The Spectrum ULA: How to Design a Microcomputer (BOOK)

[1024MAK]

That's hard to believe, given that they are writing a book/article to share knowledge.

I wasn't talking about Chris Smith personally. Rather about some guys on the forums.
And maybe I'm biased by my local Polish experience. We have a big electrics and electronics forums and
these guys are often quite unfriendly there. Generally you have to know 80% of answer to your question to
show you are worthy of an answer, and only an answer about some detail.

Typical conversation:

Newbie: How to do X?
"Expert": If you don't know it, you are hopeless. Leave it for a proffessional

I presume you don’t mean this forum. I myself do try to explain or describe things in as a straightforward manner as I can. If I do say things that you / anyone does not understand, please do ask. I myself am happy to try to explain or help where I can.

With any technical or technology subject, it is always hard to get the balance right. That is the balance between talking down to someone who already has a a lot of knowledge on the subject or someone who is inexperienced with the subject. As it is not always obvious when a question is asked.

Further, just like most technical or technology subjects, the language used, the names, terms etc. can be hard for someone without good knowledge of the subject. The use off specialist language is not unique to any one subject, it occurs throughout industry for various subjects.

Alas, if you are around, or often only talk with people in the same subject/ field, it is easy to forget that what you and others may easily understand, may be completely incomprehensible to others outside the same subject/ field.

Electrical guys talk and use different terminology to analogue electronic guys, who use different terminology to digital/ computer electronic guys. Radio/TV and radar guys again have further variations. Similarly telephone/ communications guys also have their own variations. Yet all rely on electrical current / electron flow.

So yes, the hardware side can be very complex and hard to understand.

By its very nature, a very detailed look at how the ZX Spectrum and it’s ULA work, Chris’s book is of course very much for people who already have a good understanding of electronics.

Oh, one other thing that I want to make clear. Mistakes when working on the hardware can be unforgiving. Both for the health of the hardware and with high voltages / mains voltages, the health of the member. Or it may be that sorting out the problem will be impractical without the use of certain test gear. So sometimes hardware guys will suggest or recommend that a inexperienced member would be better off sending / taking their item to someone more experienced/ or has the facilities/ test gear.

Mark

[ZXDunny]

And sometimes they are even jealous of sharing their knowledge.

That's hard to believe, given that they are writing a book/article to share knowledge.

Ramsoft. Back in the days before accurate emulation was considered the norm, they claimed to have a "99% accurate" ULA<>z80 interaction in their emulator - and for many years declined to share what they knew with the community. When they did eventually do so, they shared intentionally wrong information which was found out pretty quickly and caused one of the biggest flame wars in the history of the community.

They also released tape preservation tools which produced tape images that only their emulator could read correctly, which caused huge upheavals in the preservation community when it was discovered.

[Ralf]

I presume you don’t mean this forum

Sure I don't, this is a friendly place. If you are interested, I meant this one: https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/forums.html

Oh, one other thing that I want to make clear. Mistakes when working on the hardware can be unforgiving

Yep, that's the problem. If you make mistake in the code and your program crashes then you just examine the code, fix the mistake,
and run again. If it still crashes you check again and do it until it runs okay.

With electronics a mistake often means putting wrong voltage at wrong place and frying the elements there. And there is no "undo"
option in real life

Actually I know a story about it which is almost funny. A guy was repairing an old CRT tv. He opened it, disconnected the monitor for bigger comfort of work as cables were short and started working. Actually he did also one more thing which I suppose was a dirty trick. So he connected a 100 Watt bulb into cables which were giving voltage to the monitor. This way everything was supposed to work just like the monitor was connected

Unfortunately the bulb burned out at some moment. The voltage which was supposed to go to the monitor went somewhere else and burned the electronics.

It's a serious problem for beginners as learning means experimenting and hardware often doesn't allow you for much experimenting.