The Spectrum Show EP 111

[@PeteFinn]

I've never owned a Spectrum, in fact I've never even used one. I grew up with the VIC-20, C64 and Amiga just like most kids here in Finland, but I absolutely love watching these Spectrum Shows! They always bring me back to the awesome 80s and let me relive the excitement of playing with these wonderful machines! Thank you very much for your monthly journeys back in time!

[@DaveMcGarry]

Such a heartwarming post! Hope you are staying warm there in Finland from a Brit sweating in sunny Australia! Spectrum forever 🌈

[@PeteFinn]

@@DaveMcGarry It's starting to get a bit chilly here - and dark! Sunny Australia doesn't sound bad at all, to be honest! :)

[@trefwoordpunk2225]

Oh how I wish I could have afforded this stuff at the time...I used to always lust over that +D advert in the magazines....my pocket money barely stretched to a 3.99 title from John Menzies in those days though!

[@kennethgibson456]

Snap!

[@richardnewton6175]

Thanks for the video Paul. Brings back fond memories. I still have my Disciple Interface and Spectrum+ 128K at my father's which I'll need to dig out and check if still working. Not sure about the +D but the Disciple which was the bigger unit did work with 128K and could take 128K snapshots. I think you either pressed a key while pressing the Snapshot button or it came up with a menu. I would think the +D should work with 128K as well. Back in the day I made a disk organiser and disc editor for it and sold a fair few copies. I also recall in our computer club at the time utilising the network connections for a few Spectrums with Disciples for a database application I programmed to store race results. The finish times would be entered into each Spectrum and the results merged into the 'master' Spectrum and sorting on various categories performed. The results were then printed out on the connected printer. Such a good peripheral. As part of my computer club I remember going to the MGT factory in South Wales and meeting Bruce Gordon where we discussed some of the features of the upcoming SAM Coupe. He was a smart Scotsman and listened to us about keeping the network connection. Shame the SAM Coupe took a little too long to come to market as was a lovely machine. The next door neighbour did buy one but don't know if they still have it.

[@RetroBoxRoom]

The +D does work with a 128K and +2 (Grey). You press a different key to take a 128K snapshot. 4 = 48K Snapshot, 5 = 128K Snapshot.

[@saintuk70]

ahhh....Hunchback :) Oh and seeing the Manic Miner Lost Levels makes me want to revisit the amazing site that was Retrospec.

[@8-bitsteve500]

Another superb episode and... oh my word!! To have my name on a TSS episode, I can die happy now. Thanks so much guys!

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

Sometimes comments or questions can stir ideas..

[@geoffneil5073]

Thanks for the idea I really enjoyed playing The Lost Levels

[@paulweston1106]

I had the original Disciple along with a Star dot matrix printer; I did quite a bit of my college work on it using a crude DTP package that gave different fonts to the standard usually available on the Spectrum. The ability to rip games straight from memory was amazing at the time, good for bypassing any most copy protection and also good as a game save feature. Mine suffered that common problem of resetting the Spectrum if the interface wobbled slightly.

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

Yes, I do have a DTP package for the +3 and will get round to using it at some point.

[@jgbreezer]

I persuaded my parents to help me get a Star dot matrix printer (LC-20 I think, was newer and better than the LC-10 iirc) so I could do and print out work for college, then later with a PC until I got an ink-jet. I did my Technology & Design (which was metalwork/woodwork/design) GCSE write up (and maybe one other) on er.. not Tasword but the OCP DTP package I still have in its box. Also used it a lot for letter writing so I could keep copies; my handwriting can be a bit messy anyway, left-handedness doesn't help either (easier to smudge).

[@robsretrostuff]

Great episode as always. Ah, the printer sounds and manually feeding the paper using the roller, great memories I had completely forgotten about. Keep up the good work, much appreciated

[@heyhonpuds]

Congrats on 10k subscribers 🏆

[@TRONMAGNUM2099]

I didn't own a speccy until 2020 but I own 5 now. I grew up with the C64 here in the states. Just found your show but wanted to say it is really great!

