Sinclair ZX81 turns 30! Do you have one?

[bartman]

Wow !!!!!!
The Sinclair ZX81 turned 30!!!!http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/../vbiis/images/smilies/thumbsup.gif
Those of you who go...... "WTF is a ZX81???????"......http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/../vbiis/images/smilies/eyepopping.gif
well here is a link ....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12703674

I started of with one of these beauties way back and like the article said ....pestering the parents ( in my case just mum) for the puter and then the expansion pack....
I managed to write a program to play Yatzee ( if anyone remembers the game with dice....http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/../vbiis/images/smilies/questionicon.gif) and sure enough as the article says .... lots of frustration with loading and saving to a tape drive!!!!http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/../vbiis/images/smilies/mad.gif

Anyhoooo, here are a few pics of my ZX81 plus 16KB expansion pack....
Dug it up out of a storage box and also found my First mobile phone, an Ericsson GH 337 wit a fancy antenna http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/../vbiis/images/smilies/winking70.gif.

Let me know if I'm not the only owner of a ZX81 in Australia ( well I guess in the IIS community at least...)http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/../vbiis/images/smilies/confused2.gif

5: rem "print bartman onto the screen indefinitely"
10: print "bartman";
20: goto 10
30: end(.....mmmm did not need that I guess)

I think that was the BASIC code that I first used .... Please correct me if I'm wrong.....

Bartman

[MrB]

No I didn't have one, but as a kid I always looked at the adverts in the magazines and dreamed.
I always ended up with the hand-me-downs from friends and family... Vic20, C64 etc
Wish I still had them.



lol no, but it is good programing practice ;)

[bojan]

Well, as far as I am concerned, you are sill the only one :thumbsup:.. Because mine is in a basement somewhere in Europe..(if !)
Actually I used to have two (because I managed to burn ULA chip on the first one when trying to make the printer for it).
It was fun... I made 16kB extension (using static RAM's) and some other things...

Later, I made Apple][ and never looked back ;)

Yes, it was BASIC.. so called 8kBASIC, ZX81 version.

[CraigS]

No Zx81 .. but I was a Dick Smith Mini Scamp man ! (The kit with the National Semiconductor SC/MP CPU ..and you had to program it from the switches on the front panel !)

… Made my own … none of this buy someone else's product !
:P:)
I wanted to know how it all worked !
:)
Still have it kicking around somewhere, too.

Cheers

[seeker372011]

I had a Timex Sinclair which I bought in the US-wasn't it the same thing? , but sadly don't know where it is now-i gave it away to someone
wish I had kept it!
yes it was fun writing stuff in BASIC
had to hook it up to a TV and save to a cassette player
Narayan

[CraigS]

I think my Scamp ended up getting a Basic interpreter built into it, also. Yes .. that's right … burnt into one of the first EPROMs !

I also built a keyboard ASCII encoder for it as well …

I should save this beast from becoming lost … its already what … 35 years old!!!
:)
Cheers

[Barrykgerdes]

My friend who worked at NSC in Scotland gave me an experimental scamp kit to play with. I made a display and keyboard out of an old(?) calculator. I spent hours trying to get it to do something but gave up in the end. The year 1976.

In 1982 I bought a sega 8 bit computer that ran Sega BASIC. It saved to tape but was very unreliable. I later bought the accessories disk drive unit that was much better. With the disk drive I was able to load CPM and had a 40 character wide version of Wordstar. I think the computer is still stored somewhere in Adelaide.

The next computer I had was about 1984. It was 8/16 bit, two FDD and ran DOS 2.11. I later added a HDD, DOS 6.22, 1.44Mb drive and VGA screen. It is still operational. I have Symphony and dataflex loaded on it and can turn it on, check the Database in approximately the same time it takes to load load XP on a modern computer. Those old computers used their limited resources much better than the modern ones.

Barry

[AdrianF]

My first PC was a Sinclair with no expansion pack. Bought the 16k expansion pack later. It was amazing what could be done on so little memory.
Graduated to a C64 and then a series of TRS80's CoCo's (1,2 and 3).


Adrian

[kustard]

I had a TI99/4A whilst all my friends had VIC20's and CBM64's... I had to write my own games and taught myself how to program on it.

I remember seeing a Sinclair once on a trip to Sydney but it was the XZ Spectrum and not the ZX81.

[CraigS]

So folks .. which of all these computers would be the oldest (most original) ?

