Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Y'know, other stuff, Sinclair related.
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Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by zxbruno »

Back in 1992 I was still a very active Spectrum user. Everyone I knew had moved on to Amigas or PCs with Sound Blaster sound cards. I remember the gradual disappearance of games, magazines and Spectrums (James Bond pack) from the Portuguese shops. I also remember buying the last issue of Microhobby, which had a goodbye letter on the first page. I had no way to know that there were others who were still using Spectrums like me. The first emulator for PC was already known but no one cared about it because it required loading tapes via parallel port. I wouldn't discover anything about WOS or "El Mundo Del Spectrum" until 1998. Therefore, between 1992 and 1998, I thought I was the last Spectrum user on Earth. :| I was the "crazy" guy. I did my school presentations with my old computer and loaded things from disk. I printed my essays with my Seikosha. My parents bought it to help me with my homework. ;) When I had friends over, they'd see my crazy Spectrum collection* and laugh and say "Ha! He still uses Spectrums!" We were poor and there was no way I could "move on" to a more modern computer. My parents bought my first Spectrum with great sacrifice and I think I developed an emotional attachment to all-things Spectrum, which is still present to this day.

Was anyone else in a similar situation?


*I never bought a Spectrum back in the day. My parents bought the first one, and everything else was given to me by people who didn't care about it anymore.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Ast A. Moore »

I, too, was using my Spectrum way into the mid to late nineties. I don’t think I ever thought of myself as the last Spectrum user on the planet, but I certainly didn’t anticipate its comeback. I’m eternally grateful to all the people at WOS and SC, as well as Spectrum enthusiasts at large, for keeping it alive.

I’ve never been a “community” person, but the Spectrum community is a place where I feel at home.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by 8BitAG »

Ah, there were loads of Spectrum users in the mid-nineties... in our text adventure community. :) So, no.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

I came across the first Spectrum emulator at the end of 1992/beginning 1993, just when I got my first PC (386).

I started to convert my old tapes to emulator files (*.sp) to get as much games as I could. But I couldn't find many people like me in that situation so I felt something similar, till Internet appeared and one of the first words I typed up in Yahoo (and using a Netscape browser!) were 'ZX Spectrum', realizing then there were a whole universe of Spectrum geeks like me around the world.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by ZxSpence »

I used my Speccy and Spam Soupe until 94
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by R-Tape »

Nope, because I was part of the exodus to 16bit platforms and beyond. Even now, I can't understand why people remained faithful when things like high res colour was dangled in front of them - I couldn't wait to jump ship.

I find the start of the non-commercial era fascinating: did it feel like you were in a wilderness? were you classed as eccentric? Do you consider it eccentric? I've had similar conversations before (in addition to you guys in this thread, Graz never left the speccy and therefore doesn't even consider it to be retro) and I *still* don't fully understand why you stayed with it. I have a reverence for those that did, like they are true speccy fans in a way that I'm not.

Anyway - I glad you did stay with it!
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by ZxSpence »

Had an Amiga 500, 1200, 3000 and various PCs from 89 as well but the Amiga always seemed half finished to me and was always a total arse to get online, had flickering high res and the more colours the more it slowed down. Even when I mediator towered the 1200 and added a blizzard PPC 604 there was something a bit half arsed about it. Well, a lot half arsed. I could rant for pages about what I don't like about the Amiga (less so about what I like). An unpopular view and I still have a 1200 today but let's be honest, by 93 the Amiga was dying too. Sure, I used to write software on all of them but the +3 stayed the distance, not as useful as the Sam of course.

I enjoyed games on the Speccy way more than games on the Amiga, even though technically those games should crush it.

However these days my hobby machine is a QL with super gold card and you know what? It's great. Even the microdrives work and the microdrive wafers. Most of my Amiga disks are sadly unreadable and it languishes unused in a box at the moment. My last Amiga, all other Amiga junk given away years ago, including OS4 based stuff.

If I want to do work stuff I use my laptop. Browse, use my phone. If I want to f**k about and write software, my trusty Sinclair QL is where it's at and I wish I had got one in 84.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by zxbruno »

R-Tape wrote: Fri Sep 20, 2019 8:45 pmEven now, I can't understand why people remained faithful when things like high res colour was dangled in front of them
I couldn't afford any of the new stuff computers. But even if I did or if Amigas or PCs had been given to me, I was emotionally connected to the Spectrum. It was my first computer and I had a universe of things to explore (dozens of books, hundreds of magazines and tapes) that were available to me. One of my cousins had already moved on to the Apple world, and all his Timex and Spectrum stuff was gathering dust. I had watched him use HiSoft Devpack when I was a young kid, play games, develop machine code routines, play digitised speech, and when I finally got my first Spectrum he had already moved on and only used Apple computers. First the Apple Macintosh, then the IIci. I slowly "borrowed" all his stuff from his Sinclair days.

