The most disappointing hardware for the ZX Spectrum?

[PeteProdge]

I'd have to say the Datel Electronics Lightpen.



The IDEA behind it is brilliant. My imagined scenario was to be able to draw right on my screen, with pixel perfection. Why, I could even 'jab' at the telly to adjust a pixel. That's how I thought it would work.

The reality is that it's less graceful than Bambi's first outing on ice. Wherever you aim, 90% of the time, it's well off, like a rigged airgun at a fairground game stall. Or like trying to use your smartphone with thick leather gloves on. No wonder the Datel Electronics advert always featured a few circles and a poorly written word.

Because of necessities in the technology, the screen flashes constantly when you're using it. It's not one for photosensitive epileptics. Indeed, pretty much anything involving light reading through a CRT on the ZX Spectrum has this problem - the light guns were pretty awful too.

In the end, after returning the lightpen to Datel for a refund* I ended up writing a BASIC program where I could 'sculpt' things pixel by pixel, simply using QAOP[SPACE] to turn pixels on and off.

I also feel a bit cheated by the Sinclair SJS1 joystick, bundled with Spectrum +2s. It's widely panned. I find it doesn't have much of a movement radius and the feedback is neglible. I also hate the way it's angled by default. Ugh.

What would you say was the worst hardware add-on for the ZX Spectrum?

* = They never acknowledged its return, so I was £15 down.

[Sokurah]

The Mikro-Plus from Mikro-Gen was also a wasted opportunity. Only Shadow of the Unicorn was released that used it, and that wasn't exactly what it was made out to be. I believe that, had it come with the Wally Week game (I can't remember which one, but possibly 3 Weeks in Paradise), it would've been a bigger success. Even better if it had been released earlier and could've been used by other developers.

[Jbizzel]

Not quite on topic but close enough....

About 8 years ago I told my music producing friend I had bought a drum machine.

He was so excited he jumped in the car and drove the 20 miles to my house.

When he got here I showed him my SpecDrum which had just arrived

[TMD2003]

I have a particular non-appreciation - in its emulated form, at least - for the Currah Microspeech. If Stephen Hawking had been saddled with this thing instead of the bang-up-to-date (for 1985) speech computer that he used for the remaining 33 years of his life, he wouldn't have made it past 33 days.

Despite this, I'm making a suitably crap game with it as one of the big pile of entries I've got in store for [mention]uglifruit[/mention]. Not to mention that it's payback for all of his Microspeech games so far...

[Guesser]

The TTX2000S is a bit disappointing because the ROM code seems rushed and is limited in features, though also because of the lack of support it got, as I believe those limitations can be worked around in software to some degree at least.
Channel 4 did broadcast telesoftware for a while, but it was spread over multiple systems (speccy, amstrad, and beeb iirc), and weren't able to (or weren't interested in) source(ing) their own, and commercial publishers obviously had little interest in giving things away for free.
The BBC (concentrating on their own machine of course) were able to make much more use of telesoftware by broadcasting in-depth programming articles written specially, and utility programs that made use of the teletext hardware and services.
To me that's the big selling point of telesoftware, being able to write programs which receive the latest information live, in an age before broadband, which the Spectrum completely missed out on, though it was probably never really workable with the speccy's limited OS, and tapes/microdrives etc. even if 4Data had had the same public service resources to throw at it as Auntie.

[Ralf]

Nobody mentioned microdrives so far?

They were supposed by sir Clive to be a standard add-on to Spectrum which would be much cheapier than disk drives and yet load data in seconds.

They were a big failure as turned out to be unreliable, you could easily lose all your data only after using your microdrive several times.

[Pobulous]

The original RAM Turbo for me.
Caused compatibility issues with quite a few games - original version of Elite was one.
Not sure if that was caused by the switchable Cursors/IF2 mode.

Also, it made me realise that the joysticks of the time weren't for me (If I use a joystick now, it's a 6 or 8 button arcade type), and I never did get hold of any ROM cartridges.

