Games That Push the Limits of the ZX80
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- Опубликовано: 14 июл 2024
- Games on the ZX80? Was that a thing? Yes indeed it was and I'll be taking a look the games that pushed it to the limit, which is basically all of them.
Paul Farrow's ZX Resource Centre
www.fruitcake.plus.com/index.html
Cronosoft ZX80 Games:
cronosoft.fwscart.com/ZX80/ca...
My Patreon:
/ sharopolis
00:00 Intro
01:23 Bramwell Enterprises
02:42 Breakout
03:23 Space Intruders
05:26 QS Defender
06:53 Double Breakout
07:28 Ack Ack
08:20 Mazogs
10:26 Kong
11:26 Pacman
12:53 Patreon Thanks
Music
Dude - Patrick Patrikios
Luxery - Causmic
Longest Run - Noir et Blanc Vie
knowpe - Noir et Blanc Vie
Summer in the Neighborhood - Bad Snacks 
Игры
Much respect to those who can code with such expertise. I used to code for a living and many a time I dropped into assembler to achieve tight routines which I fear is a lost art relying more on the raw power of modern hardware. And that's not to say the huge storage devices relied on to hold the bloated code.
Oh my God - someone who gets it. I was always amazed at how a computer running at 166mhz could fly to the end of the universe and back with the present games, word processing software, multi-talking, multi-media, etc, etc. Then years later all of a sudden you need 2048ghz cpu just to run one word processing software; Yes super bad non efficient coding. If OS's and software in general were programmed with the most optimization and efficient coding then all our computers would be running at Warp 9.9999999 :-) ok i'm over exaggerating but you get the point. It is a lost art.
I always thought if companies told their coders to code with 7 year old tech and get it to run at benchmark quotas then it would run heavenly on present day models.
I guess portability is not really an issue you’d consider
I was 10 in 1980 and saw a ZX80 at a school fair. I was totally hooked from then on although the magic of computers have worn off after being a database developer for 20 odd years.
My first computer.
I saved a tenner by assembling it myself.
No-one could have been more surprised than me when it actually worked.
Still crap though.
As was my QL, with those bloody hopeless microdrives.
One lives and learns.
Mind you, they were my intro to programming for a living.
Programs that push the ZX80
10 Print "hello world"
20 goto 10
Run
Out of Memory
I remember typing on the ZX80 and the flickering screen was actually a benefit under these cases. Because the shitty membrane keyboard offered no feedback, you never knew whether you'd hit the key or the right one. By having it flash briefly, you knew you'd hit something, so it cut out the need to peck one key then look up each time.
Small mercies and all that.
I did the same on the ZX81 as when you put it in fast mode it did the same.
You couldn't even _enter_ that program on a ZX80, it doesn't support lower case letters.
10 Print "Thank you for writing me."
There, you now have a god program.
It would actually print out...
--------
hello world
hello world
hello world
///20 more times
5/10
--------
[Error code 5 means 'No more room on screen']
Hahaha did they really paint the air vents on? That's absolutely hilarious
YUp. Everything was about the look and the price. It must be as cheap as possible to get it to as many people as possible. Laughable in retrospect, but the fact is this alone kickstarted the whole of Britain's computing craze. That's nothing to laugh at.
In England, home computing is similar to football. We sort of invented it, but the rest of the world then proceeds to thrash us at it.
"This emergency exit is painted-on!!"
@@heyhonpuds Actually, no. If you looked at the face value of it, you'd see many foreign companies doing better. But look deeper - an AWFUL lot of those companies either employ some legendary British devs or owe their success to them. Case in point, Dylan Cuthbert doing the 3D work on the SNES that Nintendo thought was impossible. They hired him and Starfox and so on was born.
So no, it ain't exactly true.
@@heyhonpuds - I'd disagree - ever heard of ARM? ;)
Oh I remember Mazogs. Only got that game to load properly a total of ONCE on my lousy ZX81.
All very impressive, and it's amazing to think that somebody is still making games for it 40 years later.
