Oh nice, a Living Computer Museum. That would be a nice thing to have near where I live... oh wait there was one.
Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer
#32Re: Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was manufactured to be as cheap as possible. There were the plus editions that had much better keys.
> It was manufactured to be as cheap as possible. Exactly. The membrane keyboards weren't aesthetic choices, they were one of a number of compromises that were necessary to achieve the price point set by Clive Sinclair. He intuited that a sub-£200 colour computer would sell in huge quantities, and he was right. My (middle class) parents couldn't countenance the cost of a Commodore 64, but they were prepared to buy me…
Computers were a luxury item then, beside that lots of people had no idea what to do with one too. Only the most computer curious people would spend around $900 (inflation corrected) on a fancy calculator ;)
Re: Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer
#34Nice, I live in PT. Will visit. I have around 30 working speccy's and especially the rubber key ones give me great nostalgic joy even though I was an MSX child.
I visited - really nice!
They also have a Philips VG8020 MSX on display.
Re: Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer
#35Nice, I live in PT. Will visit. I have around 30 working speccy's and especially the rubber key ones give me great nostalgic joy even though I was an MSX child.
I visited - really nice! They also have a Philips VG8020 MSX on display.
> Philips VG8020
Ah nice, my first love. I still have it, working. I will go sooner.
Re: Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Aventuras AD; but TBH most modern games written for the ZX in Spanish (especially text adventures) are many times better than "La edad de oro del software español" (The golden age of the Spanish software).
Have to check those, I don't play modern games measured in hundreds of GB and hours, thanks for the hint.
I have some text adventure saga (Los extraordinarios casos del Dr. Van Halen) which is about
Lovecraftian/Poe themes and such; it's composed of nine tapes.
If you are interested, I can send a zip to you with a PDF and the TAP files.
Also, on modernish platforms, there's "El archipiélago", probably the best Spanish Z Machine game ever. You can get the last one at IFDB. Getting the first saga it's a bit cumbersome because you need to get nine downloads and sort the 'volumes' after that.
Back to "Van Halen", as the games are designed with PAWS/GACG or whatever was called that universal format from the 80's, the Zesarux emulator can trap all the interpretatation (as if it were a ZMachine-like interpreter itself) and giving you options to both debug the adventures and translate them to Portuguese (from any to any language) on the spot with online services (and maybe local, IDK; it shoudn't be difficult to add support to Argos Translate, Apertium and the like). Input is not translated but, well, these games have a really common verb set.
Re: Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer
#37The emphasis should be on "our" in the title: I think they mean Portugal's first involvement, which was around 1984. If you took "our" to mean Earth, then other PCs predate the ZX Spectrum and these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Computer_2048
Indeed, I was part of this generation, the first real computer I got, by opposition to build your own kits from electronic stores, was the Timex 2068 from that same factory. Only recently I got to understand Timex spotlight in USA was long gone, while in the Iberian Penisula it was still all over the place, alongside ZX Spectrums and some MSX models. I never knew anyone with a C64 back then. Then the next computing w…
Spain is still pushing out great titles for these machines- the scene around the Oric-1/Atmos computers (competitors to the ZX Spectrum) is particularly virulent, among the Spanish retro hacking community. Some truly astonishing things coming from those folks, for these 40+ year old machines ..