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The Official ZX Spectrum "Rosetinted" Thread

G

Gowans

Member
After the love the Amiga thread has brought forth heres another to the Spectrum.
(The predecessor to the Amiga for me & so many others here in the UK)

The Official Spectrum "Rosetinited" Thread

spectrum_1.jpg


So lets look back at the machine that gave us:

Jetpac, Back to Skool, R-Type, Elite, Chase HQ, Operation Wolf, Daily Thompson,Rainbow Islands, Dizzy, Atic Attack, Batman, Bubble Bobble, Jet Set Willy

Also never forget: The Load Screens :D
 
You're such a sweetie. This thread better be good.

So, yeah, the old man got me a Speccy when I was 4. By 6 I was programming. By 30 I'd designed a loading screen for a popular Spectrum emulator on the DS.

Progress, baby.

Seriously, an amazing little machine. I still have my rubber keyboard 48, my +1 and stacks of games and mags and a whole box of nostalgia.

*sobs*
 
Sigh finally a decent console getting some attention!

Played way too much Dynamite Dan 1 & 2 as a kid, even my mum was obsessed with it. Such awesome choon's.

Also, www.worldofspectrum.org is a beloved treasure trove for anyone interested in the system.
 
I've been enjoying ZX Spectrum nostalgia recently thanks to the 'The ZX Spectrum Book' by Andrew Rollings. I keep it on my desk at work (I work at a games developer) and at least a couple of times a day someone stops and picks it up.

It's a great book, highly recommended, despite the costly shipping.

http://www.zxgoldenyears.com/
 
Yeah I have the coolest Dad ever that got me this and used to play with me.

We got some magasines and I'd type out teh pages of code into the Amiga from teh back of the mag to make a basic game or animated picture appear :)

I had this little rubber beauty then a bigger one with no tape player, my friend got one too and had one with a tape player attached at the time I thought it was PIMP till at my Dad came back with a floppy disk drive for it and I remeber how amazed we were loading games on it and they would be so fast compared to the tape.

God that tape loading used to kill me, sometimes it wouldn't work and you had to start again god!!! I can still remember the noise and colour bars :lol
 
Mmmkay said:
Played way too much Dynamite Dan 1 & 2 as a kid, even my mum was obsessed with it. Such awesome choon's.
Click to expand...

I still play Dynamite Dan. I love the 2D platformers on the Speccy, my favourites were DD, JSW, Manic Miner, Rollercoaster, all the Monty games (especially Auf...) - classic stuff.
 
I have one of the ZX models sitting on a bookshelf in my house. It hink it's the American branding, without the adorable little rainbow (which mine doesn't have). I have people come over all the time who can't believe it's actually a computer.

I remember sitting in my living room typing (if you can call what you had to do with the ZX typing) out an entire copy of Frogger from a computing magazine just so I could have something to play on it.

Ah, the good old days where you had to key in the game before you could save it to a tape cassette.

Edit: Oh, and someone needs to fire up a TRS-80 Color Computer thread, as I still lack posting privileges.
 
nofilter said:
I still play Dynamite Dan. I love the 2D platformers on the Speccy, my favourites were DD, JSW, Manic Miner, Rollercoaster, all the Monty games (especially Auf...) - classic stuff.
Click to expand...

Monty!!! I loved that game played it so much
MontyOnTheRun_SpectrumCover.jpg


Cant remember ever getting that far in any of the games as I was only wee but man it didn;t matter.

I always remember of the Ghostbusters game I'd just ride the car, try upgrades then get to the bit where you get the ghost trap then I'd get confused. :lol
 
ha, the lovely sound of ye good ole spectrum loading a game from an audio tape. 10 minutes loadings :lol


You forgot Cookie in your list è.é


cookie.gif
 
Got one when I was 3, started my gaming hobby. Jet Pack was my favourite along with DD ( That game was hard! ).
 
My mom bought a beautiful Spectrum 48k for my birthday. After a couple of months, the poor machine broke down (probably due to overheating thanks to my multitask programming) and she promptly took it back to the electrical retailer for a replacement. Sadly, the retailer had none available at the time and without hesitation, my mother asked if she could just have store credit, which she then used to buy a vacuum cleaner. Thanks mom, best birthday ever, psychologically scarred for life.