Love to know (just out of interest).

I think my scamp dates back to what Barry mentions .. about 1976.

The Sinclair was pretty early in the piece but was only available in the UK/Europe, originally, (as I recall).
:)
Cheers

[Barrykgerdes]

I think the NSC SCMP (National Semi Conductors Micro Processor) was the first reasonably successful micro processor chip released circa 1975. There were a number of published circuits in electronics magazines around 1976-77 that used it. However Motorola was not far behind and then came the very successful Z80. I think about 1979, someone may like to research it.

Prior to the micro processor there were some "computer kits" using TTL etc components that used teleprinters for terminals. A friend of mine had one in 1974 that played startrek. Did anyone else have one? I was not very interested in computers then. Preferred building my colour TV transmitters and other elctronic stuff as a radio ham. I could transmit colour TV 18 months before the official operation colour TV.

Barry

[CraigS]

I think mine ran at a princely clock speed of 1 MHz !!

It had a 16 bit address bus and an 8 bit data bus !

I think it originally became available in 1974.

It had a serial i/o port as I recall, also.

Can't remember how much RAM the kit had, but it was tiny compared with today's monsters !

I also think that Sinclair used it as the the basis for the Sinclair Mk14 (1977), which was the forerunner to Bart's ZX81 (1981).

I think the SC/MP's main competitor at the time was the mighty Motorola 6800 (1974).

Talk about a trip down memory lane, there Bart !

Thanks for the thread.
:)
Cheers

[Barrykgerdes]

I think it had 1KB of static RAM but it might have been 1Kb. I ditched my scamp kit about 11 years ago when I moved.

Barry

[CraigS]

:lol: .. it seems hilarious, eh Barry ?

I don't think I could afford the extra chips and I do recall counting the memory in lots of 64 bytes ! :lol:

How embarrassing !
:)
Cheers

[Bassnut]

What about the ZX80 that preceeded it?? I bought one as a kit from Boots in the UK in 79'. I still have the ZX80 and 81. The ZX80 was the revolution, a total of only 4 ICs !. I made 16k RAM expansion packs and A/D conversion PCBs for them in 81' (in OZ). Sold many of them, specially to universities. Some of the projects done by universities with the A/D convertors were amazing (as a data logging device), there was nothing else at the time, at the price that could do anything close.

[dalemadison]

I had one with the 8k memory module. I remember a couple of hours typing in a program from a mag and days debugging my typing mistakes.

[CraigS]

The Sinclairs were always more advanced than my puny, primitive Scamp.

The ZX 80 was terrrific ! (Wiki seems to think this was brought to market in 1980).

Get 'em mounted and framed, Fred !

I'm going to retrieve my Scamp, shortly.

All of these things should be regarded as world-wide treasures !

Ha !…

;)

:)
Cheers

[thunderchildobs]

I sold my ZX81 +16K to upgrade to get my ZX Specturm, which I still have. I also still have the orginal ZX printer with a roll of silver paper.

Brendan

[Bassnut]

Graig, yes this is such a nostalgia trip, got me digging the monster out, in perfect nick, and with original manual in tact !.

Your right, it was bought in 80' and it was the ZX81 that was 4 chip. The video out put handling was very clever I recall, used the dynamic RAM refresh function of the Z80 CPU to control the video raster display. My ZX81 had an extra IC stuck to the top of the CPU hand wired to the PCB to correct a firmware math bug.

The ZX thermal printer was a marvel too, so small and capable of amazing, chunky graphics.

There was a far more advanced computer PCB kit produced in North London at the same time as the ZX, at about the same price that I cant remember the name of at all and that I cant find any mention of anywhere now, but it didnt come with basic and was a ***** to program in assembler (I think it tanked as a result). I left it with a company in London I worked for at the time, and it became a prototype for automating studio sound mixing desks, the 1st in the industry.

The British are good at this sort of excentric, erratic out of left-field innovation, the TRS80 was boring in comparison.

Technically though, the US was far ahead, Ive worked on industrial machines that were built in 75' that were allready (discrete chip CPUs) 16bit albiet with magnetic core memory, you could actually see the individual bit cores on a giant PCB covered with a wired core array!. They are still in use to this day (Excellon XL3 PCB drill machines).

Thanks for the recall Bart !.

[ballaratdragons]

Never seen one, never heard of them.

My 1st computer was a Commodore 64 and I didn't know how to use it.