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Just a question for those who got to own a ZX Printer... was it worth having it?

[XTM]

I'd have to say the Datel Electronics Lightpen. (...) In the end, after returning the lightpen to Datel for a refund* I ended up writing a BASIC program where I could 'sculpt' things pixel by pixel, simply using QAOP[SPACE] to turn pixels on and off.

Dearie me, Datel. Back in 1988 I saw an advert for their "wannabe Multiface One" called Snapshot II. Obtaining it in the first place was a bit of a faff as dealing in foreign currencies wasn't so easy in those days. I handed over the asking price in Deutschmarks to an older relative who then used an Eurocheque to pay it to Datel.

When it arrived, I was excited to have a device to make "forgeries" with. This excitement quickly gave way to disappointment as it became apparent that you couldn't load a "snapshot" without the Snapshot II attached. To make matters worse, you always had to load in a program before you could actually use the thing, and it didn't always work when I pressed that NMI button - sometimes it simply froze the Speccy. And it was simply not as good as the Multiface, which I hadn't seen in action on the Speccy yet, but my brother had a Multiface Two for his Amstrad CPC so I knew how it operated.

The only saving grace was the in-built Kempston port but obviously that wasn't enough to warrant the asking price so I tried to return it. Can't remember why but they didn't want to take it back. Me stating in my letter that I'd want to give it back so I could buy a Multiface One instead probably didn't help my cause

In the end I was stuck with it and the only reason I'd ever use it was to make use of the Kempston port, as it had the property of allowing the autofire function of some joysticks like the Quickshot 2. The Multiface One's Kempston port didn't have that property, nevertheless I was happy to finally obtain one about a year later.

I'd probably not go as far as saying the Snapshot II was the most disappointing hardware for the ZX Spectrum, because for that I'd have to know every single piece of hardware to compare (I'd say that's impossible for anyone to know) but for me personally it certainly was.

My next disappointment would follow in 1990 in the shape of the Opus Discovery, but that's a story for another time ...

Hi Pete, I made a BASIC QAOP_Space drawing program probably similar to yours and I did quite a few pics with it ... I really have to look into a way to grab stuff from my old tapes, sadly I don't have a tape recorder anymore.

[Guesser]

Just a question for those who got to own a ZX Printer... was it worth having it?

The person I got one of my Spectrum+, and my IF1 & Microdrive from made use of it printing out nice file catalogues for all their cartridges and things. In some ways it's a cheap and nasty gimmick, but the printouts are just as readable now as when they were made, which is an advantage it has over similar thermal printers.
Obviously it's only useful if you want to print out program listings and things. If you bought one to do desktop publishing you'd be very disappointed

[Ast A. Moore]

When he got here I showed him my SpecDrum which had just arrived

A cruel joke indeed.

[Joefish]

Just a question for those who got to own a ZX Printer... was it worth having it?

I don't know about 'worth it' but it was a massive cost saving. Bear in mind a bog-standard 9-pin (double overprinting each line) dot-matrix tractor-feed printer would still set you back something approaching £300 even at the end of the 80s. So any sort of printer, even a till-roll/bog-roll thermal job where most of the work was done by the paper, was a miracle at £50.

The same criticism of microdrives should also look at a contemporary advert for the price of floppy drives...

My own criticism is aimed squarely at this box, the Kempston Pro Joystick Interface. I swapped a Microspeech for one of these and wished I hadn't.



What I wanted was to play Tomahawk (combat helicopter sim) with a twin-joystick setup, which it would only allow with Sinclair joysticks (not Kempston + Sinclair). And it was OK for that. What is galling though is that although it has three joystick ports, you can't use three joysticks with it.
If you put a joystick in the Kempston port, it simultaneously operates the cursor keys. This not only interferes with the two other Sinclair ports, but can really mess with some games like Cybernoid, where the number keys have some other function. There's no soft switch like the RAM Turbo for selecting the control method. It's Kempston + Cursor keys from that port all the time.

