Part 6 - Losing that spectrum feeling. ========================================== ***************************************** * PART 6 - LOSING THAT SPECTRUM FEELING * ***************************************** By Stephen Smith(stevo@jonlan.demon.co.uk) Okay, this one is a serious (one sided) discussion, unlike my previous ramblings. We're talking about what makes the Spectrum the Spectrum, and it's more than just the games, or the rubber keys, or it's easy programming. It's that Spectrum feeling, and I feel that when I use my emulator to play Spectrum games, I'm losing something, and I think I know why. There was a discussion around February on comp.sys.sinclair about the merits of using a Spectrum Emulator over a real Spectrum to play Spectrum games, and I must confess to being in the Emulator camp, although, as I said, that's mainly because my Spectrum doesn't work any more (join the club). However, I also use an Emulator to play Spectrum Games because it's so much quicker and easier to load the games than using the real thing, which can be an edgy affair, and due to my hardware, I could only play games that I have tapes of (about 20, compared to about 150 snaps in total). And there we have the two problems in a nutshell - speed and quantity. It's too easy and too quick! In the old days when I used a real Spectrum, I didn't have that any games and those that I did have took five minutes to load. So when they did load, I spent a long time with them, exploring them and seeing how far I could get. Now, with the Emulator, I load up a snap (say Rollercoaster), jump around for literally about 30 seconds, lose a few lives, and then load another game. I can remember playing Rollercoaster in the past on my real Spectrum, and I played it for *days!* (I even thought it was better than MM and JSW). Maybe it's because I'm older now and prefer games to be deeper, but it's so easy to give a snap 30 seconds to prove itself, and if it fails (as most will do in that time limit), to load up another one, and then another etc. The ftp sites means that we have an almost unlimited supply of games to try out. I don't give them a chance any more, but I'm determined to change. Thank you for listening! Stephen Smith - stevo@jonlan.demon.co.uk "Spectrum Users do it with a rubber." TECHNICAL FORUM This month, there is a follow-up to last month's query by Dominik Behr about the Timex FDDЗ. "I just got through reading Emulate issue 4 on-line and wanted to give a reply to one of the letters in the Technical Forum concerning the Timex FDDЗ disk system. I'm no expert on the system, but I just wanted to answer in case no-one else did. (I can't believe that would happen!)" [It did - TEd] "There is some info on the disk system at: http://relcom.eu.net/zx/de/tc2048.pst. It is a collection of some e-mails talking about (mostly) how to transfer files from the Timex disk system to a PC. The author used 22DISK to read the Timex disks on a PC and includes the setup configuration to read TOS disks. Mr Behr could try to contact the author (Wojtek) using the e-mail address in the file and ask him for a copy of TOS on disk. He should also be able to suggest a way of using 22DISK to copy TOS back onto a Timex disk. "I also just came across an ad for CP/M 2.2 for the FDDЗO00 system (the one with the 64K bank built in) with Timex's original CP/M manual and Digital Research's official CP/M manual. This one's a rare bird as it was only released in Portugal after Timex Corp. folded. I don't know how widespread CP/M usage was on the Timex computers in Portugal." Tech Ed's reply: Thanks! Not only have I now found out about the Portuguese Timex computers, we also appear to have an answer to last month's query. As for CP/M, my experience of this operating system has been gained on the Research Machines LINK 480Z and Amstrad CPC and PCW series. I know it could also be used on the Spectrum +3, but not on most versions of the Spectrum due to the memory layout. It would be interesting to know more about CP/M on the Timex. ==========================================