@Wiffy/DaveP

Yours could be the making of a long overdue flame war between Spectrum and C64 (my camp) owners!!!

_________________

Yeah, only positive thing I can say about the C64 is that 'BASIC' really did mean 'basic'

Get ya c64 emulator out, lets see war commence....

C64 owners are teh lamers!11!!!!

Spectrum? Spectrum? pfft, sounds like u geezers jump over rainboz. Get wif da pogram d00dz


Oh, and if we l4m3, u must b3 l337 den eh? And at least we had Internation Karate +

Last edited by Theodosius on 26-Feb-2005 at 11:17 AM.

_________________

We had that too, I think it was the original IK we never had. However you had The Last Ninja 2 and we never did ( bah ).

We also got Carrier Command ( real 3d!!! ) amongst other 3d games ported back from the Amiga.

But Ultimate Play The Game wrote cracking Spectrum games, did any make it down-ported to the C64?

Good games:
Exolon
Zynaps
Nebulus
Ranarama
Knightlore
Head Over Heels
Atic Atac
JetPac
Carrier Command
Hard Drivin ( if sluggish )

(Edit)
Quote:

Carrier Command was Realtime's first original 16-bit title, and was initially published for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga in early 1988. All other versions (Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, C64, PC and Mac) were published the following year, after Rainbird had been sold to Microprose. The C64 version was the only version not coded by Realtime, probably due to the hardware not being particularly adept at 3D. C64 experts Source took the game design and employed a sprite-based top-down view.

LOLOLOL hahahaha

You guys never had ACE nor S.W.A.T. nor Operation: Wolf... which BTW, I had hooked up on my Logitech 5.1 speaker system back in 1985, so

_________________

Operation Wolf, I had that on my Spectrum +3 ( Ocean Software ).

No idea what T.W.A.T and ARCE are, maybe they will be on the spectrum archive 'worldofspectrum.org'

(Edit)

T.W.A.T:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=^Swat%21$&pub=^The+Power+House$

ACE:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=^ACE$&pub=^Cascade+Games+Ltd$

Operation Wolf:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=^Operation+Wolf$&pub=^Ocean+Software+Ltd$

lol T.W.4.T.

Does the spooccy have the SID chip???

_________________

Nah the 48ks had a bleeper then the 128ks had quite a good 3 channel sound chip.

The sam coupe had a 6 channel stereo sound chip.

Yeah... but it's not 5.1 is it???????

_________________

...and SID the FLID was????

Sam had a built in euroscart connector, a snapshot button for illegal game copying
and a mouse port that never worked AND built in networking and midi ports.

It really coulda been a contender.

hmm true. BUT! The C64 was modded to allow one to surf the web.. BAH! You spooccy trolls are shockers!

_________________

Spectrum got doom, google for zx spectrum doom. LOL.

lol i can't find it anywhere

_________________

http://www.zxspectrum.co.uk/list.php?term=d&type=1&from=360

Part the way down, scene demos, Doom and Doom 2

ok, I concede

BUT, the speccy never had Half-Life2 like on the C64 now did it?

_________________

@Theodosius

Hmm, dirextx 0.64

I too, was a Speccy man.

I had friends with C64's & although it had some nice features, it never quite felt as right as my Speccy.

16 whole colours!!! Fantastic

FuZion.

PS. R-Type on the Speccy was truly supreme... Prince of Persia on the Speccy is pretty fine too.

Heh. Having programmed for both, I can honestly say the C64 kicks the spectrums ass in every way shape and form. As for high res graphics, the C64 has an almost identical high resolution mode to the spectrum (actually higher, its 320x200), with similar colour attributes as the spectrum. Not only that, but the C64 can overlay sprites onto that hi-res display mode in hardware. Of course, most C64 games programmers decided that, since the C64 is perfectly able to display sprites in front of colourful graphics without them becoming unrecognisable due to horrible colour clash, they would use the multicolour mode instead. Rightly so, in my not so humble opinion.

Lets look at a Dizzy game that is ported from the spectrum (Magic Land Dizzy):

http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=734

You'll notice that not only are the graphics identical to the spectrum (oh look! non-blocky graphics!), but that dizzy can walk in front of a tree without turning into a horrible red mess. Note also that because the C64's high res mode has 64 more horizontal pixels and 8 more vertical pixels, they found room to put a nice pretty border around it. Awww. Lovely.

Now lets look at a game which was written for the C64 first, then downgraded for the poor little spectrum:

http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=730

Oh look. The sky is blue, dizzy is white with red feet and gloves, trees don't seem to be painted with blood. Note also that while resolution has been sacrificed, Dizzy is still high resolution.

Of course, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy is still pretty ugly on both the C64 and the spectrum. But here is a good example of why the C64 kicks the spectrums arse: Mayhem in Monsterland. Smooth scrolling, full colour, excellent platform action. Oh yes, and the score panel is actually in the bottom border. Of course, the spectrum is completely unable to use the overscan area for more than perhaps raster bars.

Note: I actually have nothing against the spectrum and am in the process of writing a game for the Spectrum 128, which was featured in Retro Gamer magazine. This post was written in the spirit of DaveP's original. I do, however, know for a fact that the C64 is a much, much, much better computer than the Spectrum. So There.

Last edited by xeron on 28-Feb-2005 at 01:13 PM.

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

Ah shurrup

Oh and as for the "3d" quote, I should point out that the C64 has a full colour, playable demo of a wolfenstein engine style game. Although very low-res, it includes enemies, teleports, ammo, and health. There *are* higher resolution colour wolf engines for the C64, but they are in demos and not playable.

