If you could re-design the Spectrum...

Alessandro Grussu · October 2004

Let's suppose you could go back in time to the beginning of the Eighties. The Spectrum is being designed as the revolutionary successor to the already popular ZX81. Which features would you change to the original design? Please note: you should stick to technology available at the time - no 3D graphic chipsets :)
My choices would be:
a) No colour clash, ie keeping the 8 basic colours with their respective BRIGHT variations, but without the limitations of INK and PAPER of the low-resolution grid - all pixels could be independently coloured;
b) A proper sound chip, which could be fully heard through the TV loudspeaker(s);
c) A better keyboard;
d) A "real" disk drive unit, using standard floppy disks.

cyborg · October 2004

I believe we've had these sorts of thread before.

They always miss the point that the Spectrum probably wouldn't have been as popular if it were more advanced as it would have enevitably been more expensive.

a) No colour clash, ie keeping the 8 basic colours with their respective BRIGHT variations, but without the limitations of INK and PAPER of the low-resolution grid - all pixels could be independently coloured;

You mean 15 basic colours. BRIGHT, INK and PAPER would have no real meaning in a different system, since there's no longer INK or PAPER and BRIGHT is not attribute bound.

You would need 24k for the video memory under this sysetm - so forget the 16k models.

A better suggestion would be the removal of FLASH in favour of simply having 16 INK/PAPER colours per attribute square. FLASH is crap.

b) A proper sound chip, which could be fully heard through the TV loudspeaker(s);
c) A better keyboard;
d) A "real" disk drive unit, using standard floppy disks.

These were all done with subsequent models.

Alessandro Grussu · October 2004

On 2004-10-17 20:25, cyborg wrote:
I believe we've had these sorts of thread before.

Ouch! :D Are you sure? Well if it's true I will cover my head with ashes :)

They always miss the point that the Spectrum probably wouldn't have been as popular if it were more advanced as it would have enevitably been more expensive.

I am aware of this, but I did not mention this detail intentionally. I was only curious to see what people would have liked to see implemented on the Spectrum regardless of price.

You mean 15 basic colours. BRIGHT, INK and PAPER would have no real meaning in a different system, since there's no longer INK or PAPER and BRIGHT is not attribute bound.

Of course.

A better suggestion would be the removal of FLASH in favour of simply having 16 INK/PAPER colours per attribute square. FLASH is crap.

Yes, I agree.

b) A proper sound chip, which could be fully heard through the TV loudspeaker(s);
c) A better keyboard;
d) A "real" disk drive unit, using standard floppy disks.

These were all done with subsequent models.
[/quote]
Of course I know this, but I wish they would have been present from the beginning.

mel the bell · October 2004

I quite like the little rubbery keyboard :)

OOh the feel i can feel it now mmmmmm....the smell .......mmmmmmmmm

darkman · October 2004

On 2004-10-17 20:14, Alessandro Grussu wrote:

No colour clash, ie keeping the 8 basic colours with their respective BRIGHT variations, but without the limitations of INK and PAPER of the low-resolution grid - all pixels could be independently coloured;

There's something I've always wondered. How much difference would it have made if you were allowed 3 colours per character block - both in terms of memory use & in terms of how games would have looked. Could you have eliminated colour clash without going monochrome ?

cyborg · October 2004

There's something I've always wondered. How much difference would it have made if you were allowed 3 colours per character block

There's no way that would have ever been a choice. 4 colours is the next logical choice after 2.

Now as you have a 2 bit system as opposed to a 1 bit system that would imply that the memory used would be doubled.

darkman · October 2004

Suppose you had 2 attribute layers, & could choose which layer every object on screen used i.e: each individual graphic still has only 2 attributes, but 2 sets of attributes are allowed per block when 2 graphics pass. Would that work, with careful programming ?

cyborg · October 2004

On 2004-10-17 22:22, darkman wrote:
Suppose you had 2 attribute layers, & could choose which layer every object on screen used i.e: each individual graphic still has only 2 attributes, but 2 sets of attributes are allowed per block when 2 graphics pass. Would that work, with careful programming ?

How would that actually change the display from being any different to how it is now - except you've now got a redundant set of information? There's no concept of an object.

GOC · October 2004

There is one thing about the Speccy which could have been changed with nearly no effort or cost penalty, and it might have made it slightly better IMHO: the screen layout could have been made linear (just switch some address lines - 8x8 char drawing would have been slower but not a zillion times slower).