Sharopolis, thank you for this most interesting video series! Can't have enough of it! It really goes to show that super advanced hardware isn't everything. Most of the times, it is the skill of the programmer that makes the difference between a mediocre game and really good one, regardless of the machine it runs on.
Thank you! I'm glad you've enjoyed it.
Some of those actually seem more playable than the type-in games for my C16... albeit less colourful, graphical, and noisy.
My mate bought the ZX80 kit, and programmed his first game, which was basically a dice rolling game. It took us hours, and the result was so uninspiring it make me never want to touch another computer again.
He used to stand a cold bottle of milk out of the fridge, on top of the ZX80, to keep it cool.
"He used to stand a cold bottle of milk out of the fridge, on top of the ZX80, to keep it cool." This made me chuckle 😄
I'm been making retro gaming YT content for 13 years and staggered I've never stumbled over your channel before now. Fantastic video sir -subbed!
Thanks! Likewise!
Remembee my first experiences on the Timex-Sinclair 1000. Can not forget those dsys of Atic programming and Games
Respect. Incredible work, too bad the original zx80 users could never enjoy these quality releases.
The only games I ever saw on the ZX80 were text adventures. These look great.
I remember when these games found out how to do this trick and it nlew our tiny little minds. We spent ages reverse engineering this stuff. Machine code was a real pain in the arse on ZX80 and ZX81.
My experience of the ZX80/ZX81 were very similar. These are AMAZING, especially the ones needing no extra hardware (no disrespect to the HW engineers).
@@watsoft70 I have not just admiration for these coders, but tremendous nostalgia too. I grew up learning on these things, and every game I bought I would religiously nose at the coding and try to disassemble how certain routines worked. It was and is truly amazing what people did to get round these limitations. I learned audio engineering years later and one thing my studio teacher said always stuck with me as a great general rule "if you learn on crappy or limited equipment, it means you can do ANYTHING" because at that time we were using and old 16 track mixer with an 8 track tape in the early 1990s. It's a great universal truth, and looking back at things like this, it deserves great credit.
@@crunchyfrog555 I completely agree. I learned computing and programming back in the day when RAM was at a premium so coding was neat and reusable and techniques had to be engineered to get round other hardware limitations. As things progressed I found that supporting code developed by those of a similar or earlier introduction to computing was a joy where that of those who weren't bound by such limitations, not so much. Unfortunately I now apply the same mental attitude to everything and assesment and planning of anything I do tends to take longer that the actual execution...I have to laugh at myself, but I do feel an achievement of doing anything as best as I think I can.
@@crunchyfrog555 Couldn't agree more. I'd write a piece of code on the 81 with six varables, and depending on those it could scan the keyboard, print or scan the screen memory. Such a great way of saving space.
I remember going to a PC show in London in early 1981 and paying one pound for an A4 sheet of paper with code to enter into my 1K ZX-80. I was astonished at the Space Intruders that I had bought.
Wow, amazingly small games! And they don't seem bad at all
Even a paragraph of text pushes the limits of the ZX80
Absolutely amazing
Fascinating video. Watching more and more of these and getting strangely nostalgic for computers that I never used. I was only months old when this machine came out!
If I'd have been 5-10 years older, I would have got further with coding :(. At 10, in 1990, I was just working out PROCedures on the BBC Micro to program basic menus (once I understood DEFPROC wasn't a hard-of-hearing Godzilla). At 11 I got an Amiga and sadly once the games were all there in front of me to play without having to type stuff in I lost interest in coding stuff. It was always a means to an end, although I am still creative in other ways (writing, needlecraft -- knitting patterns are just a form of programming for yarn! -- and drawing).
My grandmother was programming a Spectrum and then a CPC to do the parish accounts though. She was a cybergranny worthy of William Gibson.
Absolutely awesome retro games on Early Sinclair's toys! 💪
Thanks for this. Really enjoy your videos!
Another fascinating video, brilliantly informative, cheers!
Quite unbelievable achievements on the hardware! Wow!
Time to dust off my zx81 again. Thank you for this video. I grew up with the c64, I have been collecting spectrums since the last 3 years. It has been a nice journey ☺️
I don't know how you ended up in my RUclips feed, glad you did (I subbed).