I probably got the +2 grey around 1988 or 1989. I basically told myself "Now that I finally have one, I'm going to enjoy it as much as I can", and I did. The limitations of the computer, compared to the superior consoles, Amigas and PCs, didn't bother me at all. I could play PC games at my cousin's house (3D Boxing, X-Wing, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis), borrow a Mac IIci at my other cousin's house (Illustrator, Photoshop), or play "accelerated" Spectrum games on a Sam Coupé at another cousin's house, but never felt the same fascination for those computers.

Now that we have the internet, I know I had people in my hometown who were still using Spectrums. But back then, I was sure I was the only one. And I was ridiculed for it.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by uglifruit »

I remember using mine late on (not as late as some, it turns out), to do some programming when doing my physics degree. I found it refreshing to do things in BASIC and/or assembly that we fun, rather than the (trivial and a bit pointless) stuff I was forced to be doing in a computer lab in Fortran77(!) Computing module.

I also found knocking something quickly up on the speccy was an easy way to "brute force" solve some of the trickier maths problems.

I didn't really talk about I my spectruming to other people at the time. (Shame, or envy over then all having "better" machines?)
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Spud »

Perhaps it depends on what you were using the speccy for. If you were chasing the next big thing in games then the speccy may have been a transient thing. We got ours in 85, but we had already an Atari 2600 prior and were already on that conveyor belt by then. My dad made me vow the Sega Master System would be the last computer upgrade, but then game the Amiga 500, Atari lynx, game gear, SNES, etc etc.

I loved the speccy for the easy to copy games and cheapness. My fondness never waned but the lure of everything else especially 16bit was too much to withstand.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by DouglasReynholm »

Like R-Tape I also abandoned the Speccy around '88 for the consoles and an Amiga (later PC) - but - curiously one of the first things I did when I got my first personal access (not through uni or work) to the internet, was search for Spectrum stuff. I'm sure WOS was one of the first things I came across maybe 98/99? I just missed something about that era.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Cosmium »

DouglasReynholm wrote: Sat Sep 21, 2019 12:26 am Like R-Tape I also abandoned the Speccy around '88 for the consoles and an Amiga (later PC) - but - curiously one of the first things I did when I got my first personal access (not through uni or work) to the internet, was search for Spectrum stuff. I'm sure WOS was one of the first things I came across maybe 98/99? I just missed something about that era.
Exactly the same thing for me. It was around 95/96 when the world of internet searches first became available to me, and the Spectrum was one of the first things I looked up (probably with Yahoo or Alta Vista) :)
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by toot_toot »

I had bought my Amiga by Christmas 1990, but I still kept my Spectrum and still played the oldies (but goldies!)

I do remember starting University in Autumn 1993 and being shocked to see a copy of Your Sinclair on sale with "The Final Issue" on it. Shocked that it was still going when by that point it felt like the Amiga was beginning it's decline! I had to pick up a copy as I remember getting the very fist issue of Your Sinclair back in 1986 when it had the Rasputin demo cover tape (maybe even one of the first covertapes in the UK?). It was mixed feelings reading it, while the magazine was full of joy at sending Your Sinclair off, which was a nice way to finish it instead of the usual "disappearing off the shelves without any notice", and it was great to see it still have a thriving, albeit niche, community, it was a bit sad to see how the Sinclair brand had faded out and was now irrelevant as a computer brand in the 1990s. All those lost opportunities and all those arguments in the playground about the Commie versus the Speccy - all a waste of time!

Even when I had moved on to my Amiga, I still played the Spectrum and I think it was then that I realised the real strengths of the Spectrum. Games from 1984-1987 were probably the best era when programmers could really get the most out of the computer and a lot of the games weren't trying to be arcade games, console games, 16-bit computer games. They were Spectrum games and they were brilliant for it. You couldn't experience them on a 16-bit computer or console. But unfortunately by 1990 onwards, too many games were trying to be like 16-bit console or computer games and the Spectrum just couldn't come close. That's probably why I didn't buy many new games from 1990 onwards, except for the odd compilation (especially Codemaster's Quattro and Alternative's 4 Most compilations). I did buy a few magazines due to the cover tapes having some amazing games on them, but I do remember thinking that some of the full price games looked pretty bad in comparison to the Amiga versions.