Spector · October 2004

If you could change anything about the Spectrum's design... Well, I'm not sure what I'd want to change really. The Spectrum is what it is because of it's limitations. I wouldn't want 4 colours per attribute block because that would push the price of the machine up, and it would have been aphysically different computer too. I wouldn't have changed the sound either. Maybe the one design change I would have made would be to have the sound coming out of the TV rather than a little speaker in the computer. You have more control over the volume that way.

cyborg · October 2004

On 2004-10-17 23:08, GOC wrote:
There is one thing about the Speccy which could have been changed with nearly no effort or cost penalty, and it might have made it slightly better IMHO: the screen layout could have been made linear (just switch some address lines - 8x8 char drawing would have been slower but not a zillion times slower).

The decisions were not so much based on speed as space - since they were trying to cram as much in to the 16K ROM as possible.

Saboteur · October 2004

bit off topic, but...

Do you think that sinclair was correct to always release new versions that were back compaptible. ? ?

I know the reasoning behind this choice was to keep the huge back catalogue available but I can't help wondering what might have been if old sir clive had tried something completely different.

monty.mole · October 2004

I personally would not have changed anything about the original Spectrum. I think it was just right for its time, and intended target market. The Spectrum 128, on the other hand... It was such a pity that it didn't include better graphics capabilities.

Philip Kendall · October 2004

On 2004-10-18 09:46, Saboteur wrote:
I can't help wondering what might have been if old sir clive had tried something completely different.

Like the QL, you mean?

sirclive1 · October 2004

If i could redesign the spectrum , i wouldnt , the charm would be lost.

Paul van der Laan · October 2004

Exactly SirClive1, how can we think of redesigning something which is at the same time the object of our admiration?

Saboteur · October 2004

'Like the QL, you mean?'

I shouldv'e seen that comin :D.

It's not quite what I mean't, the Ql was aimed at the business market - not so much at the home user - Although i've never used a QL so they may be quite good and a missed opportunity.

I'm just an old fashioned spec chum that wanted to see sinclair world domination...

muhahahahahahahaha

thx1138 · October 2004

just that an integral ROM cart slot be fitted, and ROM software pushed harder, so that more titles were available on carts.

I imagine cost would have been prohibitive though

thx1138 · October 2004

From what I've read the first issue QL was bollocksed up, and they had to redesign it a bit.

CKay · October 2004

I honestly can`t think of anything that I would have liked changed, at least in the `basic` spectrum model, from the off...

I don`t think lack of backward compatibility would have helped, although see what you mean, it would have meant that there was significantly better hardware/features in newer models to justify a break.

It would have just meant that all those later spectrum buyers like me with the +2 wouldn`t have had access to the older games, or any newer ones that were 48K only... meaning less game sales and earlier death of speccy.

SpecMem · October 2004

Was it so that producing any kind of sound took all the processor time as long as the sound was being played? Wonder how big a change it would've been to adjust hardware to be able to start an individual tone/beep which wouldn't have eaten processor time after starting to play the individual tone.

Anyway, would have been nice to have a bit more dynamic sound system, though many games had even in-game music. Of course improvements came with later models.

SpecMem

cyborg · October 2004

On 2004-10-18 22:06, SpecMem wrote:
Was it so that producing any kind of sound took all the processor time as long as the sound was being played? Wonder how big a change it would've been to adjust hardware to be able to start an individual tone/beep which wouldn't have eaten processor time after starting to play the individual tone.

You'd need the ULA to act as a tone generator. Instead of directly moving the cone of the loudspeaker by use of 1 and 0 inputs you'd have to set an oscillator on the ULA to output these 0's and 1's at the right time. That is, you tell the ULA what frequency tone you want outputted and it does it.

The AY of course works a bit like this.

zeropolis79 · October 2004

GOC · October 2004

I wonder if it would have been extremely costly for the standard 48K to come with a simple 8-bit DAC connected to the speaker, so that more advanced MC programs could have output nicer sounds and music without the need for PCM... Just imagine... Chronos or Agent-X with twice the quality... wow... :)

SpecMem · October 2004

On 2004-10-18 22:51, cyborg wrote:
You'd need the ULA to act as a tone generator. Instead of directly moving the cone of the loudspeaker by use of 1 and 0 inputs you'd have to set an oscillator on the ULA to output these 0's and 1's at the right time. That is, you tell the ULA what frequency tone you want outputted and it does it.

