Tall tales about the spectrum

[Wall_Axe]

Once,at school, a fellow pupil told me he altered the code in double dragon so that the heroes had spikes on their knees and the game was hacked so that their knee was a fatal move and blood(!) Came out of the injured enemies.

I borrowed the tape which this game was on....it was blank. He just refused to acknowledge the tape was blank. It didn't seem like a prank, he just seemed to enjoy saying he had done things he hadn't done.

He offered to give me a lesson in machine code at break time, we asked a teacher to use a room. He gave a nonsensical lecture for half an hour:D

Anyone else hear some tall tales?

[Evil Genius]

Once,at school, a fellow pupil told me he altered the code in double dragon so that the heroes had spikes on their knees and the game was hacked so that their knee was a fatal move and blood(!) Came out of the injured enemies.

I borrowed the tape which this game was on....it was blank. He just refused to acknowledge the tape was blank. It didn't seem like a prank, he just seemed to enjoy saying he had done things he hadn't done.

Yeah, I went to school with kids like that.

we asked a teacher to use a room. He gave a nonsensical lecture for half an hour:D

Yeah, I had teachers like that too

[PeteProdge]

First off, this one iss not about the Speccy but a similar fantasist at school insisted he once changed teletext output at school through his BBC micro.

Apparently he was using it one day when it 'kind of crashed' and a Ceefax page came up and he found he could go through the entirety of the pages in real time. He went to the BBC One listings where Neighbours was, and changed "Mrs Mangel" to "Mrs Dangle" for a laugh... but... as every fantasist loves to throw in a little flaw (like "but my dad's Ferrari wasn't good enough so we got rid of it"), he finished his tale of chinny reckon, by noting that his mum watch reading Ceefax downstairs and happened to be on that very same page and yelled "Alan, stop it!" at him so he had to change it back.

Very impressive for a BBC micro with no modem or anything like that connected to it.

But back to the Speccy, and a mate insisted that he got a lot of Ocean games because his dad worked at the place where they printed the inlays. Even that remark made me think "oh how VERY convenient, yeah riiight". And the games he got were on blank cassettes with none of Ocean's custom loading, but a message saying "M1 LOADING" and screen corruption at the end - yeah years later when I got a Multiface I then realised those were Multifaced snapshots.

However, in his defence, the dad-working-at-the-printers thing could well be true because I realised, decades later, there were a cluster of specialist colour printing plants, and various companies, over in Corby, about 17 miles away.

[Wall_Axe]

That's weird cos it could be true. Maybe he heard word of mouth about the printers,then made up the rest.

[PeteProdge]

That's weird cos it could be true. Maybe he heard word of mouth about the printers,then made up the rest.

Yeah, that's roughly my conclusion.

Although I don't know what, if any, process there is for a printing plant to come into contact with the actual cassette/disk media. I suppose it's not out of the ordinary for them to be somewhat involved a bit further in the fulfilment part of this supply chain? 'Twas late 80s.

The family were upper working class and earning quite nicely judging by the semi-detached dwelling, two cars on the drive, that kinda thing, although we were both at state schools. Oh and they kept moving about, we only knew each other for about four years at junior/secondary as they'd move to other towns. Last I heard of him his was running a cafe down in Hampshire and was in a metal badn. Erm... right, this is TMI now, isn't it? I'll stop rambling.

[Lethargeek]

Not sure if it belongs here as it is a true story (but you're free to not believe me)

Some day over 30 years ago i sit at home playing R-Type demo with a friend. Then a power surge occured (quite frequent thing back then in the 90s). Normally it would be fatal for the gameplay, but not this time. Somehow the game survived with just small amount of gfx garbage, but the sound effects became much longer (some even over several seconds), complex, juicy and very funny

I did even record these on a cassette, but alas it didn't survive to this day

[hitm4n]

I installed Quake 3 on my Speccy back in 1958. Tru story.

[flange]

I installed Quake 3 on my Speccy back in 1958. Tru story.

Considering I wrote Quake 3 in 1965 I very much doubt it!

[PeteProdge]

I installed Quake 3 on my Speccy back in 1958. Tru story.

Yeah, I accept that, but seeing as Quake 4 was out in 1956, you should have gone with that, far better. I suppose you're into 'retro', right?

[TMD2003]

Pah! I've got Minecraft running on a 1K ZX80. Beat that.

[Mad Fritz]

Vision Pro @MK14?

[bluespikey]

I managed to borrow a pristine new copy of Knightlore from my sister's new boyfriend in early 85. This was a big thing for me, I might normally get a new game for £5.95 at Christmas or my Birthday. But he wanted to impress my sister, so he grudgingly let me borrow it over a weekend.