To me, the old stuff is more impressive simply because the programmer had access to what was in the books and magazines while the modern developers have access the cumulative knowledge of everyone. With the ability to write code on a PC and compile it on a PC and run it in emulation all very quickly, the modern coder has a lot of advantages over the coders of old days.
Thi is true not just of programmers but people like us who were buying games. All we had were maybe magazines, the box on the shelf, and maybe word of mouth. It was hugely difficult to avoid crap games. Couple that with becoming a professional DJ a few years after and trying to track down certain records without the internet and it's a wonder how we managed, looking back.
But there's actually a more admirable thing concerning the coders. I trained as an audio engineer. The first studfio we used was an old 16-track mixer with 8-track recorder. Why we had this crap cut down equipemtn was simple as the tutor told us - "if you can work with the many limitations this offers, you can use anything". And that philosophy works every bit here.
@@crunchyfrog555 Your tutor was a wise man.
@@BertGrink He was an exceptionally good studio tutor. Calm, easy going and really brought out people to perform something even if they were reticent or shy. So much stuff that he said is stuck with me. He really nailed the point that in a studio production you've got to nail handling people.
I love these old school-underpowered micro computers
Sounds like this might be a similar style of coding that was used for the Atari 2600. In the 2600, the programmer needed to draw the screen manually and while you could stuff code during the line draws to the screen, most of the executable code was done between screen draws as the TIA had to be babied to draw the screen.
Yes it's similar, but on the Atari 2600 you had some time on the horizontal blank to do stuff, but on the ZX80 it was only the vertical blank.
@@Sharopolis Cool. Thanks for the info! Were the free v-blank CPU cycles less on the ZX80 compared a 2600?
@@shamriceYou should see the Bally Astrocade/Astrovision console from 1977. It only had enough RAM to draw the screen, and that was it. So programs had to hide the game code in the first 2 bits of each byte that was drawing the screen.
And its version of Pac-Man (officially known as Muncher) was so good that we would have thrown away our Ataris if we'd seen it.
top video , well made and informative
Thank you!
Great video mate ..sharing far and wide on Facebook/Twitter :)
My Commodore Vic-20 was way more advanced but then it cost my parents £149 back in '82. Mind you this gave you 3.5 k of useable RAM (I expanded mine to 16k), 3 channel sound, colour, and a built in joystick port + you got the infamous C2N Datacorder in the box.
What a great time to experience, the dawning of computers and video games... Everything felt new and amazing.
The dawning of computers was in the early 1940s, not in the 1980s. (But I see what you mean, personal computers and home computers using microprocessors and ordinary household tv's for display.)
@@herrbonk3635 Yeah home computing more precisely.
@@TheJosep70 Yes. (I tried to avoid that strange abstraction, "computing", a concept that does not even exist in my native language :D)
Looking forward to this! got a cup of tea ready.
Hope you enjoy!
@@Sharopolis - brilliant as always mate! I'm a coder too and I appreciate the detail - you really know your stuff!
@@JohnnyWednesday Thanks!
@@Sharopolis - I watch a lot of retro youtubers and you're my fave, right up there with Neil at RMC (I recommended your channel to him and he replied that he already watches you and rates you highly!) You totally deserve more recognition! and you'll deffo get it if you persist!
Thanks, glad to know RMC watches!
I'm definitely a Retro Enthusiast.
Interesting video, I remember the disappointment of scanning WH Smith’s shelves looking for zx80 games, my mates buying games for the 81, Spectrum and vic20, there was literally nothing, even the magazines had very little for the 80, but every now and again you’d come across a magazine with a zx80 game listing, or some obscure hardware, a robot arm (I’m sure there was an ad for one), and I’d be excited, cannot believe I flogged my 80 for £10, I’d love to get another, especially with this type of technology now available. The
Whoooaahh now that’s mind blowing those chroma color adaptor games!!??
Amazing. I'm didn't know they got flicker-free games.
Neither did I till I started making this video, I thought it was going to be a fairly short explanation of why games don't really work on this system.