I also remember my local John Menzies gradually reducing the amount of Spectrum games they sold, as well as the games being "electronically distributed" meaning they didn't actually give you the original tape, but had a tape duplicator in the back. But the other problem was by this point most of the games were budget re-releases and even then they were of games that you could get a better version on the Amiga for just a few pounds more (Kixx and Hit Squad's games were £3.99 for the Spectrum and £7.99 for the Amiga).

There was a big resurgence in the Spectrum with the Internet but especially with CD-ROMs becoming cheaper. I remember picking up "Speccy Sensations 2" in around 1995 and it had thousands of Spectrum games on it, it was amazing going back to the games that I never had but desperately wanted to play, like Underwurlde.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Ralf »

I'm one of the guys who abandoned Speccy completely at some moment :oops:

In my case there was no Amiga or Atari ST period. I switched from Zx Spectrum directly to PC. It was around 1991/1992 and it was PC AT which enabled me to play all the newest cool games - Civilisation, Dune 2, Centurion, Wolfenstein, Prince of Persia, Pirates, Ishar, Monkey Island and so on. I wasn't very sentimental at that time, just hungry for the newest, shiny new games.

It was a time when there was incredible progress in games and each month appeared games which offered features and playability not seen before. We were pioneers of gaming. Today, we have great technology but I guess we reached some plateau. New games are just like games made 10 years ago, they may have more polygons in 3D graphics but essentially play and look the same.

Going back to Spectrum,at some moment, maybe around 1996/1997 I started getting some nostalgia for Spectrum games. I learnt about emulators and got the emulator by Pedro Gimeno. Funny thing, now when I'm writing I don't remember emulator's name but I remember the author.

At the university there was this new thing called Internet and I downloaded a few Spectrum games from it. But the connections were slow and you had to fight for computer access with girls who found very fancy to write emails even if they could just tell everything personally. You know it was "I wrote you an email", "Okay, I'm going to computer room to check it" ;)

I also got some CD with 3000 of Spectrum games or so. 100% "legal" of course, sold in biggest bookstores ;)

Later, around maybe 2002 I somehow learnt about WOS. There was some time when I was browsing WOS in internet cafes ;)

And then I got internet access at home and the rest you know.

And here I am now, getting my first grey hairs. Maybe less passionate about Speccy, maybe a bit more bitter about the people but still caring about our old machine :)
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Alessandro »

My 48K, which my Dad bought me in June 1984, sadly was half-fried around 1993. I knew of no other who was using real hardware Spectrums around then, which was not surprising since from 1985 on Italy had become a Commodore colony, and everybody else had C64s, or had ditched the C64 in favour of the Amiga.

In 1995, I purchased my first PC, the only one I got assembled (later were assembled by myself from single components). I used it to compose and print my master degrees's thesis, which I discussed the following year. So I went straight from the Spectrum to MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 - Windows 95 was released just a couple of months later, but judging from the troubles it caused at the time, I think the old 3.11/DOS combination was better than that, at least for some time more...

Many years later, I began purchasing Spectrums of different generations in working order from the ebay. I now have 10 of them.

The old 48K was lost amidst lots of boxes in the garage. From what I have seen in later years, maybe by substituting the RAM chips and the voltage regulator, it could have been cured. But that's just my guess.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Vampyre »

I drifted away from the Speccy in November 1988 when I got an Atari ST - but was still actively using it up until late 1992. Wasn't buying any games for it but was programming my own in Basic whilst I was on the dole that year. Sold it to my 14 year old neighbour in early 1993 and I know it was still going strong in 2016 when the neighbours dad gave it to a charity shop (really wish I'd known - I would have happily given them some cash for it).

When I got my first PC in 1994 the first thing I ever loaded was a Speccy emulator :-). That was Gerton Lunter's magnificent Z80 that I used for years until the Windows-based emulators finally took over.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by ZxSpence »

I liked the function keys of the ST.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by 1024MAK »

My story is over here. I never ever got rid of the first ZX Spectrum. But, it’s been in storage for a long time now. As the replacement PSU that I build got refused to run another item. As it was in two bits, I’ve lost track of where the regulator board has been stored. Hence this ZX Spectrum sits awaiting its turn to be powered up again.

But I do have multiple other Speccy machines now. Including rubber key, plus models, +2 (grey), +2B, +3, +3B.

