Are you a TRUE SPECTRUM USER?

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/stevo/specuser/specuser.htm

27 - You develop loads of superstitions when trying to load a game successfully.
These include not leaving the room, walking on tip toes around the computer, trying to get the tape recorder as far from the TV as possible to reduce any interference, disconnecting the one lead (ear or mic?) that you didn't need to use when loading, and even turning the TV off while loading (and dreading it when you turned it back on again) and finally sacrificing a live chicken in the name of the Devil over the top of the computer while it was loading, letting the blooding drip from it's neck onto the keyboard. What? Was I the only one?

I think you lose something when load from disk. You lose that anticipation, that expectation, and that releif when it finally does load succesfully. It gave you a chance to build up your hopes and excitement. There was nothing quite like the feeling when the game you have just bought, and waited days to play, suddenly switches from loading and goes to the title screen. Anyway...

Stark

Hehe, you lose that horrible screechy sound. The horrible screechy sound that you're afraid to turn the volume down on in case it fails to load, and are also afraid to leave the room for

On the other hand, those coloured lines are so psychadelic, especially the ones on copy-protected games

Okay, let's see.

I get No. 1, 3, 4,5 , 13, 15, 19, 21, 22, 24, 29, 35

secret_squirrel

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

I think you lose something when load from disk.

You obviously never experienced BBC micro floppies!

Also remember 'speed loaders' your ears had to get used to a whole new sound effect. Plus you could convince yourself that you could almost hear exactly where the loading went wrong!

nlgbbbblth

Stark wrote:

Hehe, you lose that horrible screechy sound. The horrible screechy sound that you're afraid to turn the volume down on in case it fails to load, and are also afraid to leave the room for

On the other hand, those coloured lines are so psychadelic, especially the ones on copy-protected games

Okay, let's see.

I get No. 1, 3, 4,5 , 13, 15, 19, 21, 22, 24, 29, 35

ha ha
I get most of those. Got my Spectrum in 1984. Owned a ZX81 for about 15 months prior to that.

The Horizon tape that had Thro The Wall - deadly game.

Capt'n Midnight

secret_squirrel wrote:

You obviously never experienced BBC micro floppies!

Also remember 'speed loaders' your ears had to get used to a whole new sound effect. Plus you could convince yourself that you could almost hear exactly where the loading went wrong!

5 1/4's 160KB single side, no defrag so you prayed there wasn't another file in the gap when saving a big file, and the number format was arse-endian relative to a PC (or was the PC wrong) and you had to read the bytes in backwards when converting the data into csv's for lotus . - them were the days.

soiaf

nlgbbbblth wrote:

The Horizon tape that had Thro The Wall - deadly game.

It was fun. I seem to remember it was written in Basic, I remember changing the code to try different things out.

From the list no. 13 is still one that haunts me. Find myself still occasionally 'playing back' those loading sounds.

As for no. 27, how could you possibly not have loads of superstitions?

Abdiel

That was the game that usually failed to load for me - took about 4 or 5 times to get it properly loaded.

The Wall game was good alright, although I think I played "Horace and the Spiders" a lot more though.

Flukey

Ah, the good old Spectrum, my first ever computer. I had a 48k. It set me off and I now work in IT, teaching computer courses.

Now then, for all you fans of classic Spectrum games, here is one I found recently which you can actually play on this computer, as you did back then.

http://www.asej39.dsl.pipex.com/HTML/Game/Basic.html

Have fun!

DArcy

Our cassette player used to chew the tapes up & you'd have to fish them out of it & wind it all back manually. We played our games with the Spectrum on a black and white tv...Paperboy & NightRider...it didn't get much better than that

BLITZ_Molloy

I had a Commodore but can definately relate to the loading times. I never understood peoples frustration with the Playstations loading times. Having been conditioned as 8+ minutes of waiting before I played a game on my old home computers even stuff like Striker '96 which took 2 minutes seemed like nothing at all.

_Kaiser_

Amstrad CPC 464 (complete with green screen monitor) was my first one. A jeweller's screwdriver was often needed to tweak the heads on the tape so some games would load

Still, Elite on the CPC was the BEST VERSION EVER! I actually made "Elite" and at that stage my ship had a Cloaking Device I'd salvaged along the way that could fire when cloaked (wayyy before Star Trek VI!) but was a killer on energy. There was also the mission where you exited the space station only to find the sun in front of you going nova! (got tons of money if you made it to the next system) and then there was the deliberate hyperspace misjump that let you go a few rounds with the thargoids!

Ahhhh memories.....

telecinesk

Ah yes that brings it back./
The old crash at the very end ,especially when it was a turboload game. That happened very often.And the crash if someone plugged anything in the wallsocket beside the computer. The ROM was so unstable!
Saw a spectrum recently and laughed./.
Have an emulator on this laptop to remind me of them cool days.

secret_squirrel

Kaiser2000 wrote:

Still, Elite on the CPC was the BEST VERSION EVER!

if you were really hardcore you made 'elite' on the bbc version

niexile

Here's some words to bring fear to the Speccy user's heart:

BREAK; CONT repeats

Paligulus

The whole loading superstitions thing genuinly brought back some fond memories!!!

I remember playing the Commodore 64 in a mates house and being given out to for speaking while the game was loading!!!

I also remember my mates little brother's foot gently brushing off one of the leads...well needless to say he got severly corrected!!!!


46 - You can name the following companies "Budget" labels.
Ocean - The Hit Squad

That brings back memories!! For me Ocean equalled quality. I can still remember Platoon. What a great game...

Third_Echelon

Yeah... those were the days..

I had a commodore 64 and a ZX Spectrum..

Some great title i loved playing:
-> Paperboy
-> Chiller
-> Emlyn Hughes Soccer
-> James Bond (cant remember the title. I think it was the living daylights game with the light gun...)
-> R-Type

Ah the memories.

The loading superstitions are so true! Brilliant

rubadub

I remember the whole, ear to ear mic to mic debate, and volume turned up too. Saying the grey had to go to the ear sockets. I remember a guy with a dodgy high-speed dubbing tape recorder at the time but it used to record music too fast. We used to record games with it so they would load faster, worked most times.