Alternate Reality - What if the Acorn Electron was released at the same time as the ZX Spectrum?

[@a4000t]

Makes me grateful to have had a Commodore 64 :)

[@BillFixesEverything]

I know where you’re coming from. Now I can appreciate all of them for what they are but back in the 1980s, the C64 was on a different level compared to most home computers

[@ZXSpectrum128K]

​@@BillFixesEverythingnonsense there's over 33k games for zx 5million can't be wrong

[@BillFixesEverything]

@@ZXSpectrum128K The ZX Spectrum does have some amazing games for it and quite a few better ports then the C64 got and better then the Acorn Electron got as you can see at the end of the video. The Spectrum did have one massive advantage in that it could be programmed to do whatever, no sprite or sound hardware, it was a blank canvas

[@ZXSpectrum128K]

@@BillFixesEverything I think also just 6kb of pixels and only 768 bytes of colour has to be the smallest ram to processor ratio no? Have you seen lotus turbo esprit?

[@BillFixesEverything]

⁠@@ZXSpectrum128K weirdly I do like lotus turbo esprit even though it runs like a slide show

[@MultiMidden]

Big problem with the Electron was that it was slower than the beeb, so many games were run in a lower colour graphics mode than on the beeb as they were faster. The beeb's 8 colours was pretty poor for 1981 (77's Apple II was 16, 79's Atari 4/800 was 256), so games that already didn't look great looked worse. The irony is that just 8kb of additional RAM would have enabled a work around to speed it up to almost beeb speed - but I guess that was discovered too late.

[@BillFixesEverything]

I think the issue was memory cost back then would have ramped the price up closer to the BBC price. A friend of mine had an electron back in the day and would often buy the BBC B versions of games because if they used certain graphic modes, they would work on the Electron. He did come unstuck buying the BBC B version of elite. It would get to the loading picture and crash because part of the screen is in an unsupported graphic mode for the electron. Still he tried one whole Saturday trying to get it to work before taking it back. Back then a lot of kids didn’t know the differences of why one game would work and another wouldn’t. Thanks for your comment