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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Ast A. Moore »

1024MAK wrote: Sat Sep 21, 2019 10:12 pm I do have multiple other Speccy machines now. Including rubber key, plus models, +2 (grey), +2B, +3, +3B.
I didn’t know you had a +3B. It’s a Spanish model, right? (Were there any UK +3Bs produced, anyway?)
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by 1024MAK »

1024MAK wrote: Sat Sep 21, 2019 10:12 pm refused to run another item
That should of course said “reused”. Blooming auto suggest/ auto correct... :roll:

About the +3B. I’m about 200 miles away from it at the moment. I’ll post some photos of it next week...

Oh, I also forgot the 128K toast rack in my list. Although I have not yet got around to fixing it (looks like a DRAM chip fault, plus the usual degraded membrane). I also forgot to say, I have +2 grey machines with two different PCB revisions.

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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by PeteProdge »

By 1993, I could see 'the end is nigh' for my Spectrum +2. It's funny how these things work, because back in the mid 80s, I and many others just assumed Spectrums, Commodores and Amstrads would just be around forever. What with Bill Gates's famous (mis)quote "640K [RAM] ought to be enough for anybody", we felt home computing could sit as it was, for many decades to come.

But yeah, in the late 80s, the posh kids loved to show off their Atari STs. That really became the flavour of the month but it wasn't too long before the Amiga rose in popularity and then the Amiga and ST kids did a reprise of the C64 vs Speccy war. Didn't last too long as the Amiga eventually won out. If you didn't own an Amiga, you'd at least make mention that you played on one once, in a shop and it was the best thing ever.

Nobody at that time cared about PCs, we were all gamers, PCs were for boring word processing, spreadsheets and business propositions. They were just for dads and businessmen. What little games came out would be in retina-scarring colour schemes of magenta and cyan, ugh, even the Acorn Electron and Dragon 32 were more visually enticing. WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT A PC?

Oh and the consoles of the day (NES and Sega Master System) barely registered a blip in my hometown. Come to think of it, Nintendo's disastrous handling of the NES in Europe (the price points for hardware and cartridges were way way too high) was a marked contrast to their undeniable success in the USA where it was massively prolific.

Around 1991 I noticed the dwindling of Speccy software. (Obviously the dip occurred long before that, but you don't notice these things at the time.) I'd been some games shows at Earls Court and Birmingham's NEC, and the software companies were pretty much all targeting the Amiga and ST. Even the Commodore 64 and 'IBM PC & Compatibles' got more attention than the Speccy. The Speccy magazines were, shall we say, on a 'diet', with Crash turning into a pamphlet.

Now I've read from books on Ocean and US Gold that the Spectrum platforms still shifted software in highly respectable quantities at that time, but with the stunning colour palettes and sound abilities from the two major 16-bit computers, that's what you want as your 'shop window' at trade shows.

I loved Your Sinclair magazine. That kept me going as Spectrum user. When that shut up shop in the late summer of 1993, that's when I felt it was time to move on. The penultimate issue of Your Sinclair had a huge feature on Spectrum emulators. Learning that the Amiga could do a pretty good 'impersonation' of a Speccy made it highly desirable.

I was rather fed up with one guy at college always bragging about his new Amiga 600, looking down on everyone who had a Speccy, Amstrad, Sega Master System, Atari ST... To be fair to him, he was a former Spectrum user who had moved to the Sam Coupe, but as we know, that tanked, so maybe the Amiga, with its credible software library, was a good bet. I was rather miffed with his constant bragging, so I intentionally went to one up him by getting the Amiga 1200 - with a far better colour palette.

(As Amiga users can tell you, the 600 was merely a 500 in a redesigned body with not much hardware improvement. You actually had more compatibility by owning a 500 plus. I guess it's like the Spectrum +2 vs +2A in a way.)

Mind you, one guy at college - the guy who had a pretty damned good perception of computing - warned that both the ST and Amiga would soon be wiped out by the rise of the PC. "Pah, no way", I scoffed. Well, yeah, there's a reason why I'm typing all this on a PC and not an Amiga.

Returning to the subject, I did know others stuck to the Speccy post-1993. Even the Amiga 600 owner would get out his Sam Coupe for a quick bash on Chaos, which we both knew was a fantastic game. There was a young kid along the road from me who had been given his older brother's Speccy as a hand-me-down, and we spent a long time doing tape-to-tape 'back-ups' of our games library around 1993 and 1994.