[@TheRetroEngine]

1 million channel views!!!! Congrats and this is EP 111 - coincidence? Spooky

[@kins749]

Another great show with all of my favourite sections

[@LongyFromCork]

Another great episode. I have a Nintendo DS, so can't wait to try Manic Miner - The Lost Levels. After fixing the type in, I was almost expecting you to make some modifications to the gameplay to make it more exciting, such as dropping more than one enemy, and perhaps using a level timer and energy system to make it a bit more frantic. Really impressed how you always know how to fix the type ins. Must have been really frustrating for anyone back in the day who didn't know how to, especially after spending such a long time typing in. Keep up the good work.

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

I've just typed a huge one with a LOT of errors. Still working through them with a hope to get it working for a future episode. Very annoying it is.. so many different things not working simultaneously!

[@geoffneil5073]

The Lost Levels are great but as I said can be a bit tricky from out offset

[@Dev_olution]

Top stuff as always, cheers Paul

[@RetroJay1974]

Thanks for making this video! I have a +D with its disk drive, and it has confirmed my +D has been opened at some point in its life. The seller or somebody else had taken the screws off the case for some reason, then put them back minus one screw but also decided to place little washers on each screw? I still need to test the thing to ensure it works.

[@rastersoft]

There was a copy protection trick against NMI hardware copiers: it consisted on pointing the Stack Pointer register (SP) into the ROM, or into important code. That way, when pressing the NMI button, the return address would be "stored" in ROM (thus the system would miss it), or it would overwrite important code. In the former case, after the copy routine ended and tried to return to the original code, it would jump to a random address, the one at the ROM. In the later case, when the processor tries to run that code, it would have been altered and the code would fail too. Of course, not having the SP is an important drawback, so this trick was usually done in the main menu (precisely the point where you usually do the snapshot). Try to do it during the game itself. BTW: the Disciple and the Plus D have its own 8K static RAM, so any extra data outside the NMI return address (like the content of the registers) is stored outside the computer's "normal" memory, thus only the two bytes for the NMI returning address are needed in "normal" RAM memory.

[@bryngunn]

What? I need to wait another month for the next one! Love it. Thanks Guys.

[@kcinplatinumgaming2598]

oh what fun! I started writing software on the zx81 and moved to the spectrums back in 1988, My first ever proper purchase was a 128+2B from a catalog 179.99 was the price lol .. soon after I moved to developing 6502 on the C64 until the Amigas came along.. The spectrum was a good turning point in my life .. Z80 8 bit was my time! to shine :D .. long live Clives Sinclair's spectrum .. uks cheapest and lowest cost door wedges lol ..

[@frankowalker4662]

Ahhh, the sound of a dot matrix printer. Bliss.

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

It's the sound of my early life... love it.

[@Andre0238]

I´m sure Allan Turvey can convert MM to Spectrum ;)

[@davidpowell9965]

I loved the Plus D. Later I got the UniDOS replacement rom and disk, which added a lot of nice stuff like subdirectories. I used it with the PCG DTP Suite a lot, that was a cool modular piece of software for wordprocessing, editing images, and laying out pages, and squeezing as good a quality as you can get from a 9 pin printer from it.

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

I have that program and hope to review it soon.

[@AmbersKnight]

Great to see you back so soon :)

[@gertsy2000]

Great show. Subscribed.

[@computergamesplayed3718]

Great video 👍

[@Huddison]

I have to say that Manic Miner the lost levels, looks fantastic and also very faithful to the original MM - I must give this one a go!

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

I found them very tricky.. but Geoff ripped through them.

[@geoffneil5073]

@@BuckingTheTrend2008 I wouldn't say ripped through them, being able to start again at the level you last got to is a great help.

[@bilbobaggings]

Finally managed to resubscribe to patreon. Yippppeeee!

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

Thank you for your support. It wouldn't be possible without my Patrons.

[@KingPepper41]

One question Paul Jenkinson, which you never answered, was the fact, does the Plus D interface work on a 128K ZX-Spectrum, as that would have more room for the games to load in, and thus, less crashing and better, compatibility i should imagine. - Thanks for the continuing Spectrum Shows.

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

Yes it does. You press a different button to save 128k snapshots.

