Who Are You Guys..... ???
I'm curious to learn about the guys (and no doubt gals) who keep this forum alive. Were you all Spectrum-heads from the start? Did any of you come later (i.e. post-Quake??). Is this a major nostalgia thing? Are there a lot of old programmers out there as well? WHO ARE YOU MAD PEOPLE?
And, just to keep it relevant to the "Games" theme, what games are you playing now? I've just spent an hour on Manic Miner and enjoyed myself thoroughly. Then I showed my little boy (6 years old, Joseph) Starquake, and he though it was ace.... despite playing on a Wii all day.
And, just to keep it relevant to the "Games" theme, what games are you playing now? I've just spent an hour on Manic Miner and enjoyed myself thoroughly. Then I showed my little boy (6 years old, Joseph) Starquake, and he though it was ace.... despite playing on a Wii all day.
Post edited by Andy Remic on
Comments
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showthread.php?t=24182
I personally have been a non stop Spectrum user since late 1982 but I very rarely play game (usually just to test my Spectrum emulator Spud). I did a lot of coding during the 80's (though nothing of any note) and quite a bit of games hacking.
Yes, it's a major nostalgia thing, I'm a man from the 80's stuck in the wrong decade...
Thanks for pointing out the poll!! It's good to see some (sad) old hands here :-)
Why am I still interested? I love old video games and I've an affection for the Spectrum for obvious reasons so I tend to games on that platform (and the Amiga, for similar reasons). I'm not too into pure nostalgia, though. A lot of games I liked back in the day I'm not so fond of now and don't really bother with, I tend to stick to the stuff that endures well. Manic Miner and Starquake certainly fit that description!
Oh, and I write a retro/indie games blog the link for which is in my sig at the bottom of my posts. The Spectrum gets mentioned quite a lot. ;-)
What am I playing now? The new Phantomas game, cuz I'm reviewing it for a retrogaming fanzine. And I'm planning to give the new Jonathan Cauldwell game, Banger Management, a proper shot soon.
Got my first Spectrum (16K issue 2) around Christmas 1982, having sold my ZX81 to someone locally. Did a lot of amateur programming in the 80s ? mainly assembly ? although nothing too serious, mainly BASIC extensions, ROM tweaks, etc. Also made a few hardware add-ons, parallel interface, 48K upgrade, memory paging unit, etc. Again, nothing fancy ? I tended to read more than I actually did. Then had a bit of a hiatus throughout most of the 90s, although have started (perhaps with the rise of WOS and the internet in general) to spend more time tinkering with Z80 things, although I don?t have much time. Oh, I also bought a second hand QL in 1997. A fascinating machine, but I?m certainly no QL expert.
Never worked in IT ? I spent a long time in the NHS, and now work in education ? and I?m now also a post-grad anthropology student :-o. Hence lots of time to think about what I?d like to do with the Spectrum, but unfortunately (with a hectic, full-time job and a PhD to complete) little time to actually ?do?.
Never really ?did? the games thing. The only one I ever bought was Timegate, following a good review in YS (I think). Oh, and Planet of Death...which came free with the Spectrum. Today, I love reading about the hardware and software squeezes that folk are still performing on this 25+ year old hardware ? the ROM rewrites are a particular interest, as I think I must have memorised Dr Logan?s original book during my early Spectrum days. The whole story of the ROM development is still (despite Geoff?s brilliant work to date) rather incomplete, and demands some more research...just don?t have the time! I'm also looking forward to reading Chris' ULA/Harlequin book.
I personally just generally like computer games :) and the Speccy was my second(first was a pong thingy) and most amazing computer gaming device!! At the time it was just so different to all other "toys". I remember someone on my street got WayOfTheExplodingFist - I had a joystick+interface so several kids from the street were literally living in my house for about 2 weeks - playing a 2 player fighting game that was that good in the 80's.........now that's a good memory and that's the kind of memory that keeps me interested. Especially when you play the likes of Fist or Thrust or Bombjack etc and you find they are still very good to play.