[PeteProdge]

The Mikro-Plus from Mikro-Gen was also a wasted opportunity. Only Shadow of the Unicorn was released that used it, and that wasn't exactly what it was made out to be. I believe that, had it come with the Wally Week game (I can't remember which one, but possibly 3 Weeks in Paradise), it would've been a bigger success. Even better if it had been released earlier and could've been used by other developers.

Ah yes, didn't Shadow Of The Unicorn and that hardware effectively turn your machine into a 'Spectrum 64K'? (With the downside that you could only have that game, a bit like Henry T Ford's colour offerings, really.)

I might be talking daft here, but, in 1985, would it have been feasible to have that hardware be 16K of RAM, and load in the 64K game straight off tape? I'm guessing it would be feasible but I reckon the price for the chips would be a LOT higher, probably not commercially viable.

It is a fascinating thing, in the pre-128K world. A shame the game was utter pants.

[Sokurah]

I might be talking daft here, but, in 1985, would it have been feasible to have that hardware be 16K of RAM, and load in the 64K game straight off tape? I'm guessing it would be feasible but I reckon the price for the chips would be a LOT higher, probably not commercially viable.

I don't know the difference in price between ROM and RAM chips, but I honestly can't imagine it being much, so theoretically the interface could have been better if it had been delivered with RAM chips and instructions on how to page it in. Then all developers could've made use of it ... but that would obviously have made Micro-gen's own offerings pretty unremarkable.

[zup]

Two new contenders:
- The SD-1 (the "protection" dongle for Camelot Warriors). Totally useless unless you wanted to play Camelot Warriors. Also, I wonder how many people forgot to connect it before turning on the computer and tried to plug it in after loading the game.
- The Spirit Steering Wheel. There are no photos but the description (a yellow plastic circunference like the cover of a jar) tells me that, if it was shipped, it would be a massive disapointment.

[1024MAK]

Ah yes, didn't Shadow Of The Unicorn and that hardware effectively turn your machine into a 'Spectrum 64K'? (With the downside that you could only have that game, a bit like Henry T Ford's colour offerings, really.)

I might be talking daft here, but, in 1985, would it have been feasible to have that hardware be 16K of RAM, and load in the 64K game straight off tape? I'm guessing it would be feasible but I reckon the price for the chips would be a LOT higher, probably not commercially viable.

The Mikro-Plus only has two chips, one of which is a ROM (actually an EEPROM) chip that replaces the BASIC ROM in the memory map. The other chip is a standard logic chip, that does the very bare minimum to provide a joystick port.

So from an electronics engineering viewpoint, it’s utterly crap.

Yes, an interface that could page RAM in, in place of the BASIC ROM was definitely possible in 1984. Two 6264 SRAM chips would have provided 16k bytes of RAM. It would have been more expensive, because more logic chips would have been needed to control the paging in of the RAM.

Mark

[1024MAK]

I don't know the difference in price between ROM and RAM chips, but I honestly can't imagine it being much, so theoretically the interface could have been better if it had been delivered with RAM chips and instructions on how to page it in. Then all developers could've made use of it ... but that would obviously have made Micro-gen's own offerings pretty unremarkable.

Over on StarDot forums, there is a topic that lists various prices of various chips from 1980 onwards.

From the Jameco Electronics advert in the November 1985 issue of Byte magazine (prices in U.S. Dollars)

SRAM: HM6264P-15 - $6.95 each (two chips needed for 16k bytes of RAM)
EPROM: 27128-25 - $5.95 each (only a single chip needed for 16k bytes of ROM)

link to advert

Mark

[FFoulkes]

About 8 years ago I told my music producing friend I had bought a drum machine.
He was so excited he jumped in the car and drove the 20 miles to my house.
When he got here I showed him my SpecDrum which had just arrived

