Manic Miner

i finished it a couple of times - never conquered Jet Set Willy though nor did I ever get 100% on the Hobbit

i completed the lot

took me 2 days though

Jet Set Willy offered £10,000 to anyone who collected all the keys, don't think they ever paid out.

I always got stuck early in the Hobbit but there are many walkthroughs available now. I completed 3D Ant Attack

As I do a bit of App developing, I've thought about recreating Jumping Jack for a mobile using the tilt function of a phone to move left and right and a swipe up to jump. That was a difficult game.

State of the art graphics in The Hobbit: http://torinak.com/qaop#!hobbit

The Troll just ate me (2.5% completed)

I used to enjoy getting the sword and killing Elrond and Thorin. Gandalf was a tough SOAB though.

I remember 'wanted monty mole' with arthur scargil in it
There was a bug from recollection that made it impossible to get past a certain stage

^^ That was one of the few games I bought for the ZX Spectrum, everything else was transferred tape to tape. Wasn't there an uproar about the game at the time because of the Pit Strikes?

I was too young for the politics but the game was made by Gremlin I think and they used to be based in Sheffield which was effected by thatcher's pit culling

I just looked and there was a walk through for monty on youtube
It seems there wasnt a bug I was just s hit at it
The bit where you dropped into a coal cart it seems you had to keep walking while in it

Ie just looked through several games on the spectrum to see what the ends were like.
Well not upto much is the answer for each.

God awful games they were, the colours used to give me migraines as a kid.
My speccy had issues and would tip over into having a breakdown very often
It turns out this was in the days before plug and play and although I was told never to do it I regulally plugged in or unplugged the joystick after the game was loaded which completely radged its box
Meaning It would crash after a few mins of playing the damn thing

You must be early 40's Dusty and a bit younger than me. I was old school and hardcore, had a ZX81 before the Spectrum. My ZX Spectrum had a rubber keyboard and 48k. There was nothing you could do on the ZX81 except code, guess that's why I've got back into coding but things have changed a bit from ZX Spectrum BASIC.

Great mocumentary of the era, I didn't know the politics or story of Sinclair and Alan Sugar. You may have seen it but it's worth a watch again. The Sinclair C5 was ahead of it's time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

I thought the games were brilliant, only a few games have ever taken my interest (Age of Empires, Banjo Kazooie spring to mind) but it's the Spectrum I remember the most with fondness.

Yeah Im 40
I had seen that programme from a few years ago as it happens.
The games look like a dog's arse now, but Id agree watching the walkthroughs is like reminising a little.
Im teasing myself watching Saboteur now between races to see how that one turned out.

You probably came along when the Spectrum had it's day. It was well explained in that documentary that the BBC Micro, Acorn, Comodore 64 had better graphics, keyboards, CPU's ect but it was the vast amount of games that won it for the Spectrum.

I remember XMas, 1983 when I asked Santa for one and my Dad wasn't able to pick one up until XMas Eve when one store managed to get some stock. He offered me one of those other brands but I wanted a ZX Spectrum! I was prepared to wait until after XMas to get it if I had to because it was what I wanted.

Consoles came on the scene around 1990, one thing I remember was watching Sonic on the Megadrive in Curry and thought I had to have one! The graphics astounded me.

For the next generation of computers, I owned an Amiga before moving to Windows (3.1 I think). Amiga was great (Sensible soccer, Cannon Fodder and the Indie games you bought via Floppy and mail order) but the PC was Lemmings until Age of Empires came along.

Also my first PC cost me £700 used, it had a 40MB hard drive and a Pentium 90 processor (state of the art!) I think my phone is now faster. My first printer was a 27 pin dot matrix shop display for £130 and the first DVD rewrite drive cost me £299 and I couldn't get the drivers to work. TF I stopped spewing money!

