Isn't it interesting when something you were doing on your computer 5 or 10 years ago is the latest fad. In this case retrocomputing. Yep home computers have been around so long that certain ones older ones, especially of the 8 bit CPU variety are considered chic these days.
There were numerous home computers around in the early/mid 80s. None more popular than the ZX Spectrum. The only changes in later models were basically cosmetic with some minor hardware upgrades largely involving the user interface, memory and sound output. The Speccy remained popular for the best part of a decade. The Beatles of home computing.
My first experience with Speccy Emulators was around 1993, when the real things were still available in the shops for about 20 quid. I didn't take much interest at the time. I'd only just got rid of mine a year or so earlier, so it was a short-term diversion. I had an Amiga A500 at the time which seemed light years ahead of the speccy. I was a little miffed to discover the Amiga emulator was pretty clunky. It's 68000 CPU was of a different lineage from the Speccy's so emulation wasn't particularly efficient from a programming side of things.
A year or two later I ran an emulator on a 386 and it was like lightening. Easily running at 200% the speed of a speccy, which certainly made some games interesting. The ability to save the game at any point was a joy. The biggest advantage of course was that loading a game was nearly instant. No more waiting 5-10 minutes for a game to load off a cassette.
"A cassette?", you ask. Yep a cassette. No fancy DVD or Hard Disks in those days. Depending on the quality of the cassette and the cassette player, loading was a very hit or miss affair. You had to ensure the right volume level, the position of the tape (often by learning to recognise the electronic noises recorded on the tape). If any of these processes got disturbed by anything, like an ant sneezing in the garden, you'd have to start the whole thing all over again. The Speccy's predecessors were even more susceptible to this. I think my ZX81 only had something like a 40% loading success rate.
This effect is recognised amongst the Sinclair online community and is referred to as a mystical aura called
The Chuntey. The Chuntey required your presence near the computer at all times. Your TV also required to be tuned to the Speccy at all times. If you actually tried to do anything apart from watch the game loading, it was guaranteed not to load.
You could construct a whole
Shrodinger's cat style thought experiment by standing in the hall with the bedroom door shut whilst the Speccy was loading. Okay I'm waffling now.
A few years after first running my emulator on a 386, I couldn't slow down my PC enough to run the emulator at a decent speed. Another problem was the limited number of games available. The rise of the internet solved both problems. At one stage virtually every game released was available and some shape or form, for numerous Speccy emulators.
People have even been writing their own games. Good games or otherwise, including myself. I wrote my first Speccy program for the first time in about 15 years. One of the things I used to do on my own Speccy that I haven't done on an emulator until now. Modern emulators have a range of tools to make this much easier but I forgot how difficult it was. The whole windows/GUI environments have really spoiled me over the years. It was good to get back to basics (rubbish pun number 211).