Although attaching the SpecDrum broke my Speccy back then and ended my Speccy days that way (which was very unfortunate), I still think, its concept is pretty good.
It gave Spectrum users a lo-fi version of those classic 80s drums for relatively little money. Hardly anyone would have been able to afford a LinnDrum, which produced these kind of drum sounds in studio music (think of "Last Christmas" for example).
And the SpecDrum even had a good latin kit, so it even was a bit like the Roland TR-707 and TR-727 in one, which are also considered classics today.
To me, it sounded even closer to the LinnDrum (which I love) than anything, I've heard on the Amiga later (which is quite interesting, when you think about it).
Samples of the SpecDrum are also available. I once used them in this little tune of mine.
(Although today, you can also have samples of the LinnDrum itself, the TR-707/727, the Alesis HR-16 (which is also close) and whatnot.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ottLLH0Drdw

[1024MAK]

Not specifically for the Spectrum, but this controller is the worst that I have ever used:

The Quickshot IX Deluxe Joyball Controller.

Problems: it only has four real directions (like a joystick). Although in theory diagonals are possible, it’s a lot harder with this compared to using a good joystick.
It’s harder to hold compared to a joystick.

I used it only for about an hour before giving up with it. It then got put back into it’s box, where it has stayed ever since…

More details here.

Mark

[Pobulous]

I had a friend who had that - he seemed to like it.
I seem to remember it needed more force to move than you would expect, and it had a very small amount of movement, both of which combined to make it an ergonomic nightmare.

[FFoulkes]

Just a question for those who got to own a ZX Printer... was it worth having it?

When I first saw the ZX Printer, I kind of felt insulted. What was that thing?
I only realized a few years ago, that originally it had been designed as the printer for the ZX81, not for the Spectrum (it just appeared to be compatible). If you see it that way, it makes sense.

For my Spectrum, I had a "Seikosha GP-50S" instead. Which was kind of cool, it used ordinary paper. But unfortunately also in that toilet paper size, so it still was not really usable for office kind of work. In the end, as a kid, I found, I didn't have that much to print out anyway.
So maybe Sir Clive was right: Maybe even the ZX Printer could have done it.

[FFoulkes]

Nobody mentioned microdrives so far?
They were supposed by sir Clive to be a standard add-on to Spectrum which would be much cheapier than disk drives and yet load data in seconds.
They were a big failure as turned out to be unreliable, you could easily lose all your data only after using your microdrive several times.

Yeah, I have to agree. Microdrive + "Interface 1" were the worst computing peripherals I ever bought. It still kind of hurts, how bad it all went. With 300 DM each (so 600 DM all in all), they were incredibly expensive. Then you got those very weird commands:

Code: Select all

LOAD *"m";1;"Hello"

What??? Come on! That was rather stupid with all that Symbol Shift stuff going on.

Code: Select all

CAT 1

Yeah, where's my cat?
The 7 or 14 seconds to load a program of 48K did work though. I also didn't run that much into the problem of cartridges being unreliable. But on the other hand I only used the Microdrive for a year or two.
The biggest disappointment to me was, that there weren't any (or only very few) games released, that made special use of the Microdrive - while there were lots and lots C64 games, that made special use of the 1541 floppy drive.
That wasn't really Sir Clive's fault though (besides the reliabilty problem, that of course prevented software companies from releasing on Microdrive).
So the Microdrive was the worst thing, I ever spent more than just a small amount of money on. Because of the Spectrum, I had trusted Sinclair Research to release another great product. But they severly disappointed.

On the other hand, it also was extremely bad for Sir Clive himself. In 1982, the Spectrum had been the huge success we all know. In 1983, Clive Sinclair was knighted - and therefore became "Sir Clive"; and he also received a honorary doctorate of a university. The future looked all very promising. But it already was the peak. Because then the Microdrive and "Interface 1" were released. In 1984, Sinclair relased the QL, completely based on its double-Microdrives. Also in 1984, he released the C5. Three big failures. In 1985, his wife divorced him. In 1986, he sold the company (the computer division, that is). And that was it. Starting from the Microdrive he wasn't exactly lucky, was he?
So, it was all very bad for me as a customer, but for him as the producer it was all even worse.
Fortunately, being the smart man that he was, in spite of his many commercial failures he was able to keep his private fortune intact and personally stayed a rich man until his final days.