@@Sharopolis I've half a mind to blow the dust off my old ZX80 and see what it can do!
No, neither did I; that's absoluteluy amazing.
interesting i have 4 zx80 yet no games now i know what to look for
If you're up to the challenge, you'll find lots of type-in programs in the old magazines which can be found on archive.org such as _YOUR COMPUTER_ and _SINCLAIR USER_
how to push the ZX80 to the limits:
turn it on
I think pong pushes its limits. But this is before the video. I'll see what it can do!
Blimey, the first borrowed computer I had a go on. Went on to buy an '81. Very interesting.
I need to look at the ZX80-81 games/program lists. Seems to me it would do well at text adventures and even limited rpgs. Maybe i'm thinking too much about the TI 99/4A computer game shelf being a different beast and all that. I'm definitely going to peruse the library list.
I loved the video but I spent far too much time wondering about whether or not I saw a Dinosaur Jr. poster in the background...
Well spotted! It's a Without a Sound poster, probably not my favourite Dinosaur Jr album, but I love the artwork.
Never played ZX80 but it is an interesting video ;)
excellent series all round. any plans to do the beeb and elk in this manner?
My first computer was a ZX81 and I remember a extremely hi rez version of defender I got from somewhere (don't remember where maybe from a early BBS) it only displayed on the top half of the screen but worked really well when it did not crash due to ram pack wobble, also it must have been written in machine code.
My friend in HS (here in the USA) had the ZX80 in 1980. He got it as a kit and I helped assembled it for him. I wonder what happened to it. I had the ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000) later in the 80s which I gave away to another friend and in the 90s I got a Timex Sinclair 1500. Still have it but it needs a keyboard membrane.
If you're interesed in getting a new (and much more durable) membrane, search for either Mutant Caterpillar or SellMyRetro, both in the UK. the TS1500 uses the exact same membrane as the ZX Spectrum. It even used a nearly identical case and keyboard
Not many systems weaker then the Atari 2600 out there, but this is one of them. Fascinating, thanks for this series.
Well who woulda thunk!
For the time period, both of these systems would have been jaw dropping for those with minimum capital, but itching to have a computer at home. The Atari line of computers existed in 1979, while the Apple II was even earlier, but their original purchase prices would fill a classroom of ZX80's. The simple graphics reminds me of the Radio Shack TRS80 Model IIIs that I first encountered in a basic programming class in 1983. Simple, yet very playable to those with appreciation and a bit of imagination.
Mine was a kit. 😆
I never imagined it was possible for a computer this bad to exist. It defies imagination. It’s amazing
ZX81 colour interface. Oh, a SMD Xilinx, North has been lost. But a BGA like in the spectrum next could be worse.
Did anyone else get Elton John stuck in their head at 7:54?
Think a lot of early systems used these programming techniques.
Got a zx81 but can't get a stable tv pic. Power pack also gets very hot
I've got a ZX81 with the same problem and I'm planning on doing a video mod and voltage regulator upgrade video sometime soon so keep watching.
the zx80 doesn't have commands for printing graphics to the screen. how did they manage 6:27?
Those 'graphics' are actually text characters.
@@gwishart really? amazing
that´s easy, they all do....
I'm pretty sure Atari 2600 games work the same way with the CPU drawing graphics and the logic code running when the beam goes home.
Yep
Yep - but if your code didn't finish quickly enough? you'd screw up the video signal
@@JohnnyWednesday Yeah, and that's why programmers learned to hand-optimise their assembly language code PDQ.
If you think using VBlank for game logic is bad-- look at the Atari 2600!
Not only do you have to run all the game logic in VBlank, but you also have to manually draw every pixel of the screen, with your own kernel!
You have to send each pixel to the display manually with this too, presumably in real time rather than in hbl like on the VCS (where you even have sprites available), though the ZX80 and ZX81 might give you a ready made subroutine for it. I don't know.
Surely, the ZX80 had nothing but "limits"? I had the ZX81, and the obligatory upgrade to the Spectrum was a relief.