Nothing's changed :P

[higginsdj]

I had one. I started off with a TRS80 (model 1) in 77/78, and along the way had (in no particular order) a ZX81, TI99/4A, Exidy Sorcerer, Sharp PC 1251, Commodore 64, Commodore SX64, Amstrad PCW before moving onto PC's and now iMac's.

Cheers

[RickS]

We used TRS80s and Sorcerers as terminals for entering and editing Pascal programs at UQ Comp Sci in the late 70s and early 80s. Compilation and execution was done on the PDP-10 mainframe. I wrote the assembler code for the Z80 micros. Perhaps we should have applied for a patent on cloud computing ;)

[bartman]

Thanks Craig, sure was a trip for me as well!!!!!


YEP same here!!!!! not only ones from mags but my own programs as well !!!!!
I used to swap games by sending cassette tapes through the post ( snail mail) by contacting people through those magazines.......NO Bit torrent then!!!!!


Ahhhh Nostalgia!!!!


Heheheheh :lol::lol::lol: my second computer was a C64 too!!!

Great to hear your responses peoples!!!!!!
If, and when I get the urge, I'll try and fire it up and see if some of the tapes still work to upload a program. Will try and take a few pics then!:confused2:

Cheers
Bartman

[bartman]

I remember dabbling in some Pascal and remember that I liked the way the Language worked. I cant remember a single thing now though.....mmmmm maybe a google search is on the books now!
Bartman

[michaellxv]

Aah Pascal. That's what they used to teach us to program at Uni. I loved it so much I wrote a compiler for it in assembler on the IBM mainframe at work. What was I thinking :screwy:

My first computer was a C64. Had lots of fun with that. Started with the tape drive but soon tired of that and got the floppy drive (http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/images/commodore-64.jpg&imgrefurl=http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/skype/commodore-legend-chuck-peddle-skype-new-jersey-sri-lanka-wifi-voip.asp&h=300&w=349&sz=20&tbnid=0pshnwoagJZ4iM:&tbnh=103&tbnw=120&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcommodore%2B64&zoom=1&q=commodore+64&usg=__4FeYpA0de9TfUo-S_SaTOdCb-Gg=&sa=X&ei=QL-ETa3ZLJHEvgPF8pm9CA&ved=0CEoQ9QEwBQ). Have a look at the size of it. Single sided 360Kb from memory. We had the tool so you could cut the notch and turn them over to use both sides. :thumbsup:

Did anyone else have the programs that would play tunes with the floppy drive by banging the head against the end stop?

[bartman]

Yep did the same thing with the the floppy too!!!!!

BTW (bit slack here) , but do you know of any sites regarding Pascal Language Tutorials Michael?
Cheers
Bartman

[MrB]

You know why the 1541's were so big?
They were basicaly a C64 and powersupply, sans video and SID chips and ofcourse the keyboard. :lol:

http://www.z80.eu/1541C.jpg

[michaellxv]

Yep, and fully programmable in their own right. Most useful program was the one loaded into 2 drives and they would just continuously duplicate the disks you fed them.

[michaellxv]

A quick google found lots of potential sites, but not places I regularly visit. Just put 'pascal programming' into google.

I still have the Vax-11 Pascal reference manual and the text book we used Algorithms+Data Structure=Programs by Niklaus Wirth the guy who wrote the language.

If you have specific questions i'll see if I can still answer them.

[Jeffkop]

I still have a ZX80 and the case of the 81. I fitted it to a homemade case with full size keyboard and from memory it had a 16K memory expansion pack. This allowed my modified B/W 11inch television to sit on it.

I owe much of my assembly language programming skills to Mr Sinclair and these early Z80 based machines. I still have pages of source code hand written that I used to Poke into memory locations to run assembler. As has been suggested previosly, this is a trip down memory lane.

Great Thread.

[bartman]

Thanks Michael.....as I said I was a bit slack....:zzz2::whistle:

I'll keep you in mind if I have any Q's
Cheers
Bartman

[EddieDog]

No, I 'stole my daughters commadore 64 and learned to programme on it.
:)
Eddie

[bartman]

:lol::lol::lol::lol::lol:
I wish my sister was interested with computers from the beginning....but she was more interested in boys back then!
Bartman

[Jules76]

Unfortunately the Sinclair was a bit before my time. I feel so young! lol

My first computer was a Commodore Plus/4. I think it was supposed to be the successor to the C64, but it flopped and was discontinued the following year after it was released! I think the reason we got it was because they were flogging them off cheap some years later.