My Speccy +2 blew up one day in late 1993. I remember the tiny wisp of black smoke that emanated from the power socket. (With hindsight, I assume this was a power surge.) I wasn't tearful about it, I just shrugged my shoulders and muttered that this day was eventually going to come. My friend showed me a second-hand toy shop which sold old computers, and I was amazed that I could pick up a near-mint condition +2A for just £40! That kept me going before I got the Amiga 1200.

Before the internet came along, I'd bought a sound sampler for my Amiga 1200 - the only way to load in real cassettes into 'Spectrum Emulator v2.0'. I also made several train trips up to Leicester, where a unit in the market sold cheap 'public domain' disks for the Amiga and PC. Thanks to SoftSpot, I had around 10 floppy disks containing .z80 snapshots of early Speccy hits (mainly Ultimate and US Gold stuff) that I'd never played before. (Yeah, marked as 'PD' in those days where we naively assumed abandoned titles just fell into public domain on a whim.)

Incidentally, I gave away my +2 to a college friend, a great guy who was from a rather skint background. I got on very well with his family and they were really appreciative of the Speccy. I ensured they got Chaos, which I knew they were huge fans of.

My Amiga 1200 lasted for about four years (yeah, this was hit by ANOTHER POWER SURGE, I really don't learn do I?), so, not as long as my Speccy. I had bought all kinds of add-ons for it, shoved a 1.5GB hard drive inside it, had a second floppy drive purely to watch Jesus On Es, had a 28.8K modem for the internet (and what I got was primitive even for the time). Saved up a grand over a few months (in which I used my brother's Windows 95 PC) and got my own PC, with a staggering 233MHz Pentium processor.

Oh and one time, I lost everything on the hard drive and the PC was literally unusable. You see, it had been hit by, er, a power surge. Thankfully a repair service was able to replace the motherboard and the hard drive had to be wiped, but I could still use that PC. Oh and I now have power surge protection on almost everything. Phew.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by ZxSpence »

What I wanted in a computer was the +3 form factor with Sam coupe graphics and Amiga quality sound. Shame the Sam looked like such a kids toy (that faux professional look of spectrums...). That's why I now have a QL. Sound is terrible though and graphics are "meh" but you get a glimpse of where Sinclair could have gone by 85/6.

Being young I thought "they'll bring out a peripheral for the +3 that gives it super graphics if I hang on long enough". Muppet.

The Speccy emulator on my QL is great though. ;)
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

Ralf wrote: Sat Sep 21, 2019 9:43 am I learnt about emulators and got the emulator by Pedro Gimeno. Funny thing, now when I'm writing I don't remember emulator's name but I remember the author.
That's the same first emulator I used, its name was 'Spectrum', not a very original name! :mrgreen:

It worked with snapshots (*.sp files), all of them with the same size (49.152 bytes) no matter the size of the game. I think it also worked with TAP files, not sure. It ran at a slower speed than the real Spectrum and crashed too often, but the possibility of playing Spectrum games on a PC was marvellous!

One year later (1994) I got the shareware version of Z80, the emulator by Gerton Lunter, much better and worked at a real speed. When I met Internet I also discovered the great X128 emulator for DOS and Warajevo, the mytical emulator coded under terrible conditions during the civil war in Yugoslavia.

And when I got ZX32 by V. Kapartzianis (I think it was his name), an emulator for windows 95, it was amazing to play a Spectrum game in a small window!
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by Fahnn »

Excellent topic.

In my last year at university in Dundee (1992-93) I took my Spectrum with me and it was permanently connected to the massive CRT TV (which weighed roughly one metric tonne) that I'd bought for £40 from a dodgy second-hand shop. This was purely so that I could run my revolutionary football predictor program. Based on its predictions, I won about £35 two weeks running (from a £1 stake) and was convinced that I'd got a "system". Unfortunately I didn't win anything in the subsequent weeks and gave up on it. But technically I think I'm still in profit on that.

I had the Spectrum set up when I moved back home too, even though I also had an Amiga 500 from 1989 onwards and would more often use that (I was doing a lot of music on the Amiga at the time and the games were good too, of course). But the Spectrum was also there, right up until 1998, when I moved into my own place. It was mainly just for playing games that I'd written myself, though. I don't think I bought any commercially-released Spectrum games after about 1988.

By the time I was in my own house, I got a PC pretty quickly and both the Spectrum and Amiga were consigned to storage. I do still have them, though, and have had them both out since then and know they work. But emulators are just so more convenient.

When I win the lottery (which will almost certainly be tonight) and buy a massive house, I'll have everything set up in my computer museum. That'll be cool, I think we can all agree.
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Re: Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

Post by RWAC »

Ooh, have you written a lottery predictor too?
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