Did you have your own TV/monitor when you got your Speccy?

[1024MAK]

My brother's Chinese portable TV was the first time I'd seen VHF controls, and I was wondering at the time why it had been built to pick up radio.

Keep in mind that other parts of the world continued to use part of the VHF band for TV long after the 1980s.

Mark

[MatGubbins]

My Spectrum arrived in April 1984, I had access to the small portable 12" b/w tv in the spare room. Great for games and programming. I only saw games in colour when I went to a friends house or when I could get the big colout TV to myself. The portable TV grew legs and moved into my room. It lasted until a 14" colour TV arrived christmas 87/88, it was the best TV ever!

[XTM]

Tons of replies, this thread was a sucsess, congraturation!

By the way, I just remembered an annoying "feature" of my old b/w TV. It would often do a high-pitched whining sound and occasionally this became very loud, maybe after it had been turned on for too long, I'm not sure. I was able to temporarily "fix" it by striking the plasic case on the top/side, sometimes I had to do multiple strikes. Unfortunately I must have slapped it a few times too often on its side, as one day the grille of the loudspeaker on the right side broke and fell inside

Anyone else experienced the above (speaker bit at the end optional )?

[1024MAK]

The Ferguson TX colour TV that I had, was used long after I finished with my Speccy. It was used with a Sky Satellite Receiver and a VCR. But it developed a fault. I can’t remember what the symptoms were, but a tap on it got it working again.

Sometime later, it got a bit annoying as it was happening more often, hence I took it to pieces. The problem was found to be a couple of dry solder joints on the PCB for the pins of the line output transformer. After resoldering, it continued working for a few more years until I bought a new Panasonic wide screen CRT TV. But by then the channel/tuner buttons were extremely dodgy.

Mark

[flatduckrecords]

[TMD2003]

Keep in mind that other parts of the world continued to use part of the VHF band for TV long after the 1980s.

Hence my previous speculation...

.. a very, very cheap and nasty Chinese TV, priced at only two digits and presumably designed for the east-Asian and Pacific Rim market (maybe even Australia and New Zealand) - it had switchable UHF/VHFhi/VHFlo on each of its channel buttons...

The All-Knowing Oracle says New Zealand used VHF bands I and III until 2013. @jpnz - is this right?

[uglifruit]

My b/w portable had a contrast and brightness slider on the front. And the only way to make it work was to wedge something under one of the sliders (presumably making potentiometer touch internally). I always had a matchstick wedged beneath, it was effectively part of the telly.

[MatGubbins]

Photo taken around March-May 1990
The great Alba TV with my Amiga 500.
Surrounding posters and artwork are:
Climie Fisher - Everything (above the TV)
Climie Fisher - Coming In for the Kill (behind the TV)
R-Type promo poster from Crash magazine.
Tracings of Kamakaze Bear from an issue of Sinclair User (I know, I'm sorry...), a hoodlum/private eye sketch from Crash magazine (The Big Sleeze) https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/page.ph ... 10&page=72 , the Bubble Bobble advert, Thing On A Spring from the cover of YS.
Picture of Debbie Gibson, promo posters (from PC shows) of Thanatos and Head over Heels.
Crash calendar poster.
Papers on wall contain information regarding the AY sound chip register and note settings.
Behind the glass tumbler (below the Head over Heels poster) there is a 48k rubber spectrum it's covered with an unknown book, in front there are 3 brown postage stamps and 3 cassette tapes.
Oh, and that's my foot.
---------------------------------------------------



Photo taken around July-Sept 1991
Again, the Alba TV surrounded by:
Fleetwood Mac Tango In The Night 1988 tour poster.
Various issues of Amiga Computing (Count Duckula issue), Amiga Format and a French/English dictionary (red/blue book).
On top of the TV is the Shamen Move Any Mountain CD single, the Amiga Dos book and other bits.
Amiga 500 with Futuresound sound sampler and a stack of floppy disks.
Tracing of the Pop Will Eat Itself 92degrees 12" cover, Furry Freak Brothers comic cover, the Thanatos and Head over Heels posters as before.
In the drawer is my grey+2 with the keyboard removed and connected to some ribbon cable. This allowed me to have the keyboard on my lap and play games.
The keyboard was housed in the lower half of a Spectrum+ case with a cardboard top part. Inside were the connectors unsoldered from the mainboard and held in with blu tac and sticky tape. The cable was soldered directly to the motherboard with a sheet of clear plastic to cover the large hole.
We also see a Multiface 128 and a microdrive on a very long cable.
Under the desk there is the box to the crappy +2 joystick - yes it survived that long.
Coke cans, sellotape, scissors, loo roll inserts, pens, Smurf ruler, tourch, calculator (in black wallet) and other random crap.

