Guru Larry Fat Cunt

[jumkey mones]

In all fairness, most games for zx spectrum often retailed for way less then whatever nintendo is charging. Hell magazines even gave out free games(though either you had to type out the source code yourself or they gave out floppy discs). That and the fact that btits had such low standards for gaming at the time i can see how they migrates to those machines whos games are pretty much a weird transitional period between the atari and nes/master system in terms of tech.

[da PAC Nigguh]

I remember getting computer magazines that included games printed in BASIC that you had to copy yourself. It took forever and the games fucking sucked.

[pibbs]

I remember that.

Mad Magazine had some code to make an Alfred E Neumann. My lab partner and I in Jr High BASIC class typed it out on our school's Apple II (hooked up to a crt). Took us forever but we got extra credit.

Oh look! Found the actual page!


Look at this shit!

There's several more pages but you get the idea.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

In all fairness, most games for zx spectrum often retailed for way less then whatever nintendo is charging.

The price difference was absurd, sometimes around an entire order of magnitude or so.
Though it was even better in practice cause it was piss-easy to make more copies of a home computer game.

[Liar Revealed]

You're older than me. I shouldn't have to explain that.

You've explained the era correctly, but I was a kid then and wasn't making the purchases. I was ignorant to the prices. I hope my dad bought the computer when it had become cheap. But I seem to recall it was $200 (80s money) for the computer and around the same price to buy a disk drive.

Like you said, we knew computers would be a thing of the future and so a lot of kids wanted them.

whos games are pretty much a weird transitional period between the atari and nes/master system in terms of tech.

That's true. The C64 graphics seemed mindblowing compared to the then-still popular Atari 2600. But the ZX Spectrum doesn't seem any better than the 2600 to me.

[Kugelfisch]

In all fairness, most games for zx spectrum often retailed for way less then whatever nintendo is charging.

Yeah but that's just the reason why the NES played no role in Europe in general. They could've just gone with the C64 like most other places.
I think it comes down to marketing and it being the most affordable system in the UK.

Game prices mattered very little for the home computers of the era. Piracy was super easy. We didn't own a single retail copy of Amiga software. To me as a kid, Amiga games came on random floppies with pencilled labels.

Another interesting way of game distribution were shows that would transmit data by sound to record onto a datasette. Looks exactly like a music tape and works the same way. The sound transmission sounded like a dial up modem or a fax sent to a phone.
They sucked, by the way. Anything on datasette took several minutes to load.
It was an interesting time.

[Guest]

Video games are stupid and computers are gay.

[Guest]

I heard one of those English people say that radio stations in their country used to transmit computer programs over the radio. You could record them and then play them back on the computer's cassette player.

ZX Spectrum graphics remind me a lot of those Tiger handheld games. You'll have an outline of a character but then you can also see the background through the character for some reason.

[Liar Revealed]

There was a case where some German band encoded a C64 game onto a record.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

ZX Spectrum graphics remind me a lot of those Tiger handheld games. You'll have an outline of a character but then you can also see the background through the character for some reason.

That is the stereotypical image of ZX Spectrum game, but they didn't all look like that.
The reason why this ended up happening so often is called attribute clash. Basically pixels on screen are divided into 8x8 blocks, and all pixels of the same block can only ever have the same color. If you want to have moving pixels in color, you better make sure that the sprites have been drawn with the blocks in mind, else things start looking messy.