I too went through the lot at some point.
The spectrum was al about having blank C90 cassettes full of copied games, sometimes finding a gap between the noise on the tape and not knowing which game it was until it loaded.
Half of the games you got off your mates you didnt know what the hell you were supposed to be doing.
Like skool daze, just watched it, I never realised you were meant to be lighting up those wall plaques.

I had a master system, japanese grey import megadrive and super famicom, amiga and a few hand helds.

In fact I recently bought the nintendo switch just to play zelda, but wonderboy III came out also on it and that was one of my fave games so had to buy it just to finish it again.

The commodore 64 was by far the best, and had tons of games itself, whatever came out for the Spectrum came out on the Commodore, just look at the arcade versions of Commando and Hyper Sports on the Commodore, amazing for the time, the Spectrum sadly not...don't get me wrong the Spectrum was great for games also, but the CBM 64 was the dogs...

...and yes the Amiga was also brillant, sadly Commodore killed themselves with the terrible Amiga 32, which I bought, it was terrible lol

I've had most consoles as well (my kids have took over this mantle). Spectrum must have been well played out when you had it, I copied 1 game per cassette.

Master System was Alex Kidd and Sonic but I bought the Megadrive shortly afterwards. N64 was Banjo Kazooie (still one of my favourites) and Donkey Kong Country. Playstation was Crash Bandicoot but I've never got into gaming as such. I'd much prefer a game of poker.

I have the ps3 ps4 and all that and I dont think Ive finished a single game
I just drive around causing trouble in GTA 5 or fight night boxing.

All the speccy games Ive watched today on youtube had dire endings, just a congratualtions message then around you went again.

Tetris was the best of all games on the gameboy.

Commodore was slightly after the Spectrum by about a year iirc but your correct, it was light years ahead.

The thing I appreciate now is everything for the Commodore was also available for the Spectrum. Elite was one such game, how they crammed that into 48k I'll never know.

I do know that Mathew Smith, creator of Manic Miner, done everything in machine code (the one's and zero's) and think he made just a few thousand from the game (but probably got himself a top job.) I'm 49 now and just wish I'd have stuck with coding when I was a kid.

The Commodore 64 is released, retailing at $595USD. The price rapidly dropped, creating a price war and causing the departure of numerous companies from the home computing market. Total C64 sales during its lifetime (from 1982–1994) are estimated at more than 17 million units[citation needed], making it the best-selling computer model of all time.

Spectrum was released 2 months earlier but the C64 had a longer shelf life.

..and the games were like 5 or £6 and great value, obv not massive games like now on the ps4, but seem to have much more lastability back then

Renegade what Platform was that on ? Took me ages to Beat the Boss ,Big Bertha

What was the game I played on Spectrum with the kid on a bike having to throw the papers into the houses?

Paperboy I think.

Paperboy yeah, classic arcade coversion

This was the most frustrating game ever for me .. i completed most games .. always got to level 20 & then lost all 3 lives in a row right at the end .. Was it the BOOT !!

I don't think you accounted for inflation doridoru

Casemoney I remember Renegade but not on Spectrum?

Jun 11, 2017 -- 11:50AM, Ovalman. wrote:

I don't think you accounted for inflation doridoru Casemoney I remember Renegade but not on Spectrum?

Lol a bit but £45 is still a massive amount to most now for a game...£6 wasn't as much as that equivalent back then

My system can't cope with new games so I buy Humble Bundle (not that I play any of the games).

I'd rather play a game of poker TBH but my sons and daughter are all games freaks.

Loved all the old platform games .. played Wonderboy for hours in the arcade (started playing the fruit machines age 13) the gambling addiction had already kicked in!

on the Atari st the simple classics like Arkanoid2
Rainbow islands was a cool game once you mastered dragging the rainbows finished that.. and one of my favs Xenon2

ZX Spectrum with 48 k was in effect a super computer. Now THIS is feat of genius. 1k chess:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess

To put that in perspective, Ovalman's post at 3:45 is more than 1k.

