ZX Spectrum vs BBC Micro: the TV drama Comments by Oli Welsh

I remember the BBC Micro fondly from school as I spent many a happy break and lunch hour playing Chuckie Egg, Frakk! and Elite.

I certainly don't remember it being a rival for the Spectrum though as that was the Commodore 64, which I owned as my first computer, and is the one I have very happy memories of. Ah those were the days. :)

BBC Micro! I loved that machine, thank to being the ones we used at primary school. Some of the games were great too, like Imogen, Strykers Run, and Repton.

I was handed down an Acorn Electron by my brother, such an amusing device.

The C64 had every bit as much influence on the UK bedroom-coder generation as the spectrum did. Arguably more so as the C64's basic interpreter was too slow and limited to do anything much at all, forcing would-be game makers to learn assembler - an absolute requirement for professional coding back then.

"What? No Digital Foundry pixel by pixel analysis to accompany said screenshots. Eurogamer is getting fucking lazy! Not good enough. "

Not needed... we all know by now that games look better on Spectrum than PS3 ;-)

I hope they include the Acorn Electron, that was a beast!

Superior software always came up with good games for the Beeb, remember Exile by David braben and Ian Bell http://www.retroalphabet.com/game.asp?Ga...

Exile was all kinds of awesome, I'd really love to see a remake of that on XBLA. Still 2d, but with better physics and spruced-up HD loveliness. The atmosphere of that game was awesome.
And I still say that the Acorn Archimedes version of Elite was the best. Archimedes had some awesome games.

Exile!

Frak me that was an awesome game. I remember the robots, the exploration and the AI life that was floating around. I recon that coding for a small amounts of memory should be a requirement for any software degree. It seems that this kind of creative thinking is slowly being taught right out of the industry. I haven't met a programmer who knows assembly in years!

Ah, I remember it well, the posh kids at school had the BBC, the rest of us had Spectrums - although there was a split in the ranks there too, those with 16k those with 48k (almost forgot the other lot with the wobbly RAM Pack...)

Yeah, the Beeb was for poshos who got driven to school by their mums in big cars... Me and my homies kept it real and stuck it to the man with our Speccies! Colour clash - RESPEKT!

God you guys are sending me on a nostalgia trip!

I had a C64 and used BBC micros at school. My mate had an electron and one had an Amstrad 464. I then had one of the 128k spectrums and played fairlight, knightlore etc. etc for hours after school.

I am definitely watching this comedy thing when it comes out.....which is when exactly?

I had one of the first C64 in the UK, something like 0000005 was the serial number; I pre-ordered it months before and counted down the days until release day, and I think it came through pre-release. Didn't even have proper PAL set up on the mobo, it had a Heath Robinson collection of wires solder to inner chips.

No-one else had one for months, it was best part of a year before software started to arrive. Had to make my own fun before I could buy stuff off the shelf; had that big fat Programmers Guide book. Marvellous fun, although stopped me studying at school, and made me end up in the 1980s games industry.

TV show sounds great, looking forward to it already.

I always felt sorry for the kids whose parents bought them a "computer" in a sale, at Boots (which used to sell them) or other retailer who had jumped on the bandwagon.

Dragon 32? I still laugh at those kids now. Texas Instruments thing? Rubbish. Oric Atmos? There was one kid at school who used to try and convince everyone that Oric was more powerful than their Speccys and C64 and it was only a matter of time before we'd see great software.

Yes, posh kids has BBC Micro but my really well of mates had Atari 800s with disc drives and quality software from the USA.

The only kid I ever knew with an Electron had religious maniac parents. He ended up a creationist.

The only thing worth having a BBC for was Elite.
Otherwise it was C64 v Speccy all the way.

In the inevitable U.S. remake, Sam Tramiel (Danny DeVito) repeatedly punches himself in the face while Trip Hawkins' (Tom Cruise) nose grows with every promise.

I had a Commodore 128! I probably started it up in C128 mode like.. five times.

I don't really recall there being much of a battle between the Speccy and BBC Micro in the home.

As I recall it, the home system was the ZX48 and schools had the BBC (plus the odd rich kid, who could ace BBC games due to practice at home).


