alt Hacker NewsThe Speccy is mostly unknown in the US but in some ways it's more important than the mighty C64.
It was way less capable but much more affordable. In many poor countries, as well in large portions of Europe, the Speccy dominated because people could actually afford one. It was the VW Beetle of computers.
Can you tell which one I had as a kid? :)
Replies
vidarh • yesterday at 6:29 PM
Fewer Spectrum's of all models combined appears to have been sold than the C64 alone, so it dominated very few places.
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guytv • yesterday at 7:37 PM
Not only this.
I had a ZX Spectrum, and at some point my dad got me a C128.
I was taken aback by how poor its BASIC was in C64 mode, but on the other hand, adding sprites that moved freely across the screen without being bound to the 32x24 character grid felt like magic to me.
I was jealous of the speccy basic. The ms basic the c64 shipped was anemic, you had to have deep, hard to obtain hardware knowledge to do anything with it. Custom characters and character gfx were the most accessible for kids. I pieced together switching out character ram by comparing games in magazines when I was 13. Really impressed my father.