Today I learned about the Spanish 128K Spectrum

[mjwilson]

Due to some tweets I came across earlier today, I ended up learning a few things about the Spanish 128K Spectrum.

The starting point of the discussion was here:



Probably lots of people here already knew this, but it was all new to me, so in case you're in the same boat...

I had assumed that the Spanish 128 was more or less the same as the UK version with just minor differences. But the differences in the ROM are more significant than that: you don't get the menus of the 128 version, and the "renumber" functionality is available from a new special editor command. There's also an EDIT command which you can use to open a full-screen editor of a string's contents.

There seems to be a kind of dual editor where you can edit in the top-part of the screen or the bottom; if you're editing in the top-part then you get a special formatting applied to code, with new lines for each ":". If you're in the bottom area then you can use the new commands

Error messages are translated, of course, and there are a few extra characters in the character set like 'ñ'. (Well, not extra characters I guess, they are replacements.)

[Ast A. Moore]

Yup. You can download the Spanish ROM and use it with your favorite emulator to investigate further.

I remember seeing it for the first time some decades ago with one of the early versions of zxsp and playing around with it. Wasn’t too impressed (for example, the keywords had to but typed in caps, otherwise they wouldn’t be recognized as keywords). There were a few other minor inconveniences, which I chalked up to my simply being unfamiliar with the Spanish 128K BASIC editor in general.

But, yeah, it certainly looked different from the UK version.

[mjwilson]

Yup. You can download the Spanish ROM and use it with your favorite emulator to investigate further.

I remember seeing it for the first time some decades ago with one of the early versions of zxsp and playing around with it. Wasn’t too impressed (for example, the keywords had to but typed in caps, otherwise they wouldn’t be recognized as keywords).

Yeah that tripped me up too.

[zup]

Wasn’t too impressed (for example, the keywords had to but typed in caps, otherwise they wouldn’t be recognized as keywords).

When I was young, a friend of mine and I typed a database utility from a magazine. My friend had a Spectrum +2, and I had the old reliable Spectrum +. There were lines that couldn't be typed in the +2 because some variables had the same name as keywords, so I had to type those lines. I guess that those lines could be typed on the Spectrum 128k, due to that "feature" of the editor (maybe the developers had that in mind).

Also, it's a shame that nobody adapted the numeric keypad to write hex characters. By the time that 128k was sold, many type-ins in magazines had longer and loner machine code bits... so using that keyboard in programs like C.U.C.M. (used to input machine code listings like the second one on Specbase) would made the task easier.