I didn't get onboard the 'computer craze' right away in the early 80s, but a mate of mine did, and he went the same route: ZX81 then a Spectrum 16K which he soon upgraded to 48K. Since we were both unemployed we'd spend days on end typing in programs from the magazines, taking turns with one of us typing while the other read the program listing aloud. after an hour or so of this we'd have a cuppa coffe and a smoke, then switch places. Ahh the memories 😊
@@BertGrink yes, half of those magazine games either didn't work, or a had typing errors 😂
@@FatNorthernBigot Aye indeed, and it usually took 2 to 3 months for a correction to be printed. If at all 😆
@@BertGrink what was worse was running it before saving, cos kids are impatient, and it crashing.
@@FatNorthernBigot But the very worst thing that could happen was moving the computer about as you plugged the tape leads in so you could save your masterpiece, and then the RAM pack would become unstuck, costing you hours of tedious typing.
10 PRINT "Hello!"
20 GOTO 10
Ahh.. the 12 year old RUclips pedants.. who doesn't love them? It's Mahhdjoks btw!!! Just kidding.
Do games that pushed the limits of the ENIAC.
Games that push the limit of the Curta Calculator
Games that push the limits of pen and paper.
Can it run Crysis?
QS defender looks better than penetrator on the spectrum.
True, but Penetrator had a landscape editor that you could spend hours fooling around in lol
@@BertGrink Didn't know that. The couple of times I have loaded it, I took one look and thought that it was written in basic or something, and it didn't look like it really played like defender, though tbh it doesn't claim to be like it anywhere so I shouldn't judge it on that.
Meanwhile I can't even get my nodejs console application to stop flickering every update :P kappa ofc
I'm no linguist, but man your accent sounds identical to Retro Core's! You two grow up on the same street or something? hehe!
You're clearly not from the UK ;) similar to your ear - hundreds of miles apart to mine.
Judging by their very different accents, they didn't even grow up in the same county, let alone the same street.
I have noted over the years that a lot of retro UK computer RUclipsrs tend to have very 'earthy' vocal tones
The weird thing is my family say my voice on RUclips sounds so posh! They say I sound nothing like that in real life!
The Chroma 80 is an additional piece of hardware though, isn't it? Bizarre anyone cares enough to make and then use such things.
Makes sense if it is only a basic bit of kit but anything like this that is complicated I never see the point in.
Just looked them up on Ebay............£600............fuckin hell..........thats almost as much as I paid for the computer Im using now.
There's probably very few in their original condition; when the ZX81 was released, many people upgraded their ZX80 with the new ROMs and keyboard templates.
This computer is the very definition of cheap.
It's absolutely amazing how they managed to get it so cut down and so cheap when you bear in mind the time it came out. This was the early days of digital electronics becoming mainstream. And one big problem was not just that certain CPUs and so on were expensive or hard to get en masse, but RAM was nigh on impossible for many companies. This is why Commodore bought up MOS technologies, so they could OWN the 6502.
That Sinclair managed to cut corners to whittle down the number of chips through sharing processes is frankly amazing looking back.
I hate the white background, it blinds people.
I like your content, but the ads are ridiculous. I had to sit through some before the video, 1 minute and 10 seconds into it I had to watch more...less than 4 minutes later and even more...F that in the A.
Just get Premium or Vuanced. I could never go back to RUclips ads these days
I understand what you're saying, but I need the ad revenue to keep going.
If you want you could join my Patreon for the chance to see my videos add free;
patreon.com/sharopolis
Or you could just install an ad blocker. I'd usually complain about the 0.07 pence of revenue you would be denying me, but I'm sure you're nice guy, I'll let it slide this time!
Ugh, that's a really lazy emulator you're using to try to demonstrate ZX80 screen desynchronisation. In real life it's nowhere near that neat.
Yeah you're probably right, but if you want to supply me with a real ZX80 I'll happily use it!
Where can we see your video, showing it how it really is?
@@Hologhoul you can see someone else's video at ruclips.net/video/LoSunyxm1pE/видео.html - you'll notice that characteristic behaviour is a bounce, not a slow constant-rate roll.