Yeah the arcade in my town was great back in the 80s, I can still picture where each machine was, Bomb Jack, Bubble Bobble, Pac Man, Rygar, Hyper Sports, Return Of The Jedi, Nemesis, Jailbreak...all fantastic for 10p a game. Used to be on Bubble Bobble for 1/2hr + on 10p lol

Haven't played games for many years now .. never even bought a new console it all moves so fast .. the poker took over


amazingy still got my Atari st boxed up though !

To put that in perspective, Ovalman's post at 3:45 is more than 1k.

I admire pioneers like Mathew Smith, machine learning is all ones and zeroes. Each character of the keyboard takes up 256 bytes so my post's size is more due to Windows Operating System than my lack of Grammar

I think that's why the Raspberry Pi was developed. Too many kids just know consoles and don't know coding.

"Each character of the keyboard takes up 256 bytes" Bzzt wrong answer!

Bits

I had Bits typed out, then changed it to bytes doh!

Ovalmans coding is like waiting for Operation Wolf to Load!!

Still wrong answer :) Well it depends but in the plainest text it's one character = 1 byte = 8 bits. Even in a strange foreign language it'll be like max 4 bytes 32 bits. I voted brexit to stop such shenanginans. I want a hard 8 bit character limit, like we had under Queen Victoria!

I've failed the 8 bit test.

256 bits are needed for each character and 8 bits make a byte?

That's a lot of ones and zero's to work with on Manic Miner.

No a byte is 8 bits. For English that's all you need but for foreign langauges they may need more so it can be more complicated. On a spectrum it would have been 8.
What you might be getting confused about is a byte can represent 256 separate values, 2 to the power of 8.

This is getting far too confusing, we need to get Dianne Abbott on to explain it :)

Eithhundredandtousandfiftymillion bytes.

Yes, that's the way I knew it, 8 bits make a byte but it takes 256 bits to make a character. You are saying it takes more than this thanks to foreign languages (bloody foreigners). I didn't know that BTW so how are accentuated languages stored?

No it's 8 bytes a character in the simplest method normally used. Think of it this way:
8 bytes allows 256 values. That covers 26 A-Z + 26 + a-z + 0-9 + a load of punctiuation and extra stuff like the blocky characters you would have seen on a spectrum keyboard. But say Japanese might require far more characters. They have 500 different symbols for schoolgurl knickers alone! .

Shinobi And Daley Thompson Decathlon was too decent games a little later, Used to play them in the pub

Knock yourself out hobbit fans :)

http://torinak.com/qaop#!hobbit

The rendering is somewhat slower than a PS4.

Old fodey dodeys set in their ways

I thought it was like an 8 bit square where each character was a dot on a square.

Good to learn something new

Atic-Atac was superb -  as were most of the Ultimate games - Sabru Wulf, Lunar Jetman, Jetpac, Knight Lore

Skool Daze was also great

The Amstrad 64 was the best

I had a game called classic racing, you where the trainer of horses, nothing like getting a really good horse :), think its in part what got me into horse racing.

Also was a football manager game you got each player to 10/international.

and daley thompsons decathlon was great too, but you certainly went through a lot of joysticks playing it

I was another Spectrum fan in the day. My favourite games included Booty, Bruce Lee and Stop the Express (and many more).

There are some links here to a load of the old spectrum magazines:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.sinclair/WvMScQe1H0w

Thanks for that Gin, had a look at issue 1 of Sinclair User, brought back some great memories.

Daley Thompson thumping the keyboard lol, remember it well.

I had a ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, one mate had a C64 and the other had an Oric. I remember we had heated discussions as to who had the best computer. The C64 was light years ahead but I still stood my ground on the good old ZX Spectrum.

Oric probably had the last laugh as it's the rarest of all 3 and a collectors item.

I was thinking about games yesterday and I thought of Booty too.
Pirate game only cost 2.99 from memory and I played it plenty.

I looked at Fighting Warrior too....there was absolutely nothing to it

Player of the year got played alot too.

Firebird Software! some of the games were £1.99!