ZX81 Adventures!
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- čas přidán 29. 05. 2023
- The little ZX81 often gets overshadowed by its bigger brother - the ZX Spectrum, but what is it like on its own?
With some tasty mods on hand, lets find out.
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Down! for the ZX81: revivalstudios.itch.io/zx81-down
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This was the machine I learned BASIC on in the summer 1981. By the time I went back to school, I was quite proficient in programming. I'd spend any spare time in class writing programs for all manner of things. That machine meant everything to me, back then. Despite having fond memories of it, I don't think I'd last more than about 5 minutes on one, now, before getting a bit bored. Still, it was over 40 years ago.
I was only 4 when my household was blessed by a ZX81 suddenly appearing. The start of lifelong love affair with the microcomputer, and instrumental in me later becoming a software eng. Its such a special era we were all lucky to be part of
I was 10 and saw a ZX80 at a School Fayre and that was my jaw drop moment in life. It was totally mind blowing at the time. Yeah, things have moved on more than ever imagined but that first experience with a computer won't be forgotten.
I spent hours entering hex from a magazine into one of these, back in the day. We've come such a long way since!
i am simple man - I see ZX81 in Thumbnail, I watch'n'like 🙂
Beautiful machine, people call it names now but in the 1980s this was much loved and respected, you got used to the limitations of micro computers in those days
I got the ZX81 as a kid around 1982 with that monster maze game that I loved. I bought a gaming magazine with a program that you could code in which took me all day.
Use to play on a ZX81 and put in the lines to play a game and no tape yet, so after a failure type in all again. You have fun and that is important!
I bought one in I think 1983. The goal was to use it to plot points in 3D space onto a drawing on a drawing board. I took months ,fighting the 16k wobble box, the wonky keyboard, and the rough NTSC display, but I did get it to work. I wrote a program called "Circe" that I used to lay down very complex 3D draiwings from basically any perspective - it even included a kind of focal-length effect. I used it to draw a ton of things that totally baffled experienced illustrators - like yacht hulls, and internal cutaways of them as well.
OMG, memories... The ZX 81 was my first computer. Before I bought it I read a BASIC-book from the local library. When I understood this programming language, I was ready to spend my money.
Que recuerdos! Mi primera computadora por allá por 1985. Tenia 14 años cuando ese modelo llegó a mis manos, y era un modelo de segunda mano.
Ah, my very first real computer. I remember the thrill of first getting it, as well as the nightmare's of working with it. I actually still have it.
10 PRINT "ZX81 RULZ"
Bravo! I still have my ZX81 unused for 40 years and still in its box. When I find a tv I’ll see if it still works - you’ve got me interested again..
ZX81... started me on my journey to becoming an Electronics Design Engineer. I used the good old Z80 and its derivatives for many years befor eretiring.
I had one with all full hardware add on’s including Hi rez . I used for porting a full Startrek game in Basic from our CDC Dec10 system in college. I was able to get the entire game in HiRez running exactly as it ran on the full Dec10. Took me months, but was very rewarding to see how powerful this little machine was and could be.
Had the ZX81, 16K Ram Pack, Thermal Printer, and manual. Got the train to drive across the screen and printed the menu's for my Grandads Hotel, which was a BIG hit with the guests.
My uncle was an EE, he had 10 year old me doing all kinds of crazy things to my coveted ZX81. We made a printer interface, a video inverter, we decoded more of the memory map, I had extra ram, a second switchable ASM Monitor rom, and of course I had the whole thing situated in an old teletype keyboard that weighted about 30kg, and where I had individually rewired every single reed switched key. Took weeks and weeks to do that. Much to his disappointment I became a software guy, though I did keep it at the low level asm programming end of the scale for many years. Good times.
Hi my college lecturer said the best it can do is when it's filled with cement and use as a doorstop. I loved it LOL
I'm always impressed by the hardware hacks that the designers used to make the ZX81 so simple (and cheap). Particularly the way they abused the Z80 to generate the video display, and the fact that the cassette output is the same thing as the video output. I also seem to recall that the keyboard is somehow directly connected to the address bus. Then there's the clever "compressed display file" idea to allow a 1K machine to have enough RAM left over to do something useful.