Be Excellent To Each Other

Following the stitch up on Microlive that I posted on Bits and Bobs, lets examine the best 8 bit home computer.

This isn't just about the best gaming platform, I want you to also take into account just how good a computer each one was.

Vote and give your reasons.

Let battle commence!


Here's the link that inspired this by the way:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut_KSHgi4e0&NR=1

Sorry, I had to rejiggle the poll as it was out of alphabetical order which made things unfair and I forgot the poor old QL.

Now you can vote!

I wish I'd paid more attention to when this was started, or how many votes had been cast.
I feel like I've leapt on this a bit too enthusiastically.

Edit - Also, I can't read.

I have voted for the Sinclair Spectrum, partly because it was the only one of those that I owned (in various guises), but mainly because commodore and amstrad users smell funny. [/8 years old]

Bah. I only owned a ZX Spectrum +2. It's not on the list. IT WAS AMSTRAD, CHINNY. AMSTRAD.

Spectrum, obv. The C64 was for fat losers.

All part of the same range.

I voted CPC (natch) because it was the best all round home computer. Good graphics, good sound, an excellent selection of games and the best selection of serious packages if we discount the PCW.

I had a word processor on ROM which you could load up with just three keypresses and it was instantly there complete with spellcheck. Word doesn't load that quickly even on the latest PC!

Also, the excellent colour monitor which actually made the CPC excellent value as at that time a 14 inch colour TV was £150-£200 and would have a worse picture.

In short the CPC rules.

Good for games but abit lacking on the serious software front. Tasword was about as good as it got, and even then until Amstrad came in with a proper printer port you were stuck printing onto Sinclair metallic bog paper.

The same range? The Spectrum was dinkysmall and had arsey little rubber keys. The +2 was full size, with proper keys, and a tape deck. Completely different, Sir.

It had the bestest magazines too. The CPC was just a spectrum but not as exciting. Who wants to do stupid boring stuff like world processing? You want exciting games stuff!

I would vote for none if there were the choice. I was a 16-bitter.

Amiga. Obviously.

Natch.

Well I had a spectrum and at the time I used to claim it was the best but I was a liar.

Commodore 64 - decent keyboard, great sound chip and proper sprites. No contest really.

But it could only fit about 3 pixels on screen. Rubbish! No C64 mags were any good either. You must have been a fat loser then! Ha!

Well at the time I owned a Spectrum and used to claim it was the best so I would have to say no.

However since then I have consumed a lot of pies and coca cola so you may have a point

I think you'll find the answer (for most people) is "Whatever 8 bit I had"

Some of them managed to do things that the others couldn't , however they all had their faults

I was hoping consoles would be there. Everyone knew the PC Engine was the 8 bit champ.

Being that it's purely things with keyboards on I have gone for the speccy.

Apart from the fact it had a price tag three times the price and the games generally were not as good (graphics do not a good game make).

I admit I would have loved a C64 but the spectrum was the longest ownage period of any for me in my entire life. I reakon I must have gotten about ten years or more out of one system (even if I did have to replace it about four times..) Ahh the old Trigger and broom thing

Aha! Definitive proof, if it was needed, right there!

Speccy all the way, obviously. Yes it was crap, but in the funkiest, skillest way ever.

Only if you consider the DS and DS Lite two different ranges,

Hardly. The +2 was a 128k machine, the original Spectrum was 16. The DS and DS Lite have the same specs, and share the same software.

The answer is clear.

The SAM was everything the spectrum was, but loaded up games almost instantly, and had a decent crop of its own games to boot.

FTFY

But would you buy a computer just for the games today? Even Sir Clive never intended the Speccy to be a games only machine, hence why he bundled extensive manuals with his machines.

Fact is that the Speccy and C64 ended up as games only machines. But you only had to pick up a copy of Amstrad Action to see the CPC was vastly different. Crash, Commodore Format, YS etc were all pretty much games only (although YS did give a small amount of space to programming and hardware), pick up AA and there would be run downs of DTP packages, reviews of serious software. Some mad idiot even did a clone of Autoroute on the CPC!

The CPC was much closer to the modern PC's of today which can do everything. The Speccy and C64 were really reduced to being consoles that had keyboards.

And as for the person who said the CPC was a glorified Speccy, that's akin to saying a C64 is a glorified VIC20.

Alterna-Feex.

Which would almost be true if it wasn't for BASIC which made the speccy the easiest to program with (if you had a DKtronics keyboard mod).

C64 all the way!
I like my colours to stay inside my blocky sprites thank-you-very-much!
& C64 had 'Rescue on Fractalus' which was awesome in ways 'Speccies' could only dream of.

Ho ho, Rescue on Fractalus was like wading through mud on the C64. The CPC version was pretty much the same as the C64 from memory while the Speccy version looked appalling in yellow and red.

