Date   : Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:24:01
From   : jgh@... (Jonathan Graham Harston)
Subject: Re: Would anyone happen to have a 4116 dram chip

>Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0610181754140.27301-100000@...
uk>

Tim Fardell <tim.fardell@...> wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Jules Richardson wrote:
> > Another common Spectrum fault is the design... ;)
> Oi, less of that thankyou! ;-)
>
> Spectra are lovely computers. Only the dreadful keyboard on the early
> models let them down.

My first computer was a Spectrum, but I really wanted a Spectrum
machine with BBC firmware. I wanted BBC BASIC and BBC MOS I/O on a
Z80 with Spectrum hardware. I made copious paper designs for a
'BBC-ish' system for the Spectrum. A few years ago I finally got
BBC BASIC Z80 ported to the Spectrum.

The inability to get a SoftROM working (sideways RAM) stymied my
ability to do a lot of what I wanted, and when I eventually
discovered an advert for one they sent my money back saying they
had run out. I sent my money back to them with a letter saying "I
don't care that you've run out, I don't want my money back, I want
a SoftROM" (dammit).

If I could go back in time, I would tell Sinclair only two things:
* 40-column screen display in hardware, not 32. Allows easy
  software 80-column display, and only takes another 1K or so of
  memory, and easily implemented in the ULA.
* sideways ROM paging specification. So many things would be sooo
  much easier if everybody didn't have to invent their own
  different ways of being able to access ROM code.

See http://mdfs.net/Software/Spectrum for various ramblings.

--
J.G.Harston - jgh@...                - mdfs.net/User/JGH
Our chief weapons are 'who', 'ps -aux', 'kill -9', and a fanatical devotion
to 'reboot -q'.