[HEXdidnt]

When we first got our Spectrum, we had a couple of TVs in the house - one in the lounge, one in the dining room. Even so, initially, we had to negotiate screen time for the computer. Later on, we got a small B/W portable that, for a while, became my Spectrum's monitor. This was eventually replaced by a 'proper' green-screen monitor, for which my dad had to build a cable to bring the video signal off the edge connector to whatever wacky kind of input it had (larger than a Phono socket, and it had a twist-lock thing on the plug).

To this day, my dad is convinced that he put together a SCART cable to attach the 48K machines to a colour monitor we later acquired. No matter how many times I tell him the colour monitor was only ever used for our Amigas and my SAM Coupé, he refuses to believe me.

[1024MAK]

to whatever wacky kind of input it had (larger than a Phono socket, and it had a twist-lock thing on the plug).

BNC type maybe?

Mark

[Journeyman]

Just before I got my Spectrum +2 in 1987, my parents had replaced the family telly because all of a sudden the picture had gone from pin sharp to fuzzy and snowy, and they were reliably informed by a repairman that the tube was faulty. When the new telly arrived it had exactly the same problem, which caused some head-scratching until we noticed the aerial on the roof was pointing the wrong way - it seems to have been blown around by a storm. When it was fixed, it turned out we had a surplus but perfectly good telly, so I was lucky enough to inherit it for my Speccy.

It was a Philips of about 22", I think. It rather dominated the limited space in my room, but it worked a treat.

[zx64]

Two TV? You must be rich

[worcestersource]

Being very early 80s, we could only use the main family tv and thus we had a choice of watching kids shows or Speccy. Hmmm: Ulysses 31 or Project Future? Saturdays were pretty cool as dad went off playing football and mum enjoyed the radio in the kitchen.

So here’s a good question. Did anyone’s family tv live in a cabinet?

On occasion, my dad landed a typically ancient tv that ended up in the bedroom I shared with my youngest brother. They never lasted long before going pop but I remember playing JSW and Moon Cresta on it.

A few years later, the entrepreneur that lived two doors down started selling cheap 12” portables into hotels. Every now and then, dad would buy one for us boys for our various computers and eventually one for the lounge to replace the big tv when it conked out. That was hilarious: a massive cabinet and a tiny tv in it. Still, all five of us used to crowd round it to watch Blackadder and Red Dwarf on it.

I kinda miss those days. When I was a teenager, I bought myself an aerial so I could watch tv shows. That was great, catching Whose Line Is It Anyway and The Word when I should have been asleep! The trouble is each station needed the aerial precariously positioned elsewhere to pick up a signal.

[HEXdidnt]

BNC type maybe?

Yes, that's the one, thank you! Quite a wide-diameter, I believe.

Weirdly, I remembered it being somewhat similar to bayonet-fitting lightbulbs (that being the 'B' in BNC), and was sure it had a three-character name of some kind, but could only remember DBx-type.

[PeteProdge]

I just remembered an annoying "feature" of my old b/w TV. It would often do a high-pitched whining sound and occasionally this became very loud, maybe after it had been turned on for too long, I'm not sure. I was able to temporarily "fix" it by striking the plasic case on the top/side, sometimes I had to do multiple strikes. Unfortunately I must have slapped it a few times too often on its side, as one day the grille of the loudspeaker on the right side broke and fell inside

Anyone else experienced the above (speaker bit at the end optional )?

Not only did I experience that on a regular basis with the Philips portable I had, and the speaker falling down after my 'percussive maintenance' was rather too hard, I actually opened up the television to fish the speaker out with my bare hands and placed it back into position. A successful repair! Yes, I had turned the television off, but years later, in an electronics lesson at college I learnt that I could have been fatally electrocuted if my hand touched certain parts of the inside. A friend of mine, who knows a lot about electrical dangers, says that you'd have to have had the telly powered off for at least THREE MONTHS for it to be safe for a 'civilian' like me to tinker with.

[XTM]

Oh, and that's my foot.

And there I thought it was footage from Daniel Day-Lewis' oscar-winning performance that didn't make it into the film ...

... the speaker falling down after my 'percussive maintenance' was rather too hard

Splendid! I never imagined someone else would have experienced the same!
We shall henceforth be part of the illustrous secret society of Speccy Gaming Loudspeaker Busters (unless you as a native speaker can come up with a better name, which I'm sure you will). Not many get the honours!

