The ULA chip also takes priority over the z80 CPU when accessing memory, so while the display is being updated (which is most of the time), the CPU is running slower. There's just one graphics mode, which is not double buffered. (Yes, c64 had several custom ASICs, the speccy had an ULA - they were a world apart). Audio is produced through a piezo speaker wired to a single pin of the ULA chip - a precursor of FPGAs - that is also responsible for video output. The c64 had custom graphics chip with hardware sprites and a synthesizer audio chip that's forever unsurpassed in a home computer, multiple graphics modes and all sorts of things you can do to push the boundaries of what's obvious. You kids DON'T KNOW ANYTHING about loading times. Add a half-minute loading time for a loading screen. Since they were common, so were tape players, and thus you most likely didn't need to buy one to play with your speccy, you just hooked your existing one in.Īnd the tapes (due to unreliability of the media and the players) had the data on them at a low speed of 1200bps. Software distribution of the speccy was plain old C-cassettes, and for the young ones out there, these used to be as common as USB sticks are today, if not even more common. ![]() To put this in perspective: In modern 2015 money, inflation-adjusted, the speccy would have cost around 530 EUR, while c64 with the disc drive would be a whopping 1600 EUR. Compared to its contemporary (and way more capable) c64, according to one source it cost 130 GBP compared to 196 GBP for the c64 in 1984, plus you practically had to buy the disk drive for the c64 as well, and that cost as much as the computer itself. If there's one thing the ZX Spectrum excelled at, it was the price. Speccy, Vol 2: Speccy 101 November 30th, 2015
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