The AY of course works a bit like this.

Thanks for shedding some light on this. Also GOC's idea sounded interesting, though I don't have the technical knowhow for understanding well the differences of varied technical solutions.

Anyway, just started to also wonder, a bit off topic: is it possible that Sir Clive and the rest of the developers did actually not regard the sound as so important to make some improvements that would've been possible without much added costs. A bit similar to how the PC was in the beginning, the sound capabilities were a bit "primitive".

Greets,
SpecMem

cyborg · October 2004

RE: GOC.

Perhaps not - you can construct a very simple DAC from a R/2R resistor bridge. The only thing then is to connect it up to a port so you can use an OUT statement to write to it.

The only thing would be combining that with tape operation et al.

_________________
Damn.

[ This Message was edited by: cyborg on 2004-10-19 00:15 ]

Arm73 · October 2004

I must say I did love the speccy in any way from the rubber keyboard to the little noise coming from the inside of the computer.My biggest concern is that such a brilliant computer should have had at least a standard disk interface unit, just like the C64. Games would have been much better and more complex ( look at those brilliant russian trdos games that were developed in the mid 90's and still are ). Even serious applications vould have beneficted a lot from a more advanced mass storage unit.Then the only thing that felt so unnatural was of course the color clash: I did now nothing about the way the screen would handle attributes and colors, and at the beguinning I just could not understand why wasn't I able to drow two lines in different colors crossing each other on the screen without having those horrible colored blocks appear !! Later on I learned why it happens, but at the beguinning it was so irritating I tought my computer was broken!!

On 2004-10-18 09:50, monty.mole wrote:
I personally would not have changed anything about the original Spectrum. I think it was just right for its time, and intended target market. The Spectrum 128, on the other hand... It was such a pity that it didn't include better graphics capabilities.

That's another strong point which I aree 100%. If the original speccy was rightly that way , why did they do nothing with newest models ? I remember I bought a Plus 2 without even knowing what it was , and what was improved ( it just looked so cool with a big keyboard , a tape recorder and two joystick ports !!-which were almost useless for not being standard Atari compatible anyway-). I remember I was so eager to open it up that I actually reapped the box apart ( and a few hours later scotch-taped all togheter again ). I was so exited and thought of a million possible improvements, but at the end I was i tiny little bit disappointed seeing that nothing was really done about the graphics.

A little off-topic,
in my opinion the best Speccy successor was undoubtly the MSX 2. That great but underestimated computer ( not underestimated in Japan though )was really a super Spectrum for me. Also based on the same CPU, it was much faster and had a better basic , incorporated disk drive ( most of the models ) and great graphics !!! If the machine was more popular in Europe at the time I guess programmers would have done miracols on it, and if there was ever a Super Spectrum, or Loki or whatever I think it should have been just like the MSX 2. ( I had an Msx 2+ Sony F1XDJ by the way).

Q.

_________________
"Arguing over the internet is like being in the special olympics, even if you win you are still retarded.." P.Swytch

[ This Message was edited by: q_armando on 2004-10-19 06:55 ]

dave_beer_uk · October 2004

Imagine all the typing you could have saved if they'd made:

LOAD "" [ENTER]

one single keystroke.....

Dave

[ This Message was edited by: dave_beer_uk on 2004-10-22 01:45 ]

CKay · October 2004

Having just recieved my first rubber 48K Speccy a few weeks ago, and coming from a 128K +2 history, Im amazed at how fiddly it is with keywords... as I used to use 128 basic editor and never 48K...

However, I think it woulda been easier if they just had letter by letter editor in 48K... but like I say, now that I`ve got a 48K in front of me, with the keywords printed it`s not soo bad...

Was keywords a good idea at all?

was it due to rubber keys so less typing would be easier (no, not taking the piss) or was it just an idea, or to save space in ROM or something?

cyborg · October 2004

Was keywords a good idea at all?

It does make things substantially faster if you can get your head around it.

CKay · October 2004

I think it`s just having never owned a 48K back in the day, when you haven`t, and have to have keywords on a sheet, or in a book etc etc it seems so hard, anoyying etc

Yet, with the keywords written all over the keys and around them, I can see the sense in it...

If you could re-design the Spectrum...

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