Talk:Spectravideo

"The kernel was CP/M"

"The kernel was CP/M" - what does this mean? The CP/M 2.20 operating system came with no extra charge with the floppy drive controller, but was not shipped with the computer itself, so most users would never know about it. The fact that this operating system software was available for it doesn't mean it was "the kernel"... 62.78.204.68 11:15, 21 January 2006 (UTC) (ravel)

Agreed, I have changed the formulation. Please feel free to change it further, if you wish. Alatius 20:37, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Dim Memories$(100)

My very first computer was a Spectravideo 318. It brings back such fond memories to read this article. I tried the emulator a few years ago and it was great to see the logo filling with colour and to play Spectron again (doesn't it have the catchiest tune!).

The 318 was a computer in a keyboard with a large red lollipop of a joystick on the far right. It had the smoothest keyboard, made from soft gray rubber. That rubber is the part that actually failed in the end, after almost 20 years the keyboard just stopped working, the rubber lost all its bounce.

The machine had some ridiculous low amount of RAM (like 8 or 16K, I can't recall) but for those days it kicked the ZX-Spectrum's butt in almost all ways. I loved the sprite system, with automatic collision detection and I used to vpeek and vpoke to get all kinds of graphic effects.

My good friend and I (word Ali!) spent years writing a series of drawing programs, this culminated in our magnum-opus which was a mixture of BASIC and Assembly. It had a cursor, a toolbox, undo levels, zoom, an off-screen scratch-area, save, load, in short it had the works - and all that out of our own heads. We had never seen other programs like it at the time and we had no connections to any modem networks or even magazines in the stores (being in South Africa was like digital Siberia). The drawing app we were writing suffered a terrible fate however, it got to a point that when you typed "LIST" it would list fine, but then show corrupted code towards the end. What had happened? We had run out of RAM! What a blow. We had to stop the thing and I suppose it's still on some old cassette tape somewhere - if it didn't get used to copy some pop music!

Well, it was the best of times. Peek and Poke and Z80A and coding directly in hex. Sprite$ and Dim and Gosub and Goto and all that spaghetti code with :'s to make lines longer. The white text on the blue background. LIST and RUN and STOP and CLOAD.

Ah, I wish I could rewind the clock.

Thanks Wikipedia.

Merge with Spectravision?

Subject says it all. D. Brodale 06:08, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

My experiences ,making games for Spectravideo/MSX

We had a company (sub-company to Makron corporation, in Finland-Topi's fathers company) named T&T Productions and sold more games in Finland than the importers. Back then the svi-318/svi-328 (16kB-I guess-vs 32kB + basic could be switched off for another 16/32 kB and back on, saving strings/codes for some kind of swap-memory) Most of our games were (in those days c-64 ruled and it had some rather professional-looking games) done in basic, with some small bits of assembler-code called from the basic code. Printti (newspaper) did interwiev, and Mikrobitti did some game reviews (not too good, but keep in mind I was really young at the time).

Topi handled most of the bookkeeping and stuff, made 2(?) text-based adventure games, I made like 6 or so (one text-based other were downhill skiing or some such graphical - I remember that one since it had so lousy demo, heh - I don't really remember). It was a time of c-cassette saving/loading and I did a nice un-crackable (unless using other than spectravideo) afaik. Since I loaded the whole system (basic) along with the game set up to start when still loading... Those were the days. I think my best thing was that un-crackable safety, used in "Banana Boys" for the first time (based loosely in banana boys movie). I especially remember this since I was unable to crack it because I lost the original copy, so no bug-fixes... Heh. I have some tapes left if someone is interested I might post the cover one day if I find them. I think we sold 10-20 000 copies total. If you used and had sprites you could only have so many in same horizontal line otherwise the "last" ones would disappear on the horizontal lines that were overcrowded.

Those were the days :) Doing highschool (lukio) we didn't really publish anything noteworthy, and now I think maybe instead of after that going to university I might have been better off learning c etc (did some in univ. though), but that's liff'. Sorry, if anyone interested enough vote this off, or pick up some old magazines and take some better look/writers. Or ask me questions I'll gladly provide answers if anyone is interested enough to write, and speaks/writes decent English.

suchros_trashmail@hotmail.com, and propably not going to read, if really interested mail many/irc quakenet #wow.cult —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.113.164.122 (talk) 13:05, 7 January 2010 (UTC)