I remember having a hard time finding any software for it since it was so short lived. But of the few games I had I enjoyed it and it gave me my first taste of Basic programming. Started writing a good old fashioned Text Based Adventure Game, which was suprisingly easy to do, but my story telling skills weren't that great so I eventually gave up on that!

Fun times.

[bartman]

Thanks Jules... I do remember that too, another trip into the ancient world of computers!!!!!!
Cheers for that
Bartman

[MrB]

I believe it was supposed to be a computer suitable for small business and home office use.
The 'Plus/4' referred to the four 'Office' applications that were included in the computers ROM, word processor, spreadsheet, database, and graphing.

In many ways the +4 was way superior than the C64, however it's graphics chip could not support sprites and the SID chip had been left out so only had basic audio, it therefore had limited appeal to gamers which was the C64's success.

If they had simply expanded on the C64(like the Commodore65 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_65)), so it was backwards compatible, but with the better graphics, BASIC, memory management and the four office apps, I reckon it would have been a winner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Plus/4

[Waxing_Gibbous]

We didn't have such tres moderne instruments in Canada.
We had to make do with an abacus made out of bear teeth and moose sinews. A specially trained beaver would slap out the results in morse code with its tail.

[gary]

Time passes rapidly.

The first computer I was fortunate to own was a Motorola D2 Kit in 1976.
It was an evaluation board that Motorola had introduced for its 6800 microprocessor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6800)
and came with 128 bytes of static RAM (yes, that's bytes) and 1KB of EPROM.
The CPU could run at 1MHz but from memory was clocked at 512KHz.

Delivered, it came in a large binder which included documentation such as
schematics and assembler manuals as well as two bare circuit boards and
all the components. You soldered it yourself.
See http://www.computermuseumgroningen.nl/motorola/6800map.jpg

The completed system looked like this -
http://www.computermuseumgroningen.nl/motorola/6800d2sm.jpg

There was an executive that ran in EPROM that enabled you to punch
the hexidecimal opcodes into memory and then execute them. Seven
segment LCD's provided one form of output.

Programming in hex left me with the unfortunate legacy that I can still
remember many of those opcodes in my head to this day.
86 was a Load A Register (LDA). 20 was a Branch Always (BRA).
7E was Jump (JMP) and so on. It is a total waste of brain cells. :shrug:

The system could be interfaced to a commodity cassette recorder and programs
stored and retrieved using what was called the Kansas City Standard.




Hi Barry,

The Intel 4004 was the first microprocessor, introduced in Nov 1971.
It was a 4-bit device and though sales were initially slow as engineers pondered
what to do with it, they did pick up and it was arguably a success. It certainly
spawned an incredible revolution.

I still have a copy of the databook and have attached a scan from one of the
pages from it below.

The Intel 8008 was an 8 bit device introduced in 1972 and it was the first device
to be incorporated into a true microcomputer.

The Intel 8080, Motorola 6800 and NatSemi SC/MP ("Scamp") were all
introduced in 1974. Arguably the Motorola and Intel devices were the biggest
commercial winners and these two specific devices spawned successive
generations over the following decades that kept the two companies as the
dominant players in a highly competitive market.

The Zilog Z80 didn't appear on the scene until 1976.

The 6800 had the advantage of a cleaner architecture. For example, it
didn't have the ugliness of the 8080's I/O instructions. Instead, all I/O was
memory mapped.

However, when IBM Engineers at Boca Raton in Florida chose the Intel 8088, one of
the successors to the 8080, for inclusion in the first PC, few would have guessed that
it would ensure that the 8080's DNA would get passed down to the present time in
the commodity PC's that we use today.

However, the race was not always that clear and for some time when PC's were
still of limited use in business, Motorola MPU's dominated in the professional
market and were incorporated in the first workstations out of
Sun Microsystems, Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard.

For sheer number of microprocessor core licenses sold in the world, the clear winner
is ARM Holdings out of Cambridge in the UK. As at January 2011, some 15 billion
ARM CPU cores have shipped and it is predicted 5 billion will ship this year alone.
Used in nearly every mobile phone in the world, ARM processors also account for
an estimated 90% of all embedded 32 bit processors in the world.