[1024MAK]

When I first saw the ZX Printer, I kind of felt insulted. What was that thing?
I only realized a few years ago, that originally it had been designed as the printer for the ZX81, not for the Spectrum (it just appeared to be compatible). If you see it that way, it makes sense.

In fact, the ROM and keyboard of the ZX81 were redesigned just before production commenced in order to provide the built-in functionality for the control of the ZX Printer. Hence the ZX81 ROM and keyboard lost the READ, DATA and RESTORE BASIC commands in order to make room for LPRINT, LLIST and COPY to support the printer. DRAW and UNDRAW were also dropped. But FAST and SLOW were added.

Hence, it’s not really a surprise that Sinclair wanted full support of the ZX Printer included in the ZX Spectrum… Indeed, the ZX Spectrum ROM was supposed to include the code to support the microdrives. That’s why it’s considered to be unfinished.

Yeah, I have to agree. Microdrive + "Interface 1" were the worst computing peripherals I ever bought. It still kind of hurts, how bad it all went. With 300 DM each (so 600 DM all in all), they were incredibly expensive. Then you got those very weird commands:

Code: Select all

LOAD *"m";1;"Hello"

What??? Come on! That was rather stupid with all that Symbol Shift stuff going on.

Limitations of not having proper support in the unfinished ZX Spectrum BASIC ROM…

On the other hand, it also was extremely bad for Sir Clive himself. In 1982, the Spectrum had been the huge success we all know. In 1983, Clive Sinclair was knighted - and therefore became "Sir Clive"; and he also received a honorary doctorate of a university. The future looked all very promising. But it already was the peak. Because then the Microdrive and "Interface 1" were released. In 1984, Sinclair relased the QL, completely based on its double-Microdrives. Also in 1984, he released the C5. Three big failures. In 1985, his wife divorced him. In 1986, he sold the company (the Spectrum division, that is). And that was it. Starting from the Microdrive he wasn't exactly lucky, was he?
So, it was all very bad for me as a customer, but for him as the producer it was all even worse.

You left out the lacklustre QL keyboard (which the ZX Spectrum+ keyboard was developed from), the non-standard video output, the bugs in the ROM and of course, the dongle! Why a dongle we still don’t know. The root cause being that the operating system (QDOS) and SuperBASIC combined were too large to fit in the allocated 32k bytes of ROM space. Hence an extra 16k byte ROM chip was needed. It was possible to include this extra chip inside the QL on later production machines, and this was done. I don’t know why it was not done on the first production machines. Nearly all of which were recalled by Sinclair, where these first production boards were scrapped.

True, the further development of the microdrive system increased their reliability. But commercial software companies could not duplicate microdrive cartridges. They had to rely on Sinclair…

I did not like the QL keyboard (still not keen on it), and hence I didn’t (and still don’t) like the ZX Spectrum+ keyboard.

Mark

[equinox]

I dunno if this is an oddball vote but I would say any kind of mouse! Some systems were more or less built to work with a mouse (Amiga, Acorn) and some just can't. What are you going to do with it? Art Studio? It's about as good as the light pen really. You only have a few things that recognise it, and those are slow and shitty too.

[Joefish]

Yes, an interface that could page RAM in, in place of the BASIC ROM was definitely possible in 1984. Two 6264 SRAM chips would have provided 16k bytes of RAM. It would have been more expensive, because more logic chips would have been needed to control the paging in of the RAM.
Mark

An 8K RAM and an 8K of ROM containing a boot loader, a few fonts, and some optimised sound and graphics routines strikes me as the most effective arrangement, as it then wouldn't need paging. A bigger share like 1K ROM and the rest RAM would be even better, but even something like a 4K/12K split would mean the cost of two RAM chips PLUS a ROM at the time.