the lost years...
hello
what i am refering to in the title is the years 1993-1997 when the ZX spectrum was dormant.i know that WOS was set up in 1995,but i am guessing it really took off from 1998 onwards.did anybody think that after the spectrum scene died,that was its death knell?.was this the case in all countries connected with the spectrum?.i hope these years are right...thank you
colin
what i am refering to in the title is the years 1993-1997 when the ZX spectrum was dormant.i know that WOS was set up in 1995,but i am guessing it really took off from 1998 onwards.did anybody think that after the spectrum scene died,that was its death knell?.was this the case in all countries connected with the spectrum?.i hope these years are right...thank you
colin
Post edited by ladderman on
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cheers
I wonder how much overlap there was between the spectrum's original commercial life and its presence on the internet. css was formed in 1993 and had 500 posts in its first month in Dec 1993. Or, rather, that may just be when dejanews came into existence and started archiving newsgroups. I see Arnt (author of JPP, the first spectrum emulator for the PC) got the ball rolling to form css in Oct 1993 but a mailing list for sinclair enthusiasts existed some time before that (I don't know when that started).
I know when I started reading css (I believe early 1994) I was downloading plenty of games from nvg (the norwegian site, still there) and dcc.uchile.cl. Hundreds to thousands of snaps were available.
Edit: I should have scrolled down further to Aaron Priven's post in the thread above:
"
: The following is a list of currently active USENET newsgroups as of
: 1 December, 1983.
[many groups deleted]
: net.micro Micro computers of all kinds.
: net.micro.zx Subgroup for zx's.
"
So newsgroups existed discussing Sinclair computers in 1983. I had access to a Multics system with newsgroups at a local university in the mid '80s (using my ts2068 + ts2050 modem + vt100 emulator and a shell account) and seem to recall coming across this but without much activity. But it's all pretty hazy now. Compuserve in the states also had a timex/sinclair group but I never got into that as that was for $. Don't know whether it was worthwhile or not either.
The Russian fido group I'm sure existed beginning in the late '80s to early '90s as well. But exact dates would have to come from someone in the know in Russia. Its main purpose was (and is it seems) distributing pirated software. If you'd known about it and could find a way to connect to fidonet across the iron curtain, it would have been the ultimate playground tape swap.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
I was one of those people, and I voted for the creation of CSS.
I see the same enthusiasm for the scene today as I did back then. Of course, everyone's projects were different (mainly emulator-based), but still the same excitement.
From mailing list, through newsgroups and now web forums, the venue and people may have changed, but the love of the subject certainly hasn't.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
I can't remember the first emulator, only that I'm sure I had to send money to the Netherlands to get a registered copy would be in 1994 - any ideas??
Yeah, that would be Z80 by Gerton. The z80 (invented by Gerton) is a newer snapshot format than sna so we can still go further back...
This reminds of an article I read the other day about how the Internet (capital I) has no history.. anyone trying to research how things were 5, 10, 15, 20, years ago will have a hard time. It's not like a library with old books and old newspapers, that's for sure.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
Ah, yeah I remember ijs too. It had the largest repository at that time (I think) but I couldn't always connect (too many users) so went to nvg and uchile.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
Thanks for that
You can go to http://www.archive.org/ which takes snap shots of websites for archives. Its like a library, but obviously does not contain everything.
I also remember having Z80 emulating the 128 on an 8086 PC with no sound card. The games ran at ~20% speed, and only one channel of the 128k sound would be played back - on the PC's beeper.
I remember being blown away when I upgraded to a 25MHz 386sx and Z80 being able to run at 104% :)
I suspect it's a fairly small snapshot of the web. Google had (and has I assume) the largest index of web pages but according to estimates a couple of years ago only covered about 30 to 35% of all web pages out there. Part of the reason had to do with isolated pockets of interlinked web pages that can never be reached by automated crawlers and whose owners don't want / don't care to list their pages with Google (or whoever) by submitting a link and part because of the growth the web is experiencing.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
"11/11/88 First line of code written"
JPP's jpp.txt file has more details:
================
The snapshot file format
This format (filetype .SNA) is the format used by the Mirage
Microdriver "Dump" command. It is also used by Peter McGavin's
Spectrum emulator for the Amiga.
================
JPP v1.0 could handle snapshot files.
<1vmvnu$eaq@flode.nvg.unit.no>
16 Jun 1993, by NVG founder Arnt Gulbrandsen
With first public release in 1991 I gather. JPP was publicly released earlier in 1991 with betas existing prior and Pedro Gimeno's Spanish emulator was also released sometime in 1991.
But the earliest Spectrum emulators I can find seem to be SpecEmu for the Atari ST in April 1987, Speccy for the ST in July 1990 and Spectrum 1.0 for the Amiga in Oct 1990. I spotted references to an Italian Spectrum emulator for the Amiga that was for sale in 1990 or earlier.
