29 февраля 1996

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* PART 6 - LOSING THAT SPECTRUM FEELING *
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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.

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