No, the version you need is either the Atari XL version or the Atari 5200 version. Far far faster and smoother than the arthritic C64 version.

C64 for sure. It was just a much more grown up machine than the spectrum. Especially with the disk drive and the "scene" stuff that appeared on the Commodore Disk User magazine, it seemed like a real computer. I think I was quite lucky to get one (second hand), because my Dad insisted and insists on trying to buy British, on which argument the speccy would clearly have won

I also was lucky to be given a BBC B a bit later from a friend of the family who worked at a scientific lab where they used loads of them and occasionally got to take home the older models. It had *everything* on it - all sorts of mad expansions and dozens of roms, twin disk drives, a Prestel modem.. That actually was a real computer, I mostly used the '64 for games after I got it, but it remains my favorite.

I had a CPC, my mate had a sprectrum, and I used a BBC at primary school (we had 2 in the whole school dontchaknow!)

Out of those 3 the CPC wins hands down, the Spectrum had more games, but the games on the CPC (those that wern't just direct ports of the spectrum games) were so much better in terms of gameplay, sound, graphics. I remember some games having speech on the CPC (Robin Hood definatly had it) I also used it to do my coursework for my English GCSE, I had to buy a special cable to connect to the printer, and then do something to one of the pins, but it worked. I also learned BASIC on there, and created several useful little utilities.

One such program had about 100 mathematical formula in it. Things like typing in a quadratic equation and it would solve it for you. Or if you put in some of the lengths and angles of a triangle it would give you the missing ones, tell you the area, and draw it on screen for you. Area of a circle, Volume of a sphere or cylinder, and the converse. I loved it. It was excellent. I was going to sell it to people at school, so the other kids could do their homework, but I think I asked the teacher if I could do that, and she said no, and being the good little boy I was I didn't bother.

Malc

Ah, I know this. The CPC could talk directly to a standard centronics interface (as still found on a few printers and was really common until 2-3 years ago) but only had a 7 bit printer port for reasons best known to Amstrad. Amstrad sold the correct cables, but you could buy them from lots of places. Problem was that if you got one from Tandy (as I did) it was wired for 8 bits. The easy solution was to just locate the right bit on the edge connector on the CPC and put a tiny bit of insulating tape over it. Job done.

Or you could take the pin out the other end but that was more fiddly and if you did it wrong you broke the cable. Hence why I opted for insulating tape.

The CPC of course had the same sound chip as the ST and on the Plus machines the sound chip had DMA transfer so it didn't need to bog down the CPU. So games like Prehistorik 2 actually had sampled sounds in their soundtracks without the computer grinding to a halt!



Watch and weep Crumbledore users with your blocky graphics all in brown and SID making farting noises. :-) Up to 50 colours on screen at once. Pity about the scrolling, from what I remember it had to be done that way to keep compatibility with the standard CPC version that came on the same disc.

Impressive. That in-game music is a bit hard on the ears though.

It is. And I've just had a look at the DOS version and it does the same odd scrolly thing.

Anyway, everyone will remember me banging on about the GX4000 version of Pang being the best thing ever? Well someone has finally put a clip on Youtube:



You need to play it to love it even more. One of the greatest 8 bit conversions ever.


Don't laugh, it's the C64 version:



And finally, the Spectrum.



Speccy and CPC version sharing the same AY tunes and probably a great deal of other code as well. I liked the Speccy version, only let down that the balloons were jerky as the hardware didn't support sprites like the Plus hardware in the GX and C64.

Away from the playground the facts don't lie.

The spectrum sold more than any other in the list. Thus making it by far the most popular. It was also the easiest to code (I coded most of the free game codes in YS).

The C64 was obviously a much more powerful machine and also more capable. However, it was uber expensive and much harder to program (hence less games).

And the Amstrad sat in the middle somewhere.. I'm not even going to include the others, let's be honest they were'nt very mainstream.

But on sales figures the speccy wins.

In the UK yes, worldwide no. Worldwide (and this is from memory) the C64 notched up 15 million, the Speccy 7 million and the CPC 3 million.

Actually I take issue with the Speccy being easier to code as the CPC had a more advanced version of BASIC (given that it was 2 years newer) which incorporated a decent operating system.

And how dare you say the Sord M5 isn't mainstream!

Hmm, well, I had a Speccy as a youngster, until my dad got an Amiga in 1989, and the Speccy had the advantage of being 1.) cheap, very important in the impoverished Thatcher's Britain, 2.) common enough for you to find other Speccy owners about and 3. ) home to plenty of software, though as Chinny accurate mentions, that meant just games really.