My childhood nostaliga seems to be divided into episodes based on the computer we had at the time. Most of my early years were spent on the ZX48 (christ that system had a long life, and we talk about 10 year plans these days). Whereas the C64 came along round about the time I was able to actually buy my own games (Kickstart 2, a polished work of genius, £1.99). I seem to remeber Green Beret coming out around the tipping point.

Edit: now I think on it, what about the ZX81. My first experience of home computing. 3D Monster Maze was the scariest shit I had ever seen in my life.

Looking back I dont think people realized just how powerful the speccy was for the price. Some of the 3d stuff it did was quite amazing.

Wasn't it very good with detailed sprites, but not so hot on lots of colours onscreen at once?

I recall a lot of the later speccy games (arcade ports and so on) had relatively detailed sprites, but would be monochrome over a yellow background.

Spectrum, (with thousands of copied C15 tapes), followed by an Amstrad 128 followed by an Amiga.

Happy happy days. Games cost a fiver and you bought them so rarely because game 'sharing' was rife.

I wanted a spectrum when i was a kid. My parents bought me a BBC B in about 1982 so i could 'program my own games'...

I did, and now i've been working in the games industry for 14 years... Thanks Mum & Dad! :)

8bit computer wise, the Amstrad CPC 464 was far better than both the C64 and the Spectrum. It had the colours of the C64 and the detailed sprites of the Speccy.

Nah Mashk, C64 was best out of all of those. Was always jealous of my mates games for the C64.

C64 has American titles and European titles as well as British ones, Speccy was limited to UK and Spain, Amstrad CPC had a few British titles; if you had a disc drive for C64 you were well away with some really great multi-load stuff and were not limited to RAM size being filled by a cassette load.

I had hundreds of copied cassettes for my Spectrum ZX, and even got collared by a policeman for stealing a £1.99 copy of Dizzy from Woolworths at the age of 11.

God, I was an unethical bastard back then.

Sounds like a great idea to me! Nice one Beeb.

Ah!

The other day I opened a big box and saw all the old C15/C90 tapes for Speccy!

Sure the real rivalry WAS between Speccy and C64, however most of my gaming exposure was between Speccy at home and BBC at school, and there were a few games worth playing on BBC. C64 games were at my mate house and he often loved to show off Summer Games, Bruce Lee or such!

Speccy was far better at Starglider type of game and which C64 stunks at! Only one mate of mine at the time had Amstrad and I would second Amstrad had the best of both world but at the end just too much of in a third place like a well known console today!!

Also, first got online with C64 ... in 1984 ... and have been plugged in ever since. :) Your Speccy and Amstrads and BBCs weren't connected to CIX and the like.

@CHAZBIGPOTATO

Sorry, I know this is pedantic. :(

Exile was by Peter Irvin (who wrote Starship Command) and Jeremy Smith (who wrote Thrust). Elite was David Braben and Ian Bell.

I still have a set of BBC B kit sitting in the spare bedroom, might even be an old Microvitec Cub monitor in there as well, somewhere. I must get around to firing it up sometime and checking that it still boots, I fully expect it will, damn robust bits of kit. Ah, the memories of swapping out ROMs using a spoon to prise them from their sockets.

I`m always amused by the comments that the Beebs were for posh kids, a sentiment I`ve seen expressed more widely than just here. I never consider us to be a posh family, but the parents wanted something that would be of more use than just games (much to my initial chagrin). In hindsight I`m very glad that we went for the BBC B over the Spectrum.

@ drewman5150

"Ah, I remember it well, the posh kids at school had the BBC, the rest of us had Spectrums - although there was a split in the ranks there too, those with 16k those with 48k (almost forgot the other lot with the wobbly RAM Pack...) "

Had both

*is smug*

And a Commodore 64. And a 128. And a Dragon 32. And Atari 520 ST, then a 1040. Never had an Amiga, though, or an Amstrad.

*so smug his head will explode*

Actually found our old Commodore 128 a few months back - still boxed, wrapped in its plastic, with the external floppy drive (didn't have the 'D' model 128). Not sure, but I think Dad might have chucked it out when he moved house... :-S

We used to use BBC Micro as development workstations for Speccy, C64, and Amstrad -- they had high resolution green/amber screen monitors (80 characters wide), a great text editor in ROM, compilers for Z80 and 6502 in ROM, floppy drives, and fantastic RS232 support so we could download to target platforms with ease.

Previously people used 'Trash 80' and Imagine Software used Sage things with 68000 chips in them and dumb 80-character terminals.