Plus - finding all those programs of all kinds nowadays that you didn't have back then - that's another thing that keeps me interested in ALL retro machines. Virtua Racing on the Sega 32x being a perfect example - as is Neo Drift out on the Neo-Geo....neither of which I played at the time.
Keep up the good work ... remind the younger generation "48k should be enough for anybody" ... ;-)
Oy! That was my signature some time back: "48k ought to be enough for anybody" - Clive Sinclair ;)
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
I was only looking for an emulator at the time though.
I had used wos many times but it never occurred to me to check out the forums. doh.
Been posting on here for years, feels like home now.
That's what happens when one farts in the same cushion year after year. The poor WoS-settee is starting to change colours ... we ought best donate it to the Commodians ... it's taking on that colour, they would probably enjoy it. (Smell? What smell? It was like that when we got it. :rolleyes: -ed)
I had a disk for the ST in '91 that had a Speccy emulator (which was slow and crap) and a year or two later when I got a PC one of the first things I looked out for in the PC mags was a Speccy emulator. Quite sad considering I could have got a proper Speccy for peanuts from the local ads at that time!!!!
I found an ad in one of the PC mags for Brian Gaffs disks and ordered the wonderful Z80 emulator by Gerton Lunter with a load of .SNA images on about four or five 3 1/2 inch disks. A year later I bought a CD-ROM player and found in one of the mags and ad for the Speccy Sensations CD. A year later I found another one which ripped all of the .Z80 files from this site which is where I got the URL from.
Since then I've never looked back.
I don't play many games on emulators nowadays as I suppose I've had my fill of them. I much prefer to build the database to my Speccy site and one of these days I will put a serious amount of time into the website itself to get it matching the time I've put into the database (over 12 years now!!!!!!)
I'm a lonely Portuguese Sinclair user living in California since 1995. I discovered the Spectrum in the summer of '87 and became a fanatic user, completely ignoring Commodores or any other computer brand that was around at the time.
Microhobby was my bible but I also loved to read my cousin's British Speccy magazines.
I used to create my own games in Basic and kept using my Spectrum until 1993 (when everyone else had replaced it with an Amiga or PC).
I moved from Portugal to the U.S. in 1995 and unfortunately made a bad decision and let my sister sell most of my stuff to some German guy named Marius. I almost shot myself with a Sinclair gun when I realized how bad that decision was.
For 11 years I thought about my dear Spectrum and once in a while would check some emulators and the nvg ftp, but never found time to relive the old days full strenght.
In 2006 I decided it was time to change and started rebuilding my collection, buying stuff on eBay and shipping it to a storage place here in the U.S. and another storage place in Portugal. Both places are now full and boxes are touching the ceiling.
I can't remember all the things that I had memorized back then (like, for example, POKEs that I would type everytime I started my Spectrum, just to make the cursor faster, and lots and lots of important system variables), but I'm a lot more active today than I was before.
I help a little bit with the preservation project, scanning books and magazines, preserving tapes as TZXs or sending them to Andy, sending interfaces to people who can reverse engineer them and show everyone how their work.
I helped Anestis organize a sale of a dozen of K-Mouse turbo interfaces, helped with all the paperwork, bank transfer, Paypal transfers, etc.
I'm a dreamer, love to read old threads, love to talk about new possibilities without worrying about being shot by purists, and love to read the new threads too.
Once a year I go to Portugal and little by little I'm organizing my Sinclair collection, getting old hardware fixed, etc. I have a lot of stuff that I want to do, and I'm not stopping this Speccy addiction anytime soon.
I'm also a fan of the ZX81 and Timex computers, but not as enthusiastic as I am with the Spectrum.
I would like to learn electronics one day, but don't think I can do it.
I like to support new hardware and software projects, and encourage people to continue their work.
I look forward to connect my Spectrum to the internet. Three years ago people were telling me to forget about it, but there's someone here in this forum who shares my enthusiasm about it and the dream is becoming a reality.
So, there. Pfff, I almost felt like ewgf typing all this stuff...