One of the more mind boggling manufacturing statistics I have ever read
was in the Dec 2007 issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine, which quoted an
estimate attributed to Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, that perhaps one
quintillion - that's 10 to the power of 18 - transistors are fabricated within
devices annually. Moore goes onto say, "We make more transistors per year
than the number of printed characters in all the newspapers, magazines, books,
photocopies, and computer printouts".

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi Gary

Yes now you mention it I probably heard about all those developments in thew early 70's. A couple of my work mates were real keen on computers and played with all those devices. I deliberately stayed out of computers and when everyone took the computer options in the E&C I took the TV option. My first course on computers was about 1969 run by a couple of Uni students from AWA.

We had a number of computers at work that I saw a little of, Ikara, SPS 52 SPS 51. All used discrete parts in the CPU's. My first dabble was with the SCMP that my mate from National gave me. He also kept me supplied with ic's for our projects. I was a keen ham at the time and we travelled all over England and Scotland to conventions and exhibitions. Our department head looked on them as official business so the trips were all financed by the government. (That's why I am reluctant to complain about pollies perks).

I did nothing about computers then til I got a Sega in1982/3. My sons played with them most and both got good jobs in the IT industry as a result of learning from the ground up.

By the way are you going to the SPSP this year. If so we must catch up.

Barry

[gary]

Hi Barry,

Great to hear of your first exposure to computers back at AWA and
the story of the friend out of NSC in Scotland who have you the SC/MP to tinker with.

In the 70's and 80's, the premier enthusiast's publication at the time was Byte magazine.
I still have a collection of them and I just went and pulled a couple of copies out of
a storage box dated late 1977 and scanned a few sample pages.

One of the articles that appeared in the Nov 1977 edition was on how to write a pseudo
16-bit instruction set for the 8-bit 6502, a processor manufactured by MOS
Technology and which architecturally was quite similar to the Motorola 6800.
The article is written by some guy called Stephen Wozniak out of a little company
in Cupertino California called Apple Computer.

Woz's Apple I and Apple II both used the 6502 and I scanned a double page
advertisement for the Apple II which appeared in Byte and have included it below.

Mai and I have registered and are definitely coming to Ilford.
See you up at the house and looking forward to catching up.
Hoping there might be something to see on the radio astronomy project perhaps?

[MrB]

Cheers for the scans Gary, that was fun :)

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi Gary

Sure hope to see you at the SPSP.
I need to reposition the aerial on the dish. I miscalculated the focus because the original mount had been modified. When I put it in the right place (about an hr's work) I will hook up the LNA and Spec. analyser and have a look at the sun. This being successful the project will be turned over to the radio astronomers.

I remember the old Byte mag. and the Apples. By the time the Apple 11 came along I was the section "Guru" on the old IBM XT. Programming it with Symphony, Lotus 123, Multimate, ACAD 2 and Dataflex. These were all used when "work was slack. I had an outboard 70 MB drive and some hidden partitions that the IT managers did not ever find. I used the "FF" character in the directory address.

Barry

[Jeffkop]

Fantastic input into the thread Gary, I feel older though for the tirp down memory lane. In stark contrast, I remember how cutting edge all these magazines and their articles was at the time, and also how you felt like you were an alien becuase you played with this stuff and heaven forbid, actually understood it. It amazes me how the basics of computing havnt changed a great deal since these days either.

[gary]

Thank you Jeff & Simon,

This advertisement from 1977 offered 16384 bytes of DRAM for US$485 -
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/attachment_browse.php?a=91178

That works out at US$0.0296 a byte (i.e. approximately 3 cents a byte).

Many IceInSpace readers will have 4GB or more of DRAM loaded in their machines
these days.

It is therefore interesting to reflect how much 4GB of memory would have cost
in late 1977 if one had purchased it in the same form as appeared in the
advertisement.

Firstly, it would equate to 262,144 of those memory cards and would have cost
in excess of a staggering US$127.1 million dollars.

The 1977 board is quoted as consuming 5 watts. 262,144 boards would have consumed 1.31 Megawatts.

If one was willing to pay proportionally more for access speed, so for example,
one was prepared to pay twice as much for DRAM's twice as fast and so on,
then a modest speed DRAM today would be at least 35 times faster than its
1977 counterpart on a random access (in reality, the 2011 part achieves
considerably higher transfer rates than this when used in a typical application),
which would further inflate the US$127.1 million dollar figure to US$4.45 billion.