Edit: bad spelling today.

This sounds great as i've had many spectrums in my day - and all because of the +2's play button snapping off - yes they were very cheap!

Spectrum all the way - hunch back, manic miner, jet set willy (what names!) love it!!

/Takes out grid paper

Right lets go!

10 FOR i=USR "a" TO USR "b"+7
20 READ b
30 POKE i,b
40 NEXT i
50 RETURN
60 REM EG Logo
70 DATA 0,60,126,126,126,126,60,0
80 REM EG Logo
90 DATA BIN 11110000
100 DATA BIN 10000000
110 DATA BIN 11100000
120 DATA BIN 10000000
130 DATA BIN 11110111
140 DATA BIN 00001000
150 DATA BIN 00001001
160 DATA BIN 00000111

Yip, that looks good!

Anyone see what I did there? ;)

i remember when games used to have multiple screenshots from different systems on the boxes. atari st always looked awesome, c64 looked pretty good and spectrum (which we had) invariably looked balls. sigh.

Yea speccy here....48k then had the spectrum + that looked like a stripped down QL. My gaming hobby started with that really. Great days.

@Vroom!

Type mismatch on line 10? ;)

@photoboy

Ah bugger! there always is one somewhere.

I forget a bloody semicolon every day of the week :)

Whsmiths circa 1986.

10 PRINT "Mashk is teh bestest"
20 GOTO 10.

Why did anyone ever think that rubber keys was a good idea?

@skillian

Easier to put together init.

hmm.....BBC B : Elite ( had my picture displayed in Computer & Video Games AND got the little Elite badge thiing and Elite certificate from Acornsoft on sending in the competition code). what a game.

Repton, zalaga, frak, exile,CHUCKIE EGG, Good call on Imogen, Castle Quest, Twin Kingdom valley,thrust,s Killer Gorilla, Philosophers quest and my first Ultimate (or Rare for you youngsters) game was bought on the beeb. Sabre wulf then alien8 and knightlore.

Yes the speccy had most of these games but the beeb keyboard was the best. posh kids lol - wow its quite amazing to remember how much I loved that keyboard and yet in those days we never used a mouse!

I was an absolute demon playing Planetoid aka defender with a z < > TAB space bar H Enter and am certain I would go further on xbla pacman 'snapper' using z x . ; instead of the xbox controller....

@kangarootoo

"Wasn't it very good with detailed sprites, but not so hot on lots of colours onscreen at once?

It was basically a framebuffer, and a weirdly laid out framebuffer at that - you had a monochrome bitmap of (IIRC) 256x192 then a colour overlay at a resolution of 32x24 allowing basically two colours per 8x8 pixel square, those could be any of about 16 and it could auto-flash (foreground/backgroun) them. No sprites or any of that malarky, just a quite good CPU running at 3MHz.

Own up, who had 'rituals' they had to perform in order to make a dodgy tape load?

@mashk

We had an Acorn Electron, I (or my brother) had to listen to the tape carefully, if it started to go quiet/funny, the trick was to press the rewind button for a fraction of a second so the load could continue.

Ah yes, I have happy memories of my 48K ZX Spectrum (with it's third party keyboard and my home made joystick :)).

Still have some of my Z80 code today, mostly for graphics, such as my assembler/machine code for drawing lines, area filling, 3D vector graphics, sprites, isometric 3D graphics (using masked sprites) etc.

I remember spending so many hours optimizing the code for both speed and memory use (often by using of self modifying code). During those years, I learned so much about programming and about pushing hardware to the limits (for graphics that is).

Those were the days..... *Sigh*. :)

Enjoyed using the BBC Micro/Master too (school then University), although I could never find the time to learn 6502 machine code.

As for the C64, I couldn't afford one at the time it was popular, but wished I had one because of the graphics (I think it was the first home computer to have brown in the colour palette). The ZX Spectrum was extremely limited when it came to colour, since the colour resolution was that of the characters, and only 2 colours per character (i.e. 2 colours per 8x8 pixels). Still, it forced people to be more innovative with the graphics.

I could talk about this all day, but alas, back to work.....

@Garulon >>The only kid I ever knew with an Electron had religious maniac parents. He ended up a creationist.

wierd, the only person I knew with an Electron was also from an incredibly religious family! did they advertise in the bible or something?