AFAIK, there are NO playable wolfenstein style games for the spectrum, and the only ones in demos are black and white.

http://noname.c64.org/mood/screenshots.php

As for "traditional" 3D, the C64 is perfectly capable. It seems the Carrier Command programmers didn't know what they were doing. Cases in point:

Elite: http://www.x-speed.de/computer/elite/commodore64.html
Stealth Mission: http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=3902
Strike Force Harrier: http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=3532
Stunt Car Racer: http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=2518
F-15 Strike Eagle: http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=873
F-16 Combat Pilot: http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=874
Rescue on Fractalus: http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=2123
3D Pool: http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=3012

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

Dude! Enough!!! We surrender!

VICTORY!

*does the victory dance*

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

Just fooling ya, the C64 no matter what juicy tweaks it might have had was still fat, ugly and nasty overpriced trash.

Oh yes? Well at least its keys didn't feel like dead flesh, and right from day one you could use joysticks without having to spend extra cash on an interface of some kind!

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

Not forgetting, of course, that it sold over 22 million units. It also continued to sell for many years after the spectrum died. Oh, and finally the Spectrum was created by the same person who thought up the "Sinclair C5", which was just as useless as the spectrum itself

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

And the spectrum smells of wee wee.

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

Z80 coding (on the sinclair) is way ahead compared to the 6510 coding on the C64. Where is the otir, dbnz, jz, jnz, ret z assembly opcodes on the C64?

_________________
Games, programs, reviews

drHirudo:

Having more instructions doesn't make the Z80 "more advanced". I should know, I'm a professional Z80 programmer (really).

The 6510 has a reduced instruction set (note: that doesn't really mean its a RISC processor, although its design ideas echo through the RISC philosophy), which allows it to execute most instructions in one or two cycles (a bit like RISC). This means that although the 6510 is clocked at 1Mhz instead of the spectrums 3.5Mhz, it is actually roughly as fast, and in some cases faster (this is, again, a bit like RISC processors). Where the 6510 differs from RISC processors is that it doesn't have lots of addressing modes, or a fixed instruction length.

Generally speaking, neither machine has "the edge" in terms of CPU choice, they both have their own relative merits.

Note, though, that you can upgrade a C64 with a 20Mhz, 16bit 65816 CPU.

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

The Sam Coupe has an accelerator in the works ( been demoed ):

Quote:

The ORSAM 2004 show took place on the 6th of November, and as promised I revealed a new piece of hardware there that I am currently working on... the Mayhem Accelerator! Currently the prototype is accelerating the Sam Coupe up to 12MHz with uncontended memory (effectively nearly three times the speed of the normal Sam!), but once the final interface is complete the speed will be in the region of 20-24MHz.

The Sam Coupe isn't really a spectrum, though. Its intended to be its successor. A bit like the Amiga to the C64. Not that accelerators for old hardware isn't cool, though. Do you have a link to details of that card?

The spectrum has a lot of catching up to do on the peripherals front. Heres some of the stuff I know about for the C64:

* An ethernet card (RRNet)
* Two different IDE cards
* A SCSI card, with a CD filesystem
* A 3.2Mb ED floppy disk drive
* A 1.76Mb HD floppy disk drive
* 16Mb RAM pack
* Flash card reader
* Iomega Zip drive interface
* CP/M card
* QuickCAM (a low cost webcam) interface

Last edited by xeron on 11-Mar-2005 at 03:52 PM.

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

Quote:

and right from day one you could use joysticks without having to spend extra cash on an interface of some kind!

That's funny my Spectrum had 2 joystick ports on the side

Quote:

It also continued to sell for many years after the spectrum died.

Both stopped sales at about the same time. Actually, the Sinclair mags in the UK out lived the C64 mags by a bit.

Quote:

Oh, and finally the Spectrum was created by the same person who thought up the "Sinclair C5", which was just as useless as the spectrum itself

Oh yeah, and the C64 was made by the company that killed the Amiga

And it was frickin' BROWN!!!!

Quote:

That's funny my Spectrum had 2 joystick ports on the sid

Oh please read posts properly before commenting. I said "right from day one". It was 3 models (16k, 48k, Spectrum +), taking a few years(!) before they decided joystick ports were a good idea.

Quote:

Both stopped sales at about the same time. Actually, the Sinclair mags in the UK out lived the C64 mags by a bit.

I beg to differ. Commodore Format was on sale until October 1995, and within its pages it had reported on the deaths of Your Sinclair and Crash.

The YS special included with Retro Gamer doesn't count, btw


Quote:

Oh yeah, and the C64 was made by the company that killed the Amiga

Are you saying Commodore didn't make good computers? They may have had crap management, but they had top notch R&D...

Quote:

And it was frickin' BROWN!!!!

The C64C was the same colour as the Amiga.

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

@thread

I didn't like either machine, much - given a choice I'd have gone for the C64; the Speccy had *awful* screens - games where everything was only in two or three colours - ick!

My Dad did a whole load of research into the capabilities if the various machines available, and got us an 8-bit Atari... which although wasn't quite as popular as the other two, totally, utterly kicked their arses!

*And* it was the conceptual forerunner for the Amiga...

_________________

Who cares which machine was better? I can emulate the three (with ASp, Vice and Atari800) at once on my µA1.

_________________
Games, programs, reviews

The Amstrad CPC was CLEARLY the best 8-bit computer.

_________________