ZX Spectrum - Your memories

[Deadlight]

I'm the one who bought a Currah (?) MicroSpeech (??). Crap, it was.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currah

I got into all of the 'Wally Week' games, my fave was 'Pyramania.

[BazookaJo]

I'm the one who bought a Currah (?) MicroSpeech (??). Crap, it was.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currah

I got into all of the 'Wally Week' games, my fave was 'Pyramania.

Man - the Currah speech was awesome dude - it was like having Stephen Hawkins swearing on command.

Though admittedly F*** all use for anything else.

My fave Wally game was "Everyone's a Wally" as the hot chick on the loading screen game me exciting dreams

[psj3809]

I must admit i've been a fan of Speccy games for years, in the 80's i had a Spectrum and tons of games and then was very happy when i discovered emulators !

Yes the graphics are basic, tunes basic but at the end of the day its about playability, many modern games have great graphics/sound etc but no gameplay. I was amazed to find a huge retro community on the web !

worldofspectrum is a great community, great forum, a huge archive of games to be downloaded to play on an emulator.

Theres a site to play online Speccy games and it keeps scoreboards of all the games, great site and you'll get a lot of memories playing here !

Theres even a monthly retro mag out in WH Smiths - Retro Gamer - which regularly features the Speccy (And C64, NES, SNES, Megadrive, Gameboy etc).

We've created a Speccy review book full of reviews also 1982-1984 - 270 pages, 200+ reviews, black and white with colour covers - covers games such as Scuba Dive, Jet Pac, Manic Miner etc

1985-1986- 370 pages, 300+ reviews, a pound more but a bigger book. Covers games such as Knight Lore, Elite, Dynamite Dan etc

We dont make much money per book, mostly done for the love of it. Lulu.com take most of the money (as its print on demand). If any fans of the Speccy want to write reviews of games please let me know, we pay 50p per review

Games are still coming out on the Speccy to this day ! Great old machine ! The scene is huge at the moment, retro gaming is becoming more and more popular.

[psj3809]

Man - the Currah speech was awesome dude - it was like having Stephen Hawkins swearing on command.

Though admittedly F*** all use for anything else.

My fave Wally game was "Everyone's a Wally" as the hot chick on the loading screen game me exciting dreams

Ha ha the speech on the games wasnt great.

Death Star Interceptor was one of the few games to have speech (without needing a Currah unit), it used to have PREPARE TO LAUNCH in a weird voice like someone was holding their nose.

Robocop i'm sure used to have speech as well which wasnt too bad

[DavidM]

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[psj3809]

Never knew that. Lunar Jetman i 'wanted' to like but just couldnt get into it, sooo damn hard and frustrating !!

Knight Lore was a great game to look at but again it was just a case of wandering round the rooms, was always amazed at the graphics but just way too tough for me back then (and now).

Seriously you should check out myspeccy.com , been wasting way too much time on there (Do have the top Cobra score!) but a great site. i thought i was good at games until i registered there, way way way too many better players than me !

[TAKTAK]

i think i had thomas the tank engine on spectrum

[psj3809]

Thought of another game with speech - Ghostbusters !

Think most kids had that back then, the Speccy game was pretty poor, still liked it as Ghostbusters was huge back then at the cinema but you go back and look at that game now and it was pretty bad. Hugeeeee blockbuster hit for the Speccy back in '84 though

[DavidM]

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[DavidM]

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[psj3809]

The game was rubbish on all formats - but the C64 had some nice tunes on that

Yeah agree about that ! Thats one game for sure the C64 was much better with.

Robocop was another classic, wasnt that one of the few games which started life on a computer and was then converted to an arcade game (Instead of the other way round).

Anyone remember Softaid ? Great idea which raised a ton of money for the famine in Ethiopia, they bundled about 8 games on one tape (only 3.99 i think) with the vast majority going to charity. Sold a ton back in the day. Think that was one tape even home computer pirates didnt copy

[mycarsavw]

Thought of another game with speech - Ghostbusters !

Think most kids had that back then, the Speccy game was pretty poor, still liked it as Ghostbusters was huge back then at the cinema but you go back and look at that game now and it was pretty bad. Hugeeeee blockbuster hit for the Speccy back in '84 though

"He slimed you!" in the aforementioned Stephen Hawking/Speak 'n' Spell voice

[DavidM]

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[Stewart]

Anyone remember Glug Glug?

Movie? Betcha don't remember Movie. Class it was.

Nonterraqueous?

Mountains of Ket?

Barbarian?

[manwithnoname]

Luna Jetman used the Currah as well... also had the advantage of re-routing the standard sound via the TV, which the old 48K model never did as standard. (That was fixed on the 128K models)

I had a 48k, Kempston joystick Interface and the Currah micro speech - couldn't plug both of them in at once so I'd have a couple of hours with Currah micro speech plugged in playing games on the keyboard. I had very old model of the spectrum (the heatsink was either at the bottom right hand corner or a big one running the just about the width of the machine at the top) the speccy I had was the later and after a couple of hours if you were using the top row of the keyboard the play games it would be too hot to handle - so I'd unplug the Currah micro speech plug the Joystick in and keep playing.

'.. I'll get you lunar Jetman'

[Betty_Swallocks]

I had one of the very first 48k Spectrums. I was stationed in Germany at the time so I got it VAT free. The list price was &#163;175 but I got it for about &#163;150.

Happy days spent typing in page after page of listings to play a really simple game. You'd spend hours typing it in then twice as many hours trying to find the syntax errors that stopped it running. It taught you a lot about programming though.

Anyone remember the Sinclair printer that used silver thermal paper and produced listings that were almost completely unreadable?

Spectral Invaders? Hungry Horace and of course Manic Miner.

It was the Spectrum that led me to go into computers when I left the Air Force some years later.