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clueless spectrum users

udgoverloadudgoverload
edited January 2004 in Sinclair Miscellaneous
I was quite young when I owned a speccy and didn't know much about how it worked.

When I loaded games via the tape recorder it said in the manual something about adjusting the volume to the correct level, and I thought (for some reason!) you had to have it turned up to maximum. My parents were NOT cheered by the regular "beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooop beeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooop bleep bleep bleep!" for five minutes whenever I wanted to play a game.

I also remember being pretty jealous of someone who had a +2 because it didn't make any noise, and (oh heck this sounds so stupid now!) tried to solve the noise "problem" by wrapping a pillow round the tape recorder while it loaded the game.

Anyone else have any similarly clueless experiences using a spectrum?
Post edited by udgoverload on

Comments

  • chaosmongerschaosmongers
    edited January 2004
    Yes.

    I completely misunderstood what MACHINE CODE was when I had a ZX81.

    I saw that each ZX81 BASIC statement had an ASCII code ... e.g. PRINT is 245, CLS is 251 etc.

    I thought that you could write a machine code program in BASIC by substituting the letters, numbers, commands etc. by poking their ASCII codes straight into memory:

    for example:

    10 PRINT "HELLO"
    20 GOTO 10

    would read:

    29,28,245,11,45,42,49,49,52,11
    30,28,236,29,28

    which may have given the famous Sinclair error "BOLLOCKS IN MACHINE CODE AT 10:0"

  • bjohnnybravobjohnnybravo
    edited January 2004
    OK...how about this one... I was pissed because the Full Throttle wouldn't load... so decided to create my own game like this.
    I didn't have a clue what the computers were all about back then and started writing a program that ended up something like this

    10 REM Full Throttle
    15 REM This is a game with bikes
    20 REM Bike should be like this # (some black blocky graphic)
    25 REM There should be cows on the road
    30 REM Cows should be like this (again some black blocky graphics)
    35 REM Track should be like this
    40 REM /
    \
    45 REM | \
    50 REM | ----
    55 REM \ \
    60 ...
    65 ...

    You get the message :D (You should see it in Slovenian language though... looked even better :D )... and where did I get the running cows idea????

    I even ran for my mum (she was visiting neighbours) to save and run my soon-to-make-millions game. She did and guess what... nothing... as it was a bunch of REMs :D (I didn't have the clue about other basic commands back then)....

    eeee... Somehow I feel ashamed now :oops:

    Oh, did I mentioned that I'm a programmer now(for real)? :lol:
  • ArjunArjun
    edited January 2004
    good on ya bravo! there is hope for some of us just yet then!
    Zero - A modern Spectrum emulator for Windows.
    Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
  • RefrenzRefrenz
    edited January 2004
    Before I got my speccy in 1984, I thought that games were played like songs on a tape - you pressed play on the tape and started playing immediately. When the tape finished, it was game over and to play the game again, you rewound the tape and pressed play again.

    How shocked I was when I loaded my first game - Atic Atac - and actually had to wait for it to load before I could play!!! :o
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