One thing is clear though: SNA was not first file format. The earlier emulators all had a way of loading from tape through audio and the ST/Amiga emulators saved something like a tap file to disk.
I spent a little time on google groups and it looks like people were talking about putting all their stuff at an ftp site in early 1994 but were concerned about legality: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.sinclair/browse_thread/thread/5a33c0301e333ce3/85cc37ac236402b8?lnk=st&q=comp.sys.sinclair+faq&rnum=92#85cc37ac236402b8
Earlier messages going back to 1990 talk about people trading programs and the odd brief posting of an archive at an ftp site that was pulled down after a week.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
<1994Jan24.144443.863@cathy.ijs.si>
24 Jan 94, by Andrej Bauer.
A pertinent quote from that thread:
======
Superb! You'll have to know the problems with copyright, so read the
FAQ, but we've been waiting for someone to set up a snapshot ftp
site.
======
This was from CSS, the NVG post was on alt.folklore.computers, hence the knowledge disconnect.
Ha, yeah. Surprised ijs was so early though as the first versions of the css faq don't mention it but do mention nvg, dresden and wuarchive.
Marat Fazallun was the first css faq maintainer. He has been erroneously credited among the msx crowd with starting z80 emulation with his popular z80 core. At this point several emulators for the Spectrum existed without Marat having written a line of code yet, with some spectrum emulators crediting a prior cpm emulator for z80 emulation inspiration. Must locate that webpage and put it straight -- it bothered me to read such a wrong statement when I came across it.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
<32CCC3C1.44@gns.getronics.nl>
1997/01/03, by someone calling himself Martijn van der Heide.
Obviously a made-up name.
After packing my Speccy away and eventually selling it i moved onto the Amiga/consoles/PC
It was when i bought a PC mag in the early-mid 90's i saw an advert for a Speccy emulator with tons of games i recognised the names of. Sent off for that (and a few others) and loved playing those games again on the PC ! When the internet really took off i downloaded lots of games from that Norwegian site and when i found WOS it was brilliant and the rest is history.
Where did you get them from? We did have one BIG customer of our SNA file disks back in 94, could that have been you? Are you THE Mr G?
~If you didn't get them from Alchemist, I would like to know what other library was doing sna files.....
Nick, I too used to run Z80 on an old Amstrad 8086 machine - how I jumped for joy when I got a 486DX2/66 ! :D
For me, the ZX was very much alive during that time. I started on the demoscene around the time that YS ended, and was quite active (producing demos) through to around 1996/7, when other projects took over my time. I later got back into the scene, of course... 2000 I started raww.org.
While I was at University I started an official online recreation of the YS Tipshop Tiptionary, scanning in the pages and OCR'ing them... I wanted to produce the project and asked Future Publishing for permission, which was granted. I'd be surprised if I still had that email tho'. That would have been around 1995.
So for me the ZX was alive, just a little more "underground" than it had been previously.
My first experience of emulation was Christoph Zwerschke's ZX81 emulator on the Atari ST, in 1990 I think. It ran at almost perfect speed and even handled things like FAST mode and the scrambled chracter set in Astral Convoy. Soon after, I got my hands on Speccy, which could only manage about 25-40% of Spectrum speed in most cases, although some games were still quite playable.
Yeah. Yesterday when I saw this topic, I was gonna write something about the demo scene which I saw was not mentioned in the topic yet, but I was tired and couldn't be arsed to post.
For me it's pretty much as you described. Used to receive lots of demos (and write some myself of course) in those years after about 1992/1993, mainly from Poland and the other eastern european countries plus of course a couple from the U.K., it was the time when the "oldskool" style was still going strong and before the demo scene shifted towards Russia. I did demo reviews for FBIs (that dude from the "Unbelievables" who you surely know, icabod) german fanzine in those years, before I finally lost interest around 1997. In fact, when a lot of demos wouldn't run smoothly on a bog-standard 128k speccy due to being programmed for a Pentagon/Scorpion clone, this certainly contributed to that loss of interest ...
Edited to add: I hereby end this thread, as usually whenever I post suddenly replies to that topic magically cease to come forth.
With no covertapes to write games for I continued to support the Spectrum by publishing games myself via mail order. Crazy Golf, Demolition, Gloop and Dead or Alive were all written during this time. I struggled on for a while, getting the odd review in fanzines here and there, but sales dwindled and by 1998 had dried up completely. At that point I decided to call it a day.
Not long after I got an internet connection, and stumbled across this site. I signed the WoS guestbook in 2000 and lurked around the forums for a while, but having seen how few new games were being developed I decided to start work on Egghead 3 early in 2002. The rest, as they say, is history.
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