[Vampyre]

Not only did I experience that on a regular basis with the Philips portable I had, and the speaker falling down after my 'percussive maintenance' was rather too hard, I actually opened up the television to fish the speaker out with my bare hands and placed it back into position. A successful repair! Yes, I had turned the television off, but years later, in an electronics lesson at college I learnt that I could have been fatally electrocuted if my hand touched certain parts of the inside. A friend of mine, who knows a lot about electrical dangers, says that you'd have to have had the telly powered off for at least THREE MONTHS for it to be safe for a 'civilian' like me to tinker with.

My daft maintenance job involved the Speccy power supply.

I can't remember how it happened but something happened to the plug and it was effectively falling apart. Me, being the "intelligent" teenager that I was, decided that the best repair was to tape it together. I couldn't find any kind of tape apart from some metallic tape in my dad's toolbox. So I bound the plug back together, plugged it in and started a gaming session.

About five minutes later there was a BANG! that scared the bejesus out of me and smoke started filling the room. Obviously I quickly turned the socket off and pulled it out to be granted with a blackened plug. Amazingly it didn't fry a single thing, the Speccy was still fine and nothing had tripped either. I was also able to resurrect the power supply too.

Big lesson learnt that day.

[1024MAK]

So here’s a good question. Did anyone’s family tv live in a cabinet?

No, all the TVs of all the family (my own mum and dad, my nan and granddad, my other nan, my uncles etc) were either on their own stands, or on top of another item of furniture. I don’t think I ever saw a TV in a cabinet apart from in shops.

Mark

[1024MAK]

Not only did I experience that on a regular basis with the Philips portable I had, and the speaker falling down after my 'percussive maintenance' was rather too hard, I actually opened up the television to fish the speaker out with my bare hands and placed it back into position. A successful repair! Yes, I had turned the television off, but years later, in an electronics lesson at college I learnt that I could have been fatally electrocuted if my hand touched certain parts of the inside. A friend of mine, who knows a lot about electrical dangers, says that you'd have to have had the telly powered off for at least THREE MONTHS for it to be safe for a 'civilian' like me to tinker with.

Err, unlikely it would hold a dangerous voltage for three months. And the bigger risk is not the 15 to 25kV EHT (which is actually hard to get accidentally zapped by, as the cable HAS to be well insulated), but rather either the live metalwork (yes, that may include items inside other than the circuitry) which may be referenced to the mains line (live) or neutral (via a bridge rectifier), or the charge on the electrolytic capacitors (340V DC for the rectified mains side) or the HT supply (typically 90V to 150V).These two having lots of exposed electrical connections…

Mark

[1024MAK]

About five minutes later there was a BANG! that scared the bejesus out of me and smoke started filling the room.

Thanks, that’s made my day

Mark

[TMD2003]

About five minutes later there was a BANG! that scared the bejesus out of me and smoke started filling the room. Obviously I quickly turned the socket off and pulled it out to be granted with a blackened plug. Amazingly it didn't fry a single thing, the Speccy was still fine and nothing had tripped either. I was also able to resurrect the power supply too.

Big Clive meets Vampyre mashup in three, two, one moment please...

[Matt_B]

I did a bit of research on my old TV and it was a Murphy V1400 from 1975, so not actually that much older than the Spectrum. I guess 7 years was like an eternity in the life of electronics back then though.

What with Murphy Radio being a bit of a cult brand these days, I was wondering whether it might have been worth something. Alas, the company had already been bought out in the 1960s and was used as a badge for no-name electronics from Asia. I could have sworn that was a far newer practice than that.

[Joefish]

I remember my Nan's old B&W telly was one that was still in the Argos catalogue for quite some time, but I can't find any good scans at the moment to look it up. I took it with me to use with my ST for my first year at Uni, until my first summer off when I got a job and bought a Sony colour telly with an RGB-Scart socket.

[Journeyman]

Has anyone had to re-acquire an analogue TV for their vintage computing kit? I have 2 modern flat screens in the house, both work fine for my Spectrum +2 with RGB-to-SCART cable, but my ZX81 absolutely refuses to play ball with them. They both have analogue inputs but the ZX81's UHF output seems to be too dirty for either of them to pick it up and lock onto it. I don't fancy trying to do any mods on it.

I scoured eBay and got one of those dinky black and white portables with built-in radio that used to be common in caravans. It works pretty well.

[1024MAK]

Nah, (1), I have a Sharp LCD TV that works okay with a ZX81 (and most other 1980s computers, and (2) I have a colour CRT TV still. Not that it gets used much.

Not normally used with Sinclair machines, but I also have some CRT monitors. One is hooked up to a BBC Master Compact at the moment (5V TTL RGB inputs). Some are VGA, one is connected to a old Compaq IBM compatible running Windows 3.1.

Mark