LOve loading up games I played 20+ years ago, and getting that warm gooey feeling (rose tinted?) inside that just, for a split second, reminds you of a life free of adult induced stress and worries.
I played Rescue last week, still love that game.
good on ya man, I m sure your hard work and dedication will be worth it
It was very difficult to be a Speccy user in Argentina, the C64 was FAR more popular... in my school class I was the only Speccy user... all the other guys had a C64 or a PC (in early nineties). Also the MSX had a fair share of users (through the Talent DPC-200 -MSX- and the TPC-310 -MSX2-, both rebadged Daewoo MSX machines).
I always bought Microhobby, it came imported from Spain with some months of delay but I enjoyed them a lot.
I came back to the Speccy in 2001-2002, discovered WOS, css, ecss and a lot of emulators; I love old games (I'm admin of a retro console gaming forum: http://www.retrogaming.com.ar). I've got in the last 3 years a small but nice collection of Sinclair systems which you can see at my Speccy-dedicated site: http://www.speccy.com.ar (in the "Mi colecci?n" link).
Anyway, about me. I'm 34, I'm originally from Hackney in East London. Now living in sunny Essex... I'm a bit of a pixel pusher. I re-drew all the graphics for a new Speccy version Double Dragon a few years back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTg_9xy8NmQ
I also re-drew the graphics for the various PC Target; Renegade remakes out there and also designed the levels and drew the graphics on Double Dragon Forver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2CSD8FsxBM
LCD,
As a member of SPC I am intrested about the developments.
And you did an excellent job! A lot of people (me included) are still hoping to see that game completed one day.
my hobbies include, painting, riding my bike (only done it twice), reading, writting, playing on my xbox, looking at the net, and writting stuff on WOS.
i have a gf, and a facebook account.
i work for the NHS.
i like the speccy beacuse it reminds me of having a speccy, and playing all the great games. they were more innocent times in my life. also the games are free.
i come from yorkshire, you should visit, its a great place for families and people on their own. whitby is nice, it is next to the sea.
I made a few minor corrections matey, hope you don't mind :D
....and I'm originally from Newcastle so yes I'm sure my city shares a few similarities to what I said about Yorkshire. Newcastle is grey, very grey, I know I can't deny that one.
As for smack needles on the beach well I wouldn't know ours have more dogshit and broken glass to be honest, unless you go a little further along to Seaton Sluece or Blyth, then you can use the heroin needles as anti WMDs to defend your sandcastle, with a bit of imagination the look just like missiles :D
might as well be honest. :-D
Honest meaning in a parallel universe where I live in a trailer and actually have kids.
I actually live in a house, it's nice, it has air conditioning.
But the town is horrible everyone is so nice to your face, I'd love to know the type of shit they say about "That Foreigner" behind my back, and I know they do.
The trashy people as the "oh so perfect residents" call them live in a few apartment complexes near where I work. One is predominantly Mexican and full of crackheads, and crystal meth dealers, the the other is full of rednecks (reinforcing the stereotype even more).
No where I live it's pretty peaceful, it's just full of 2 faced hypocrites, and even though Newcastle is grey and depressing I kinda miss the place, after all all my best friends are there, and I don't really feel like socialising with the idiots I'm surrounded by here in the US :lol:
....and I really am gonna try to visit home sometime later in the year, it's pissing me off now, I've planned a trip home abput 4 times now and every time something has happened to make me change my fucking plans :mad:
Now that I think about it, I was really young for a computer...
It was on christmas eve and the machine a +2... me, my sister and my Dad where completely thrilled with it, but by the time of new year's eve, my dad was so bored with the tape loading that he swapped the machine for a +3 (and me and my sister spent an entire day typing LOADING "", when all it took for the games to start was to type ENTER...). Fun fact: asside from Final Whistle football(my dad), arkanoid and saboteur 2(my sister), neither my sister or my dad ever played any speccy again...
