks :)

+Larry Bundy Jr Sinclair definitely did hi-fi too!

I think there's a reference to it in the BBC drama "micromen". Sir Clive was/is one of the greatest British inventors of all time.

The hardware never has any problems at all with you removing the power. It's the software which fails miserably when you interrupt it in the middle of a non-atomic operation. On the Pi you're running GNU/Linux, which is written specifically to not corrupt anything when you cut the power. Windows would be another matter altogether.

***** my comment was based on the assumption that NTFS doesn't have journalling. It seems I'm misremembering.

But it's listed as untested (i.e. broken) and it looks like people have been resting a soldering iron on it. If you can find one in unassembled kit form, it'd go for a lot more than £400 on UK eBay.

"I didn't really look at it closely. I recall looking for one a few years ago and they weren't so insanely expensive" Condition is king with these units - boxed clean working examples go for silly money as you can see from the completed listings. Not sure how repairable broken units would be these days.

Arnim Sommer google .tap files for spectrum emulators

Daniel Perestrelo I was thinking on a hardware level...

Mike Dench Hey there fellow WOS'er :D I agree 100% about the superiority of the ZX entry system P.S. My WOS name is The_Bert - we have exchanged a few comments in the past, that's how i knew your name :)

QVear I think the c64 had that on colour pictures.

Only in hi-res graphics mode on the C64, and only if you weren't bothering with hardware sprites and were drawing them directly into the bitmap.

The MSX had this problem too, but since only one person outside of Japan ever bought one it's not surprising that it's not common knowledge

Matthew Harrison (matthehat) Ah, that'd be me. I had a Philips NMS 8250. Wonderful machine. Apart from the colour clash of course.

Should've bought a Dragon 32, then you could've had any colour you liked, as long as it was green. ;-)

I've got one of those but you have to be very careful when using it, or the individual cubes fall out. It is a fully working Rubik's Cube though.

schitlipz lol. what did you expect? the commodore 64 cost £399 at launch, the higher end 48k ZX spectrum cost £175. It's like asking why someone would buy a commodore 64 in 1985 when they could've bought an Amiga 1000. The Spectrum was way more powerful than the price difference would suggest. Not that I care, as I was too young to bother with either. besides, the only computer I owned from that era is an Atari 800XL - given that I got it in 1991 or so, or rather, two of them, 2 tape drives, joysticks, a plotter, about 20 games on cartridge and 400 on tape... For nearly nothing. Even so, to my young mind it was a frustrating mess to use, and I preferred my snes unless I felt like messing around with weird primitive looking stuff.

The Amiga sucked. Esp. the 1000 with its 256k memory, no hard drive, disk-loaded Kickstart OS, no compatibility with 64, and expensive everything. Then the 500 came with its backward ports... Commodore DIED due to the Amiga. I hate that later era in computer history. Thankfully we're in a good age right now. Incidentally, my first job, after being a paperboy, was selling Amigas. The Atari wasn't _that_ bad, but more than twice the price of 64. The 80s were ruled by the C64. If ya bought a cheaper Vic20 they'd accept a switcheroo with an extra one or two hundred bucks (I forgot which). So it was marketed really well. I'm in Canada. I only remember using one of those Spectrum things. It had a membrane keyboard and output only black and white video. This was just after my Atari 2600 and before my Vic 20. Other than that, I don't think they really existed in North America other than in magazines, and I was a techno nut. Was the UK going through some kind of depression in the 80s?

Not really. Back in 1983 one of my friends had a VIC=20 and he was ashamed of people knowing he had one, and bemoaned that his dad was stupid and should have bought a ZX Spectrum 48K like I had. Also at school saying you had a VIC=20 was a recipe for disaster, and later on saying MSX was just as bad.

Haha, I guess when we were kids it was about popularity... and easy access to games. But looking back today I'd definitely say the 64 was stellar. Today I use an emulator to play Gyrus and other little gems :) warm feelings.

I had a friend in the mid 1980s from Hackney, London and he was a total C64 fanboy. He mocked my Spectrum 48K but did enjoy some of my games. However once I got an Amstrad CPC464 his opinion changed, and he was often visibly and audibly pissed off because many of the games were far superior on the Amstrad that he liked. Many times I would visit his house and notice he had bought games which he had first played at my house on the CPC. Sometimes he would refuse to load them to show me, and angrily muttered bad things about the C64 conversion. I did get to see them eventually though and I could see why he was pissed off, e.g. glitchy, chunky badly drawn graphics, buggy coding and faults etc.