By comparison, in 1977, Cray Research's first customer paid only US$8.86 million for
their Cray 1 supercomputer which had a 80MHz clock speed but with a vector architecture.

The increases in performance and the phenomenal decreases in price of
computing in a space of only 34 years seem staggering, but when one considers
that this trend is projected to continue for some time, it is positively mind boggling
to say the least what the future holds. :thumbsup:

[ballaratdragons]

It was only 2 years ago I first heard about a 'Terrabyte' and thought "no way, nothing is that's huge!".

And yet here I am, those 2 years later, casually saving my images onto a $89 1.5 Terrabyte hard drive here at home, non plussed :lol:

[MrB]

LOL Ken!
And just think, It won't be very long until we think of a current day PC with i9 CPU and its 8GB ram and it's 2TB HDD the same way that we currently think of an XT clone with its 2MHz i8086 CPU and it's 10MB HDD

[gary]

Hi Ken,

The rapid pace of hard disk storage will continue to introduce us to SI prefixes
that few of us would have had call to use in conversation otherwise.

According to an IDC report of May 2010, the world's digital storage capacity was
expected to reach 1.2 zettabytes during 2010.

A zettabyte is 10 to the power of 21 bytes and is equivalent to a million petabytes.
A petabyte is equivalent to a million gigabytes or one thousand terabytes.

Therefore the entire world's disk storage as at some point in 2010 would have been
equivalent to the capacity of 800 million of the 1.5TB drives you own.

If stored on 3.5" floppy disks, one would have to go out and buy
600,000,000,000,000 of them.

According to IDC, between 2009 and 2020, the world's data storage capacity
is anticipated to grow 44-fold. In other words, equivalent to the capacity of 35.2 billion
1.5 TB drives. If the data were stored on DVD's, IDC claim the stack would reach
half way between Earth and Mars.

Storing this much data is one technical challenge but moving it around
networks when it is needed is another. In March 2010, AT&T reported (http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=30623) that
nearly 19 petabytes (i.e. 19,000 terabytes) of data traffic moves across just
their own network backbone on a typical business day.

IDC Digital Universe Report of May 2010 can be found here -
http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/idc-digital-universe/iview.htm

[CraigS]

Can't resist it … (& I finally retrieved it from the junk heap !)…
:)
Cheers

[Pinwheel]

I got something better a "VECTRICS" still working with all games & an extra controller. I had an offer for a free holiday in Japan for it, I declined.

[CraigS]

Whaaa !! ???

Ok .. very cool, Doug … what vintage is it ? Did you build it yourself ?
:)
Cheers

[Pinwheel]

No this was Parker bro's answer to tv PONG in the late 70's early 80's. They use Vector graphics (X,Y) It was the only console ever released with it's own dedicated monitor & vector graphics. Worth big bucks now to collectors.:)

[Pinwheel]

I also still have my Dick Smith tank battle video game that you had to build from a kit. It still works too! :thumbsup:

[CraigS]

Terrific, Doug .. spent many an hour playing 'Asteroids', on what I guess was a similar platform.

Hang onto it !
.. And 'good onya' for keeping it in such good condition !

Thanks for the pics … very cool.
:)
Cheers

[ballaratdragons]

If you love old computers and video games there is a Computer and Video Game Museum at Smythesdale Victoria (only 9 kilometres from my house :) )

Here is their website: http://computermuseum.bigpondhosting.com/

:thumbsup:

[CraigS]

Hmm .. very interesting, Ken .. amazing that someone has thought to set up a museum for it all !

However ..

My Mini-Scamp stands … unopposed as a towering monument to .. well .. errr …something .. (I'm grasping at straws, here :lol: :) ).

.. perhaps age (and mediocre worksmanship )?

:lol: :)

Cheers

[MrB]

WOW Doug!
A friend of mine had one of those, spent many hours playing Asteroids!
Do you still have the coloured acetate sheets that were supposed to be placed over the screen?

Very Nice!
http://www.vectrexmuseum.com/

[Pinwheel]

You bet your B in Mr.:lol:

It wasn't Asteroids by the way, they called it MINESTORM. love the explosions even with today's graphics.

[Octane]

Gary,

Thanks for those scans.

I just love the photography, particularly in the Apple advertisement.

I get a real kick out of seeing those deeply saturated film prints.

Cheers.

H

[bartman]

Awesome!
I remember playing with it at the shops and really badly wanting one!!!!
Cool that you still have it!!!!
Bartman