Judging by the number of emails I have received asking how to read the keyboard, calculate screen addresses or emit white noise from the beeper it has become clear that there really isn’t much in the way of resources for the new Spectrum programmer. So you’ve read the Z80 documentation, you know how the instructions affect the registers and now you want to put this knowledge to use.
It took ages to load software from tape, often coming up with an error message after you’d already endured five minutes of the screechy noises it made when it was loading.Note: This article was originally written by Jonathan Cauldwell and is reproduced here with permission. It regularly froze and needed to be reset (by physically switching it off at the mains) – often when you were right in the middle of something. The ZX Spectrum was far from perfect, of course.
I drank it all in – I even read the code for the other systems, so I could get an idea of how they worked – I was highly envious of the Commodore 64’s sprite system. This then spurred on several experiments with graph paper to create my own custom animated characters, while my brain whizzed round with other ideas of things I could make the computer do. The first issue showed you how to create an animated jumping frog and shooting tank with machine code routines (made from individual pixels rather than the standard on-board graphic blocks) that you could control with the keys. My parents kindly started buying me Input magazine, a multi-platform Marshall Cavendish part-works publication that taught you how to write BASIC code. Over the next few years I checked various Usborne programming guides out of the library, so I could make the computer do more. The first program I wrote and saved was basically the same as this, but with some of the Spectrum’s on-board graphical blocks in the first PRINT command so it made a pretty pattern when it scrolled down the screen – I called it ‘Lift’.Īfter that, I was hooked.
The obvious classic was to 10 PRINT “Hilarious statement here” 20 GOTO 10, and then watch your comedy genius cover the TV screen infinitum. Inside a ZX Spectrum 48K – a basic PCB that gave you a full-colour, programmable computer for an affordable price Like The Hobbit, it had slow-loading graphics and a text interface, but it also had stick characters based on Norse mythology with basic character attributes – you could summon dragons, fight gods and write rude words (which resulted in a dwarf called Mary being ‘not amused’ as she came onto the screen and prodded you). One game we did have was The Hobbit, a text adventure with slow-loading graphics, which I loved even if it was brutally hard and I never managed to get past the trolls.Īnother was Valhalla, which we got from my uncle when he became the PR manager for Legend Software. We never had any of them, but there wasn’t really a culture of must-have games then. Whenever I tell people I had a Spectrum, they generally reel off a list of classic games, including Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and 3D Ant Attack.
One friend had a Commodore 16, another an Acorn Electron, another a ZX81 – I was the only one with a Spectrum, so there was no playground cassette swapping. Most of my friends didn’t have a computer at home, and there was such a huge variety of systems available that when you did find someone else at school with a computer, it probably wasn’t the same one as yours. People also talk about heated playground spats between Spectrum and Commodore 64 owners – I don’t remember them either. People talk about the NES and Super Mario Bros as being revolutionary, but I didn’t know anyone at school with a NES – I wasn’t even aware it existed. I sometimes feel like I was brought up in a parallel universe when pundits discuss video games from the 1980s. I remember my Mum nervously asking ‘are you sure you know what you’re doing, Ben?’ as I did it, and I nodded as I hooked up the aerial and tuned the dial on the front of the TV to the correct RF channel for the Spectrum. Over the next year or so, I must have learned how to connect it all up and get it running, because I distinctly remember dragging the black and white TV to the dining room table, connecting up all the wires and getting the Spectrum all set up. I had a go on the bat and ball game, a Breakout clone called Thro’ The Wall – it was the first programme on side two of the Horizons cassette bundled with the computer, and I fell in love with it. I don’t remember my jaw dropping to the floor, nor it feeling revolutionary – I didn’t honestly even really know what a computer was, but I did find it fascinating that you could plug this little box into a TV and make things appear on the screen yourself, rather than just watching a TV programme.