Did you ever think you were the last Spectrum user?

[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.

[Cosmium]

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)

[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.

[Ralf]

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

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

[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.

[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.

[ZxSpence]

I liked the function keys of the ST.

[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.

Mark

[Ast A. Moore]

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?)

[1024MAK]

refused to run another item

That should of course said “reused”. Blooming auto suggest/ auto correct...

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.

Mark

[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.

[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.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

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!

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!

[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.

[RWAC]

Ooh, have you written a lottery predictor too?

[R-Tape]

Ooh, have you written a lottery predictor too?

(I might actually try this sometime!)

[Morkin]

Heh. Nice thread. I'm another one of the 'early deserters' I'm afraid, I think I'd pretty much ditched my Speccy by the end of the 80s

In the early 90s I was drawn to the cool-looking graphics of the Amiga. Never kept my Speccy, mainly due to a number of flat moves and the need to keep possessions at a minimum.

Fairly swiftly moved from Amiga, to PS1, then to PS2. Was quite late to getting myself a PC, was probably past 2000 before I had one of my own.

Got interested in the Speccy scene again around 2007 I think. After all, everyone comes back - eventually..

[R-Tape]

I missed a few replies here. This is a great thread. The reason may be obvious, but not to me: our 8 & 16bit stuff has a personality we want to preserve, but - and I may be proved wrong - we'll never care about our old nokia or sun microsystem in the same way. Why?!

In my case there was no Amiga or Atari ST period. I switched from Zx Spectrum directly to PC.

Why did it happen that way? Interesting, and pretty rare in the UK - is yours a representative example of the "Slavic" experience?

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

Amen brother (though I'm balding more than greying )

Nobody at that time cared about PCs, we were all gamers, PCs were for boring word processing, spreadsheets and business propositions.

Aye - looking back now, I got a PC around 2000 specifically for word and spreadsheets. I'd forgotten about gaming and did actually want it for my "homework". The trouble is - I didn't actually have much "homework" to do!

(and prodge - how many power surges?!!! did you live via a wonky wire in a forest?!!)

And when I got ZX32 by V. Kapartzianis

Gerton Lunter

These names are new to me. Are they still active in the scene?

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.

Yes it would! Make it speccy biased pleez!

[R-Tape]

Got interested in the Speccy scene again around 2007 I think. After all, everyone comes back - eventually..

I was about 2011, after Micromen was on the telly. Some years before that I remember a mate playing Ghosts and Goblins on his phone (or a handheld/something, can't remember) - he kept yelping that "his clothes had fallen off" and it was "ridiculously hard!". I also remember wondering why on earth he was still interested in that old guff...

[Morkin]

"his clothes had fallen off" and it was "ridiculously hard!"

Fnar indeed...

[R-Tape]

"his clothes had fallen off" and it was "ridiculously hard!"

Fnar indeed...

Actually thinking again - I'm not sure if it was a mate or a random vagrant on the canal towpath...

[Juan F. Ramirez]

[mention]R-Tape[/mention] :

As to the two emulator authors, I have no idea, their emus were not been updated for a long time, maybe someone has more info about them.

[stupidget]

I think I was still using my +2 until late 1990 when I got a MegaDrive. As much as I wanted to keep using my beloved speccy I was drawn to the idea of essentially having an arcade machine in my house. What I failed to realise was that the games cost nearly as much as I was making a week on my YTS scheme!!! As this was the case I had Streets of Rage, Toki, Gynoug (easily one of the best Shmups ever) and some crappy side scroler about magic rings. I've still got my MegaDrive and had a go on Streets of Rage the other week and it really is great fun.

I gave my Speccy collection (+2, Genius Mouse, loads of games, GAC and crash magazines) to my cousins. When I got into the Speccy Emulator scene and joined WoS back in 2003(!!!!!) I asked my cousins if they still had my speccy and they very calmly said 'Oh we dumped that years ago. We think it broke'!!!!! Ungrateful b*st*rds.

[cha05e90]

Ok, regarding the thread title: Yeah, I had similar thoughts as well. I started my computing career with a ZX81 (1K) in 1982 - followed by a ZX Spectrum (16K) in 1983. Me and my working class family did not have the money to invest in the "German standard 8-bit home computer": the Commodore 64 - far to expensive. Germany was definitely Commodore land. Nevertheless I wasn't alone, the ZX Spectrum was more or less at the 2nd place - only overtaken by the "Schneider CPC" (re-branded Amstrad CPC) some time later.

I invested my pocket money and money I earned during my holiday jobs into that system, going 48K, going to the ZX Spectrum+ "upgrade", investing in a Timex/Sinclair 2040 printer, ZX Interface 1 and ZX Microdrive etc.

In the meantime my friends made the next step to the so-called 16-bit machines, most of them to the Amiga, some to the Atari ST (and some still holding their C64s ). Around that time (1987) I (a littlebit) lost my interest in computers (I was more passionate about my motorbike back then) - nevertheless my "Sinclair workstation" was still with me. I even started to program a Mahjong clone (that I saw on my friend's Amiga) on my ZX Spectrum.

After leaving school and my military service afterwards I started my univerity studies - and used my Speccy until around 1993, i.e. doing some math stuff with it. Especially in these years from 1986 to 1993 I had the feeling, I'm the last "ZX Spectrum user" in Germany...

In 1993 I had the oppurtunity to buy a used Amiga 2000 - so I came rather late to the 16-/32-bit era (more 32-bit - it had the A2630 accelerator card installed!).

2017 was the year of the "ZX Spectrum Next" kickstarter campaign. So I fetched that ZX Spectrum (and all it's peripherals) from my attic in 2017 and I found some Masterfile database files on my Microdrive cartridges from 1992. Maybe these files are the last data I generated until 2017!

(By the way: my Amiga 2000 is still here and is used with pleasure every week - just like my Speccies...)

[PeteProdge]

Nobody at that time cared about PCs, we were all gamers, PCs were for boring word processing, spreadsheets and business propositions.

Aye - looking back now, I got a PC around 2000 specifically for word and spreadsheets. I'd forgotten about gaming and did actually want it for my "homework". The trouble is - I didn't actually have much "homework" to do!

(and prodge - how many power surges?!!! did you live via a wonky wire in a forest?!!)

To be fair, it was just three computer-zapping surges across a 12-year period. One house was particularly badly wired, and there's a side story where I could have been electrocuted just by touching a pipe near my bed.

Nowadays, all my serious electronics go into power-surge-protected sockets.