[@train.sleep.eat.repeat5278]

Sunday now sorted👍

[@geoffneil5073]

Great show as always Paul, I've tried Sir Lancelot and agree it is very frustrating.

[@flmoog]

Mr Willy is back!

[@mikeyandwho]

Another amazing edition!

[@bazza5699]

hey paul. you have so many videos, can i ask if you've done one covering the MiSTer spectrum core, curious to know what you make of it?

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

No, not yet. Don't know enough about it but it does look great with multiple cores.

[@fatbelly2438]

there was a type in program in a mag where it told us that a 48k and a 128k where the same inside and just typing in a code would turn your 48k into a 128k..i spent ages typing it in and when run it said aprilfool scowling down the screen.. i was gutted lol

[@fandabidozi3191]

How are you getting such a clear picture on your monitor? I tried my +3 recently and it was a real blurry.

[@mrpositronia]

Re: Disk interface. Did the games crash because it's a +2a/+3 device, rather than the original 48k/128k/+2 compatibility?

[@zxpresh]

That's what I thought too... it'd be interesting to see if it works better with that hardware, as the +2A/+3 had their own well-documented quirks.

[@TheSudsy]

I remember Birds and Bees was a pain to "copy" it had some weird loader that loaded more than the available memory- it sort of over wrote iteself (that was nearly 40 years ago so my memory may be duff).

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

The one I have has a BASIC loader you can break into and a single chunk of machine code.

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

I wonder what would have been if SINCLAIR Computers had gone with the ZILOG Z800 processor instead of the ZILOG Z80A and would have allowed for an upgrade path to the ZILOG Z8000 processor.

[@Firefoxfifty]

I had forgotten how noisy dot matrix printers are!

[@DaveMcGarry]

But nothing compared to daisywheel 😅

[@stephenrobertson6025]

The bi-directional ones were noisy enough, but the first dotmatrix printer I had was a Commodore MPS 801 single-direction printer which was slow and made a nice bang every time the printer head returned back to the left hand side. It was so noisy I had to be careful when I did any printing to make sure I didn't disturb my family when they were watching TV.

[@vittoriobacchiega9118]

The most noisy pointer was a chain printer used into CED (Central Electronic Data) for huge batch printing during the night. The characters are printed on a steel tape that continuosly run and an hammer, drived by a solenoid catch the appropriate time to hit the steel tape against the printing tape.

[@jezz2k]

Would love to see The Lost Levels & Willy Wood ported/converted to the 48/128 Speccy.

[@bilbobaggings]

Still not managed to pay for patreon access toTPS. Is there another way that i can pay Paul.

[@EidolonFilmsUk]

You should start to add a news section again to TSS, but contemporary, covering new games going into development, games released (inlcuding where to get them from), new peripherals comig out, Next updates etc. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of what's going on, including all the Next software.

[@BuckingTheTrend2008]

If I had help I would. Someone to read forums, check FB etc.. time is tight at the moment. Vacancy open..apply within.

[@billybollockhead5628]

Sir Lancelot I had as a kid, it's a great game, and I could get past level 2 no problems.. But it's RUINED by the length death sequence... I longed for a poke which just restarted me without the death march and floating to top of screen animation... Level 4 (shown as the last level in your review) was always a pain, as if you accidentally press jump too many times on the right hand ladder, you get stuck and cant fall off to platform, so you are forced to go to the top of the screen, and there's no way down.. so wait out timer again.

[@gwishart]

POKE 23790,17 : REM Don't play funeral march when you die. POKE 23891,0 : REM Don't do the floating animation when you die.

[@billybollockhead5628]

@@gwishart : Well that's about 35 years too late.. but thanks anyhow.. if i ever invent a time machine, i'll go back and give it to myself :D

[@madcommodore]

If there is no pass through for the disk interface then where does the joystick interface go? Not very useful for gaming.

[@MarcKloos]

Your printer ribbon is fading? Apply some WD-40 to the ribbon!

[@apppc.celulares6808]

Show BRAZIL TK90X

[@Francisco-vq4cv]

I couldn't agree more. Great Video 💎! Do not miss out - P-R-O-M-O-S-M!!!