![]() ![]() While the kids in the computer adverts had parents who bought them a portable colour telly on which to play Jet Set Willy, the average kid had used up all the Christmas present money on the computer itself. Posted in Retrocomputing Tagged game development, rom, sinclair spectrum, Sinclair Zx Spectrum, ZX SpectrumĪn abiding memory of the early-80s heyday of 8-bit computing for many is operating their computer from the carpet in front of the family TV. If you’re new to all this Spectrum stuff and where its ROM came from, then maybe it’s time for a trip down memory lane. You’ll need your own EPROM on which to burn it, but we suspect that if you’re the kind of person who has a Spectrum and has writing these games in mind, you already have access to the relevant equipment. It builds upon his past work with his Arcade Game Designer, with the distribution by ROM allowing the developer to use the full 48k available on all but a very few early 16k machines. If you’re a Spectrum enthusiast and think this sounds a little familiar then you are of course correct. It’s the ROM you wanted back in 1983, when you were struggling to fit a bit of Z80 code in a Sinclair Basic REM statement. ![]() It’s something has addressed with his Arcade Game Designer ROM, a complete and ready to run replacement for the original Spectrum ROM that contains a scripting language, a compiler, editors for in-game assets, and a game engine upon which to run your games. The SInclair ZX spectrum’s ROM for example had more than its fair share of bugs, and its BASIC programming experience with single keypress was unique but also slow to run. Thus even some of the most fondly remembered Sinclair products concealed significant flaws, and this extended to both their hardware and their software. This gave us some impressive products, but it’s fair to say that sometimes this philosophy pushed the envelope a little too far. If there is one thing that Sir Clive SInclair was famous for, it was producing electronic devices that somehow managed to squeeze near-impossible performance out of relatively meagre components. ![]()
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