An 8 bit
British computer, sporting a Z80
microprocessor, from the
80's.
The 48
KB spectrum was more or
less this:
- Microprocessor: Zilog Z80.
- ROM: 16 KBytes organized from address 0000h, which contained a BASIC interpreter and some usefull features, e.g. the computer's typeset, which could be customized.
- RAM: 48 KBytes, counting the video memory.
- Video: 256 x 192 pixels screen eating up 6 KBytes of RAM, plus a color map of 768 bytes.It was fashioned in away that each group of 8x8 pixels (a character cell) could have a foreground and a background color and the attributes of Bright (lighter colors) and Flash (quickly exchanging the foreground and background colors).
- Sound: It had a built in speaker, that had to be
activated "by hand" by the microprocessor, much like nowadays (as of 2001) winmodems. I.E., if you wanted a
440Hz beep, you had to activate the sound I/O port 440
times in a second. The ROM provided a routine to which you could specify frequency and duration of a beep.
- IO: It featured:
- modulated
PAL video out, ready to TV
-
input and output jacks for connection with a tape recorder, its default storage device
- a Sinclair Interface 2 joystick port, which I soon realized was compatible with the ATARI 2600
joystick.
- An expansion slot, to which one could connect
all sort of stuff, including the multiface one. Well, the multiface deserves a node of itself.I didn't had one - it was more or less like today's game shark's, just more powerfull.
BASIC interpreter: This mostly peculiar BASIC would not let you type any commands on a letter by letter basis. The text cursor had different modes that changed more or less automatically according to the context in a command or program line. Depending on the mode,a BASIC keyword would them appear as a whole, and the cursor would change to the text mode (L). Thanks to this feature, each keyword would take just one byte of memory, which was very important. It was changed in later models (spectrum + and spectrum 128). And when you had a program typed in, it could be edited in a menu like form.
It's worth mentioning that the spectrum's exquisite rubber keyboard made out a fantastic input device for gaming. I knew several people who would rather play on its keyboard that on any kind of joystick.
There was a clone of it, the TK90X in Brazil, but no clones of the subsequent models. Today, one can see and
play Spectrum games on several emulators that can be found for free on the Internet. The emulators will not
do for the rubber keyboard, tough. *grim*