A Bit Of Present, A Bit Of Nostalgy: Article About Nothing

A Bit Of Present, A Bit Of Nostalgy: Article About Nothing

By Aki (as Factor6)

Well, eh, it's saturday evening, 26 minutes after nine. I'm sitting in my room, watching SE#3 and enjoying my music in it, that I made more than a year ago. It's not bad :) Aaah, kill me!

X-agon has two very nice musics in this piece of code. Everytime I'm listening to his AY zak I must ... shit! mum came in and ordered me to tidy up the dishes from supper. OK, I'm back now ... well, when listening to X-agon's music everytime I must say he's very good in Speccy musamakin', although he disappeared a bit from Speccy life in this time.

Hmm, what will this article be about? Dunno yet :) I must listen to some cool AY zak, let's load Burdensome Dream by K3L and scream Bell's patterns. Huh, I'm doing it in GLECK emulator by Ignacio Burgueno for Windoze, 'coz I have bought new PC motherboard without ISA slots and its on-board soundchip doesn't have DOS sound emulation. Damn, I must spend my next money to buy SB Live! at least, coz RealSpec plays sound with it. But now, there is no way to hear the sound in common emuls like RealSpec or R80, so I had to find a suitable one for Win. It's very beta, but the sound emulation is best from other win-based emuls. Thanks God for that. And there is also a plus that it works in task, so I can watch the demo and write this text simultaneously ;)

Wow! Whatta cool FX! Dron is a very good coder! Yep. Well, not many ppl know that the 'crash' effect at the end of BDream's music is done by me, not Bell. I used to visit Dron when he was finishing that demo, and Bell wasn't there, so Dron asked me if I could make that crash sound instead of Bell. Hehe, four years ago! It was cool times.

But stop this nostalgic blah. What did I want to? Oh, yerrm, to write an article. Hehe. Yerzmyey's SE#3 article about racists was good. They are really stupid cripples having shit in their hen-brains. Yerza is very good. I met him at Forever 2001 party for the second time already, we drunk and talked about everything. I'm gradually thinking up that all ppl have the same problems, concerning not only Spectrum things, but mainly life. It's very pleasant to talk with someone from foreign country about life problems you know very well.

Well, I must say I understand 99,9% of Yerzmyey's English :) He is better at it than me, unfortunately. Maybe it's caused by the fact we both are slavians. He's Pole, I'm Czech, I can say I understand a bit when someone speaks Polish. Of course, it's not as good as between Czech and Slovak languages - we were one country for 80 years, so we understand almost everything. Polish is much more different, but I can still tell I understand it a bit. Very big problem is to understand a person speaking native English or e.g. German bloke speaking English. Those languages are totally different from Czech, so when e.g. Gasman's saying something, I must listen to it carefully, then start the understanding process in my brain, because his accent is very uncommon for me. After I have 'encrypted' whatta-kurwa-was-he-saying I can start the translating process and find out whatta-kurwa-was-he-talking-about?! Hehe :)

OK, now comes Marwin's Gallery to my emulator, another K3L debut with Bell's asskicking cover of Erasure's song. Keeeewl. Emuls, emuls, emuls, it's a hit of today, isn't it? Well, it's good to run fresh downloaded stuff before converting it to real Speccy, or to crack those strange TR-DOS files. It's also good for drawing pictures, coz of higher VGA refresh rate and sharpness of the picture.. Simply, emuls are useful, BUT, that original black box with not well keys on it, connected to some TV or old monitor will be forever the best thing in the world, not emulators.

It's part of us, the Spectrum freaks. We've got it in our mind.

I remember very clearly when I was young boy, my father brought a Timex 2048 from Poland, my very first computer. We connected it to our telly in the living-room and tried to load something from the Horizons tape. Unsuccesfully at the first time, because there was something with the volume adjust on our family's taperecorder :) We had one tape from Poland with pirated games, my first touch with the arcade gaming :) I remember the first basic basic program on the tape, named Instrukcja, with Polish instructions to games recorded on the tape. Tasma stop! Wczysnij dowolny klawisz! (Stop tape, press any key) - these Polish words I'll never forget :) hehe. Games like Jet Pac, Cookie, Jet Man, Hungry Horace, Seidabb and others are unforgettable. There was Pssst! by Ultimate as well, but it got Tape loading errors. I remember that one day the game loaded successfully and I didn't want to turn the computer off all day :) Uhh, nice memories ...

Ugh, that tune makes me crazy. Let's stop it. I'll load for example... :) Let's say.. Axis. An ESA game with good music. Well, good to listen to and write the next text. Tuleby is no longer living in Doksy. He has moved to Bela Pod Bezdezem with his girlfriend Nicol, a city about 10km far from Doksy. They live on the 1st floor of big flat house together with Charlie the dog (very big), so we don't meet very often. Tuleby has his Didaktik Kompakt 128 in desolate state and when it's powered up, it works for about one hour and then it gets frozen, maybe he should put it to the service or get a new one, but now there's no time to code demos than about five years ago, you know. This is probably the biggest problem, why the Spectrum scene gets smaller and smaller. Maybe it will end in a state that all the speccy makers will have Spectrum only in their mind, but they won't have any need to make something new. Yep, I'm very sceptic and nostalgic now, SOoo KIck MEee :) True is that every time I have a feeling it's not as bad as it seems after some Speccy demoparty or meeting my soul is full of cool experiences with ZX related friends and so on, you know what I'm talking about probably, so please don't take my blah blah blah too seriously, hehehe :)

And, fuck! why the kurwa I'm writing this? I really don't know..

..oh yeah! To support Subliminal Extacy, of course!!! To support the Speccy! You can do the same as well! Tired of Russian diskmags you don't understand? Write about everything you want, but write. In English. You will support our beloved machine, because it has put us together.

OK, it's half past eleven.

I'm going to bed right now.