Well, after that argumentative year, the family picked up a Spectrum +2 and my gaming legacy started. I remember playing a game called Final Approach for almost an eternity, it was the worst piece of shit software I've ever witnessed, but my 7 yr old brain couldn't comprehend this, having a blue bit at the top for sky, a green bit at the bottom for ground and 8 white dots to resemble a runway was heaven at the time.

Edit:

Oh, and buying games for 99p at the corner shop... How I miss those prices, nowadays, MS expect us to pay for a damn theme!
 
This thread cannot be complete without this link.

[Edit: Damn it, knew I'd taken too long to respond...]

I was on the other side of the great Spectrum vs BBC Micro wars, though I did make some money writing magazine listings for the Spectrum as well as the Beeb, and played a lot of games on it round at a friend's house. Even with the slightly rosetinted glasses I can't help remembering vast numbers of incredibly derivative and incredibly bad games for it. But there were plenty of true gems shining through as well.

We should raise our colour-clashing glasses to titles such as:

Everyone's a Wally
Chaos
Feud
Sabre Wulf
Jetpac
 
Gowans007 said:
:lol :lol :lol

Anyone remember the exact steps to getting a game to load?

I can't remember, was it just type Load the enter and hit play?
Click to expand...

Load ""

(which I still pronounce as Load Printsign Printsign)
 
iapetus said:
We should raise our colour-clashing glasses to titles such as:

Everyone's a Wally
Chaos
Feud
Sabre Wulf
Jetpac
Click to expand...

Everyone's a Wally (or at least, 3 Weeks In Paradise) had an anti-colour-clash mode. Can't remember which button you pressed, but it made the characters the same colour as the background. You couldn't really see them (a la Jack the Nipper) but hey - no colour-clash! =)
 
Spectrum 128k here. I can still hear the sounds of the loading in my head. Ten minutes loading to get a taping error. Those were the days. :lol
 
Gowans007 said:
Ahhh Printsign Printsign I remember now, phew!
Click to expand...

I wonder why we called it 'printsign'? Was that the Currah Microspeech saying that or something? It just kind of stuck. 26 years later, I still sometimes say that instead of 'quote'...
 
iapetus said:
Bomb Jack was definitely great, but I distinctly remember Renegade/Target Renegade being trash.
Click to expand...

Renegade wasn't great, but Target: Renegade was the first best co-op game ever.
 
Robocop (128 version with one of the best title tunes ever)
Hungry Horace
Wheelie
Knightlore
Atic Atac
Alien 8
Kokotoni Wilf
Cobra (hardest game I ever played)
Beach Head
Nodes Of Yesod

Other memories:

Typing out game listings
Asking grown-ups for the speccy mags (Smiths had them up with the pornos on the top shelf)
Balancing the power pack on the tape leads when they were wearing out

Such an important machine..
 
My first PC, my first gaming machine, though it wasn't called ZX Spectrum in Poland but Timex 2048.

Here it is in its full glory (not mine of course):

timex_2048.jpg


I was very young when I got it, I think 6 years old so I don't remember all games that I've played.

My favourites were Exolon, Knight Lore, Commando (with excellent grenades explosions smoke!) and... ARMY MOVES!. That last game rocked hard. Later I fell in love with Dizzy.

I had hundreds and hundreds of games for my Timex, warezing was so natural back in the late 80's in Poland - you could just walk into a store and buy warezed cassettes.

Memories.
 
Gowans007 said:
Monty!!! I loved that game played it so much
MontyOnTheRun_SpectrumCover.jpg


Cant remember ever getting that far in any of the games as I was only wee but man it didn;t matter.

I always remember of the Ghostbusters game I'd just ride the car, try upgrades then get to the bit where you get the ghost trap then I'd get confused. :lol
Click to expand...

Great game, but the C64 version - as with most games - was far, far better :)


Can anyone remember what that Codemasters speccy game was set in a Prison Camp? It used that old isometric 3d type stuff.
 
Yay for Spectrum!
My first machine.

