Friday 17 April 2015

Rise From Your Grave - Resurrecting my old Speccy +3

As were the words famously spoken by Zeus at the start of Altered Beast, and they were the words I thought of once again just a couple of nights ago. As I mentioned here a few weeks ago, I recently undertook an arduous-but-productive expedition into the mysterious depths of my old bedroom and the attic of my parents house. This resulted in the retrieval of my old gaming magazines, as detailed here in the previous post, but something else I unearthed - and one of the things I was actually looking for - was my old Spectrum +3, and happily I found it.

It was more or less exactly where I left it actually - in the attic, safely sealed in a big box along with all the cables and bits and pieces as well as a load of tape games. After cautiously opening the box in case of spiders or other scary creatures and finding none, I began sorting through everything in preparation for actually seeing if it still worked. This presented me with a problem though - how the devil do you get a computer like this working on a modern TV? As it turned out, this was easier than I thought (after consulting the instructions for my TV, naturally), and splendidly I soon saw the distinctive opening menu offered by Alan Sugar's fancy revamped Speccy models. Further progress, however, was cut short by the pesky keyboard which was apparently no longer working. Unwilling to admit defeat, this meant I had to do something I very rarely do - actually try to fix it.

For someone as technically-minded as me, that involved taking it apart, blowing all the dust away, and putting it back together again, but to my not-inconsiderable surprise, it worked! The first thing I did was try to load a disc game. First candidate was California Games, but alas, some clunking noises and an error message. Perhaps the disc was wonky? I instead tried Into the Eagles Nest but met with the same result. Sadly then, while the Speccy itself now works, the disc drive does not.

My run of bad luck didn't end there either. Upon deciding to try loading a tape game (which I was going to show my wife since she finds it amusing that games used to come on cassettes), I discovered the tape player wasn't working either. No Chronos for me then. About all I could use it for, then, was to fool around with BASIC, and this isn't something I'd done for at least 25 years. Luckily, I still remembered a few simple commands and ended up fiddling around for most of the evening (behold my masterpiece, above!). Ordinarily of course, despite how much I enjoy messing around with old computers and consoles, this isn't something I would usually have spent a lot of time on, mainly because I simply wouldn't have had that much free time. To my immeasurable sorrow, however, the stupid bloody hard drive in my laptop gave up the ghost last weekend.

This has severely hampered my ability to keep posting here at Red Parsley, and will also no doubt cause me a tremendous amount of hassle down the line (my 750GB of data was backed up but not particularly organised), but it has also given me a bit more spare time for fooling around with stuff I wouldn't normally have time for, such as dismantling and playing around with a certain Sinclair home micro, and you know what? I've bloody enjoyed it too!

To cut a long, typically rambling story short then, my blogging has taken another hit, but, as always, there has been a silver lining. How many of you, I wonder, still have the time for using hardware 'properly'? I don't mean plug 'n' play consoles, of course, but the more complicated or time consuming stuff that comes with using many home micros. Not many, probably, but it's worth making the time for now and then...
 

7 comments:

  1. I love your multicolour BASIC programme :) If your HD had not failed, would you have dug out the +3 anytime soon? The glorious large and proud red letters of "128k" shows how quickly technology has progressed just within half of one generations lifetime. Your vanilla PC now has more than 32000 times that amount of RAM...Wow! Despite their rather significant technological shortcomings, it's surprising just how much we cherish these abacuses! Your +3 (what's his/her name?) gave us both cherished memories, and I also have a soft spot for the BBC Micro in my garage.... :D

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  2. Well, I had dug it out but it was sitting in the spare room. I suppose I would've done something with it eventually but I doubt I would've spent so long messing with it. You're certainly right about the Speccy and its proudly-displayed memory capacity - games back then possibly seemed more special because of how much harder it was for the programmers to get what they wanted out of such limited hardware. Today they pretty much have unlimited space. I don't think I ever named my +3 but I probably should. I didn't know you ever had a BBC - I hope you have Chuckie Egg for it, it's my favourite version :)

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  3. Oh, you Brits and your Spectrums. I actually wrote a series of articles for 1UP about the system back in, oh, 2012, I believe. As an American raised on the VIC-20 and spoiled on the NES, I wasn't terribly impressed with its capabilities. For a machine named after an array of colors, it sure doesn't offer many.

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  4. Hey man, the Speccy rules! It wasn't too bad technically in its day and it was cheap too. Plus, it and its games had a lot of character :) It wasn't really an alternative to a proper console (no home micros were really) so you can't really compare it to the NES - I had a Master System at the same time as my Speccy, but I still used both a lot. It was worth owning for Ultimate's games alone...

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  5. Oh, and it was called the Spectrum as its predecessor (the ZX81) only had black and white graphics. It was super-colourful back then :)

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  6. When clearing out my parent's house I found my childhood computer, the Commadore Plus/4. Yet I couldn't find any of the leads or cassette games so I have never had the chance to fire it up again and test to see if it works still. The Plus/4 external cassette was a clunky yet charming piece of kit.

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  7. Wow, sweet! :) It's a shame you couldn't power it up again but maybe you can get hold of the bits and pieces you need :)

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