Guru
Joined: 05/10/2019
Location: United KingdomPosts: 8652
| Posted: 08:00am 17 Dec 2024 |
Perhaps I've been lucky. Although I've had both ZX81 and Speccy, and used all sorts of things plugged into their expansion ports, I've rarely had problems with either. Obviously, I had to be careful with them and not let the system wobble too much, but neither were really bad. Likewise, if I couldn't load a tape it was very likely that none of my friends could either. Some cassettes were duplicated badly or just used poor quality tape.
My final episode was the Speccy, with three microdrives, running a Teletext-style bulletin board called MIXTEL (Mick's TELephone). :) I think I only ever had two microdrive cartridges die, which wasn't a disastrous failure rate considering the reports from others.
If I want to play on old machines now I always use emulators. I've no interest in most of them now as, to be honest, I find every one to be so limiting that I either get bored or give up entering line numbers. The only one that I really miss though is the original keyboard Speccy as IMHO the compromises made were all in the right places. I could actually program on that without going nuts. The worst, which I was glad to get rid of, was the Commodore 64. I didn't like that at all and I wouldn't even consider it worth loading an emulator.
For some cool stuff look at Grant Searle's pages for his Multicomp design that runs on a FPGA. It's a building-blocks computer.