Did someone mention Jetpac?
Me and my crew did a Spectrum Jetpac remake 2 years ago. When we saw the Live Arcade version we were glad ours looked better :p

You can download it here
 
pswii60 said:
Can anyone remember what that Codemasters speccy game was set in a Prison Camp? It used that old isometric 3d type stuff.
Click to expand...

The Great Escape? Used to play that for hours and never get anywhere...


4qitr40.gif
 
Did any of you UK guys own an Amstrad CPC 464? One of the big electrical retailers in Australia used to sell them in the 1980s (Retravision).

I was dying for a C64 but my grandmother was manager at a Retravision store so guess who ended up with an Amstrad + green screen monitor?

Some fantastic memories though. By the sound of things, the Amstrad and Spectrum were pretty identical?

Did the spectrum get a game called "EIDOLON"? God damn that was ahead of it's time.. The atmosphere was amazing!
 
I was 8yrs old when my parents bought me a ZX Spectrum 48K+. It had the injection-moulded keyboard and a reset button oooooooohhhhhh!!!

I loved the Kempston joystick option in games like "Daley ThompsonÂ’s Decathlon". It would go mental if you didn't have a joystick connected, which was ideal for waggleathons like the 100-Metre dash. :lol

"Outrun" was ridiculous. On completion of each stage you would be asked to load the next stage from cassette. It came with the original soundtrack on tape so if you wanted the full "Arcade" experience :lol then you would be expected to do a lot of tape swapping.

Fond memories of the Spectrum I do have.:D
 
Lee N said:
Head over Heels.. best game on the speccy.
Click to expand...

How could I forget this, this game was the source of many happy times & more fights between me & my little bro.

Weirdest cute but ugly characters ever tho, Such big feet/foot :)

200px-HoHcover.jpg

HeadOverHeels.png
 
pubba said:
Some fantastic memories though. By the sound of things, the Amstrad and Spectrum were pretty identical?
Click to expand...



A lot of Spectrum games were available on the CPC too. I owned both. Well, a CPC 6128, a few years (2 maybe) after the ZX.
3.5" disks and lots of colours, I was like "ZOMG TEH GFX LOOK AMAZING" :lol
 
This is the greatest game ever made... (at least I believed it was when I played it twenty years ago)

Turbo Esprit

62h1nyf.gif
 
why is pyjamarama yet to be mentioned?!

256px-ZX_pyjamarama.png


You've got to wake up or you'll be FIRED! God that game was aces. It even had a level where you walk in and it's classic space invaders, but you throw knives and forks at the baddies in the sky.

AWEZOME
 
wow World of Spectrum has a massive text adventure section too HERE

I tryed to play a few, some where entertaining for a little while but as a kid they got instantly turned off after the whole reading part got boring after 5mins when I could be playing something with action.

Was anyone into these?
 
we got this far without people mentioning Deathchase 2000?!

Anyways!

Lazer Squad (OMG THE KING!!)
Death Chase 2000
Head Over Heels
Saboteur
Starquake
Highway Encounter
Quazatron
Ranarama
Wizards Lair
The Trap Door
Dan Dare 3 (OMG how is this possible?!)
Chaos
Ant Attack
Monty Mole (better than the C64 version by miles (unlike Monty on the Run)
Trans Am
Android/android 2
Booty
Beach Head
Ant Attack
Jetpac
Daley Thompsons Decathlon
Stop the ITA Express
Chuckie Egg
Fairlight
Dizzy Series
Dangermouse
Factory Breakout
Lords of Midnight
Exolon
Finders Keepers
Jack the Nipper
Harrier Attack
Batman
Trashman
Atic Atac
Thrusta
Wriggler
Pyjamarama
Everyones a Wally
the Snowman
Night Gunner
Kosmic Kanga
Knight Lore
Dragon Tork of Avalon
Manic Miner
Jet Set Willy
Dynamite Dan
Technician Ted
The Prize
Wheelie
Fred
Skool Daze
Back 2 Skool


phew - just off the top of my head ... wow.
 
Gowans007 said:
Yeah the sound track beats all but wasn't that game really really weird?
Click to expand...

Really weird, but I enjoyed it. Don't think I ever completed it, though.

Oh, and did anyone play a game called Zub?

zub_cpc.gif


Incredibly bland platformer, but I remember loving the 'story' way back when. :)
 
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