The Stamper's decision to sell games for £10 as an anti-piracy move certainly worked. He clearly didn't want to lend to me me, and told me not to copy it, "Cos its got a poke on it that will tell me if it was copied, and it will tell the police".

I was so awed by the technology on display that I readily believed him, and happily handed the piece of magic back with some relief the following Monday.

[blucey]

There was a kid in my school who was absolutely full of s***. His weird tall tale was that Crash was actually a weekly magazine.

He first said that. And said that he always bought it weekly.

Then when I said that's clearly not true he said that the mag got weekly reprints to fix typos etc. At which point I was like 'you buy the same mag four times because of spelling mistakes?'

And that was the end of that.

Also, he through Amaurote was pronounced AMOR-A-TITE.

He was such an absolute chief.

[PeteProdge]

This one isn't quite such a 'tall tale', but more about our naivety of what home computers could do.

My friend Kevin and I had signed up to that Home Computer Club thing in Swindon, where you get sent a full price game each month (defaulting to the 'editor's choice' game if you didn't choose in time, which always coincidentally happened to be the most expensive one in the monthly catalogue).

Kevin had picked Trivial Pursuit, it had arrived one weekday morning, he hadn't got time to load it in and so took it with him to school. We'd often walk to school together and I although wasn't that interested in it, he found something in the instructions which had convinced him the ZX Spectrum had the ability for voice recognition! (These days you won't bat even an eyelid at even the cheapest crappiest laptop/tablet/smartphone/IoT-thingamajig being able to recognise your voice.)

There was a part of the instructions that stated when playing, you had to say your answer out loud. He jumped to the conclusion that the Speccy would know what you were saying. That had to be it! After all, the Speccy could kind of 'talk' in some games through speech synthesis ("CAN VOO HELP ROPPIN IN HIS QVEST FOR THE SILVER ARROW?"), so it had to naturally progress to 'hearing' us, right?

Later that evening he realised that it'd all been a necessary thing to do when playing with friends, with a 'did you get it right?' prompt to register the score.

Ah well, turns out the ZX Spectrum didn't pre-empt Amazon Alexa or Google Nest after all.

[PeteProdge]

There was a kid in my school who was absolutely full of s***. His weird tall tale was that Crash was actually a weekly magazine.

He first said that. And said that he always bought it weekly.

Well, he was telling the truth. And yes, the spelling mistakes were so bad, that around three quarters of these weekly Crashes would have the very magazine name accidentally spelt wrong as 'Games X'...



Bet you feel silly now!

[AndyC]

Bet you feel silly now!

I'm more curious about what Betty Boo and the Bitmap Brothers have in common...

[R-Tape]

Later that evening he realised that it'd all been a necessary thing to do when playing with friends, with a 'did you get it right?' prompt to register the score.

Heh. It conjures an amusing image of a lad repeatedly shouting "CONSTANTINOPLE!" at his indifferent speccy.

[PeteProdge]

I'm more curious about what Betty Boo and the Bitmap Brothers have in common...

It's a 16-bit answer. Magic Pockets by the Bitmap Brothers was released on the ST, Amiga, PC and Acorn Archimedes and featured heavily sampling of Doin' The Do, in a deal with record label Rhythm King. That also led to Megablast by Bomb The Bass being used in Xenon 2, which never came out the Speccy. @R-Tape brought us this unofficial yet commendable effort, but don't expect any funky reimaginings of Assault On Precinct 13.

Incidentally, this edition of Games X was given away as a preview issue free gift with Crash. Games X was multiformat but did actually cover the Speccy. A strange decision, as Crash was published by Newsfield and Games X was part of Europress. (Yeah, later, Europress would rescue Crash and its Newsfield stablemates of course.) Games X itself was a magazine that paid its writers well but was sadly a financial disaster, never gaining traction with games players, who preferred the monthly magazines.

[R-Tape]

@R-Tape brought us this unofficial yet commendable effort

I should say that it's @davespicer's work (released with Woot 22), and in 1991, submitted to Mirrorsoft in 1991, but they were moving away from 8 bits.

[PeteProdge]

I should say that it's @davespicer's work (released with Woot 22), and in 1991, submitted to Mirrorsoft in 1991, but they were moving away from 8 bits.

Ah yes, I heard about their snubbing of the Speccy that year, so let's just say steps were taken to get revenge.

[bluespikey]

[PeteProdge]

[AndyC]

There were a lot of full page ads for Renegade III in the magazines at the time. A lot. I'm not saying the reviews reflect that, but there sure were a lot of them.

[XTM]

[zxbruno]

People used to say you could kill a Spectrum with a certain command, entered in Sinclair Basic. I don't remember if it was a POKE or a USR thing.