I played it non stop (and ruinned 5 joysticks, mostly with daley thompson super test) till 90/91... then I got my first game boy, summer vacations came along and I took the speccy to my vacation house never to come to Lisbon again...last game I remember being really hooked with was Goonies (some boyfriend of my sister found it in a disk and we used to play it toghether or me simply alone while he and my sis sneaked out to make out).
of course that by then I got a SNES on christmas and sort of forgot speccy (although some games I never trully did, like Footy of the year and final whistle).
If I'm not mistaken, in 93 or 94 my +3 stopped working... I never really knew what happen, he simply couldn't read the disks... so proudly he went to the basement.
In 99 when I got my first PC and got contact with the net I was brousing about speccy and found WOS. it was like a dream. I downloaded the emulator, most of my old games (some I still find this day, and realise I had completely forgoten about them, and after 10 years I haven't yet finish my goal of having a file with all "my old games" on it...), but much better than that, I was finally able to play most of the games that my friends bragged they had on +2 and 48k and I didn't have on my +3 (the one that gave me the most joy was defenetly the F1 game where you manage and change tires, I still play it with my friends to this day!).
now why it took me nearly 6 years to join WOS forums is sort of a mistery I can't really explain... I think it must be something to do with changing PC's, changing from windows 98 to windos XP and the emulator not working... from that it evolved with the forum being fun and nice... and the people here do make it a good comunity to be around...something I surelly do for the years to come.
Finaly, I'm Portuguese and I live in Lisbon, My real name is Miguel, I should be a movie director, but since I need to pay my bills I work in my family company and I do some freelance writing and very litle freelance directing. as for my nick name (that makes most people think I'm dutch) was something that curiously came around the same time I was growing my speccy, I was playing pirates with lego or playmobil, and I needed a pirate name, and I knew something about pirates being dutch (the flying ducthmen! I must have seen it in a cartoon or ripleys, believe it or not...) and my Panini euro 88 stickers colection had the Dutch Squad filled with players called Van... I also used to go to the chinese restaurant where they had the VanTan soop, and that evolved from there... I rarely used the name again until I staterted to need a nick for the net... and that's when I revivived "VanTammen" (It was the only name I tried that no one used before).
And I guess, in terms of Speccy and WOS, that's who I am!
So that was back in 1987.
It missed colours and sound because of defects ;) Still I enjoyed it!
Before having a comptuer I dreamt about owning one, and I always needed to visit the computer departments at electronic shops.
I remember before I had my first Spectrum, in one shop I typed on something with the same keys as the ZX Spectrum 128K (with heatsink), but that must have been the QL.
Years later I used some QL's from my uncle, and the QL also gave lot's of fun, but nothing compared to the Spectrum.
I also remember I got my first 128K Spectrum (heatsink), and I was SO happy! I could play lot's of new games, with fantastic music!
Later I got a Disciple interface, and that time I felt like having the best setup in the world! I still think that was the best setup at that time.
Now I use ZX Spectrum 128K's, some +2's, DivIDE, two MB02's, K-Mouse, PC Keyboard Interface and much more.
And I feel like I've only just begun.
Time is unimportant. Age is unimportant. You are as old as you feel (in my case 21), and Spectrum stays as long as people having fun with it!
That will be a long time!
www.benophetinternet.nl/hobby
Played it a lot back in the day, felt bad moving over to the Amiga in the late 80's ! Sadly i sold my Speccy/tons of games to someone for 50 quid which i thought was a good deal back then ! Wish i had kept it though.
Years later i saw an advert in a PC mag for a Speccy emulator which i sent off for and got back into playing Speccy games on my PC for the first time in ages !
When the net got popular i found WOS back in 2000 i think, was happy as hell there were manyyyy other fans like myself, always good to talk about the games. Love the homebrew games coming out, the scanned magazines back in the day and retro events, meeting up with fellow Speccy fans etc.
A good chunk of it is that it takes me back to my childhood, the rest is that the games are still very playable, yeah the graphics/sound look outdated but the gameplay is still superb and thats what its about. Plus i dont always have time to load up some epic game on the PC/Console etc, with a Speccy emulator i can have a quick blast here and there