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27 points by ibobev 5 hours ago | 5 comments

moomin 43 minutes ago

This massively understates what you could do with the basic 1-bit arrangement. People managed to get music playing during gameplay (I think Manic Miner was first) and even managed to play music with two channels and percussion (Robin of the Wood IIRC).

UncleSlacky 22 minutes ago

Some games even used it for (attempted) speech synthesis:

https://spectrumgamesuk.com/index.php?game=Meteor-Storm

"...possibly the first game with speech synthesis, albeit sounding like an unintelligble gargle."

Razengan 2 hours ago

The Spectrum, along with the C64, NES, SNES, etc is still on my to-do list of catching up with computing/gaming history by devving some games for the platforms that started it all ;")

Levitating 44 minutes ago

Depending on your country you might be able to buy a ZX spectrum for a reasonable price. Their through-hole circuit boards are very repairable and there's a some videos on YouTube explaining how to properly troubleshoot them.

I've personally had a lot of fun repairing one I bought on catawiki.

TacticalCoder 7 minutes ago

> Depending on your country you might be able to buy a ZX spectrum for a reasonable price.

Bought one at a garage sale for 5 EUR. I'm pretty sure it does not work. Haven't tried it: I still have a good old CRT TV so I could.

But when people talk about coding for these 8-bit machines, they usually mean they'll target an emulator.