I have to admit that I did spend a lot of my Speccy-owning career looking at game packaging and press adverts and wishing I had a CPC or C64 instead, with those lovely colourful graphics... Kinda bothered me as a kid that I had the 'worst' computer of the Big Three, but in retrospect, I played plenty of games on the computer which I still remember fondly today, so it wasn't that bad. The variety and quantity of software was certainly an advantage; I remember one of my friends at primary school had a PCW at home, and he was limited to playing the (admittedly excellent) Batman and Head Over Heels, and some text adventures, but not much else. I certainly remember how few games my parents had for the Oric-1 they owned before the Speccy, so the Speccy, whilst not being a 'grown up' computer, wasn't that bad.

I didn't find any of these 'playground wars' and arguments when I was a youngster, BTW. I found it rare to find anyone at school whose parents owned computer and played computer games. We were relatively young though. My dad certainly knew plenty of colleagues with Speccies to swap games with and stuff...

If I recall correctly, PCW Head Over Heels does some clever stuff even the 16 bits couldn't manage. Basically because the PCW display was so high res it could fit the larger multi-part rooms on an entire screen.

And getting any game to run on the PCW was a huge achievement because it had no way of drawing shapes in hardware. The display was totally optimized for text and was a hugely clunky bitmapped display which took up nearly 30k. When Batman came out Amstrad's engineers couldn't believe it, it was a huge technical feat to get those graphics on the screen!

I had an Electron, so of course I wanted to vote for that - but in my heart of hearts I know it was just the plucky yet unfortunately deformed younger brother that no-one liked to talk about. So I voted for the Beeb. I still quite want a Master 128 even now (although I also quite want an Electron with 4 dozen expansions to hang off the back, now I think about it).

Interestingly, I was listening to the Retro Gamer podcast yesterday, and Jon Ritman seems to say that the PCW conversion of Batman was a breeze, due to the Z80 processor, the only stumbling block being getting the keyboard routine to work. However, he may have forgotten some of the story two decades down the line.

Not necessarily. The speccy's got a much better processor (think I read somewhere that a 1Mhz Z80 is roughly twice as fast as a 1Mhz 6502, and it's 3.5 Mhz). It's also arguably a better design - very easy to write machine code for as it's simple. It also meant that it was wayyyy cheaper than the C64 in the beginning.

On the other hand, the C64 has the most amazing sound chip in history and proper (but stupidly designed) keyboard, hardware sprites and (I think) hardware scrolling, which meant is wasn't completely crippled by the slow CPU so long as you wanted to play the right games. The 16/48k speccy didn't even have a sound chip- the CPU actually drove the speaker directly iirc.

I had a speccy originally, or at least my brother did, then I got a C64 but we used to take the piss out of the c64 all the time. Loading from tape was hilariously unreliable, despite the bespoke tape recorder. You'd hold your breath when the tape stopped moving only for it to start again. Then you'd get the dreaded

READY
RUN

READY

Then I got the MASSIVE disk drive which sounded like there was a man trying to get out when things were loading, and normal loading speed took almost as long as tape. The speccy did have a proper 3.5 inch drive interface (made by none other than MGT - later to make the SAM), but unfortunately when Amstrad took over they use their rubbish 3 inch thing and that became the medium for speccy disk games.

Having played on both for years there isn't really a clear answer which is better games wise. 3D was almost universally better on the speccy, whereas stuff like The Last Ninja needed the c64s presentation. For simple shoot em ups, the c64 was awesome so long as you didn't want to do anything else. Big sprites were pretty much out of the question, although it was impressive what they could get out of it towards the end. The speccy could do anything so long as you had the programming skills, but was limited by it's one graphics mode, which was really a text mode with redefinable characters. Only 2 colours per character space...

Both the c64 and the speccy had unreleased next gen versions of their machines - the c65 and the loki, although I'd be surprised if the loki reached even the design stage given how absurdly high spec it was going to be. Interestingly, one of the design mock-ups looks a bit like a PS2.

I'm not sure the CPC is comparable as it came couple of years later and was much more expensive. It was a shame that they tended to do speccy ports of games, sometimes identical but with only 4 colours- even less than the spec. Much better in low res mode, though.

I.. have now talked about old computers enough. Anyone know where I could get s RISC PC? ebay seems to be all out.

The what?

Oh and you'll be happy to know you've missed one and like, totally upset my friend (who is now crying because he spent the best part of a year coding an emu for it)


The Sharp MZ80B

Malcolm Evans (New Generation Software) wrote all of his Speccy games on one of those, apparently.

Then my mate would like him and probably knows of him too.

He's an enormous Sharp fan..

I'd always considered that a business machine, hence why I also left out the PET. PCW was included as, due to sheer numbers, many found their way into homes.

Don't tell that to him ! hehe, you'll have him in tears

I suppose the answer to the question is crushingly simple really.. What 8 bit is the best. The best one your parents could afford to buy you.

I had to vote for the cpc464.. As I used to own one.

The port itself would have been very easy and I guess the hard word was done porting Batman (the first PCW game). From Wiki: