The Spectrum and TheVIC20

 I recently acquired two new toys. Both are remakes of old computers, neither of which I ever had but both were an object of some desire at some point.

The Spectrum. This is a remake of the good old ZX Spectrum from Sinclair. The predecessor of ZX Spectrum, ZX81, was our first home computer, and therefore it could have been logical to move on to the successor. It didn't happen, but I do remember reading about it and wondering how it would be to use one. I have since then played a bit with emulators, so have got a taste of what it was like to use a ZX Spectrum, but because of the way the original Spectrum had keywords assigned to specific keys, it was always a bit cumbersome to not have the actual keyboard. You either have keys mapped to your standard PC keyboard, or use a virtual keyboard. Neither is optimal. 

How it works is that when programming in BASIC, you don't type words like PRINT, LET, GOTO, etc, but rather press the key that has the appropriate keyword assigned to it. Some keys can have 6 different purposes, depending on the context or which modifier key you have pressed before. You can perhaps understand why it can be difficult to use a standard PC keyboard, as you have to either remember what's where, or have a printout next to the keyboard showing where each keyword and function can be found. Or using a virtual keyboard, which, unless you have a touch screen, means typing with the mouse, and the keyboard covers part of the screen so you may end up switching it on and off to see what's happening.

I have also looked into obtaining a real old ZX Spectrum, but then I always got stuck trying to decide which one I want. And which peripherals do I want to invest into. A cassette deck? I have an Arduino-based TZXduino device for my ZX81 already, and that should work for Spectrum as well, but I'd also love to get a real physical cassette deck to use real tapes. Only it's not so easy to find working tape decks from 40 years ago. A disk drive? Disk drive was not a common device to use with the original Spectrum, and I'm not very familiar with options and choices. Joysticks? The original Spectrum is lacking the sockets for the typical 9-pin D-connectors many other computers of the same era used for joysticks, so one needs to build or buy a custom interface to be able to plug in the controller.

The original Spectrum, which only has RF output to connect to the TV aerial input, apparently also has a problem with modern TVs not being able to read/process the signal, and requires a modification, similar to the ZX81.

With all that, I had never got around to buying one.

But then, Retro Games Ltd announced The Spectrum. I saw it, and I thought about it. Then I thought about it a bit more. By the time I decided that I was going to order it, it was either sold out in the places I was looking or wouldn't deliver to where I live. The country I live in also never had any shops listed on the official pages. In the end, I did manage to order it from Spain and then waited with some trepidation whether I had fallen for a scam or managed to order the genuine thing. When it arrived, I visually inspected the box and then gave it into hiding to be wrapped for Christmas.

After a month of waiting, I was finally able to open the package, hook it up and get my first taste of what using a Spectrum was like. It looks and feels like the real thing, at least to someone who never held the real thing in his hands. I can write basic programs - haven't yet, but there are a few listings in old computer magazines I want to try. I can play the 48 games included on the device, and I can play the games I download off the internet. I am very happy with that purchase, and only hope that I will be able to spend a bit more time on it, with what all my other retro distractions...

Which brings me to TheVIC20. Retro Games had brought out TheC64 Mini and Maxi some time ago already, and I had always thought I wasn't really interested. I have two real original C64 machines, cassette deck, several disk drives, and can run emulators on my gaming PC, on my phone, on my little MacBook, what more could I ask for?

Well, after experiencing The Spectrum, I realised how much easier it can be to use a remake. So, I started to feel that I'd like to have TheC64 too. The only problem is that they are old, and the availability is not that great. Except for the Mini, but I didn't want that. I did want to have a machine that has a keyboard that I can use and looks and feels physically like the real thing. Getting the Maxi from ebay seemed possible, but most of the time one would end up paying a lot more.

Various German sites would every now and then list the Maxi, but either they would not deliver where I am, or I would think about it too long and then they were gone. I was also looking at TheVIC20 with some interest but wasn't really considering it until I realised that it was the same machine as TheC64 Maxi with slightly different look. Both had both C64 and VIC20 modes, so getting one would mean having both. And then suddenly TheVIC20 became something I'd really like to have, it would be visually different from the C64 machines I had, and would expand my collection with another computer model next to filling the role of being the easy-to-use substitute for the real C64. I also remember the Vic20 tv commercials from when I was a kid, and I have to admit it was something I wanted to have at the time.

From then on I was checking for both, with the thought that I'd buy one when either becomes available. And then, a new C64 Maxi was available again on a popular online site. The only problem was it promised delivery in 4+ months. Ok, I thought I can wait and placed my order.

What I then noticed is that TheVIC20 was also available, and promised delivery on Friday same week. There were 3 units available. I thought about it, but didn't act on it. Checking again later that day, the availability of the VIC20 had gone from 3 to 1, and I made a quick decision to place an order for one and cancel TheC64.

After some anxious waiting, it arrived. I had thought to keep it for my birthday, which is in about 4 months, but was easily convinced to try it out right away. It is everything it promises to be. Now the only problem is not having enough spare time to play with all my toys, especially with the Batocera Linux installation I have also going on, but that is something for a separate post. Might have to write more about The Spectrum and TheVIC20/TheC64 too as I manage to spend a bit more time with them.

Fiction: My mail order time machine, fifth part

 My mail order time machine

Fifth 

Yet another visit from the future, this time from the robot overlord’s human relations overseer. His appearance reminded me of Maximilian from The Black Hole. He said he came by to let me know they were keeping a close eye on my twitter feed and that I should be careful. I said I don’t use twitter and for a moment he appeared slightly perplexed but then just told me to remember what he just said when I do start using twitter. I saw he was running on Android, so asked if he had any updates that would work with my Galaxy S3. While he was inspecting my phone I deactivated him with a frying pan. Glad I bought the big one, though I probably should have emptied it before hitting him over the head with it. After cleaning up, I modified his remains to run my NAS drive. 

The following morning, I woke up with a mild headache. I must stop doing this, I thought, but was not sure if I meant the waking up part, or the part that led to the headache. Of course, I still had not quite cracked the cause for the reoccurring headache. Maybe I should watch a bit less television and try to read something other than subtitles for a while. Like a book, for example. I used to read a lot of books when I was younger. But over the years at some point, I had stopped reading, though I was still buying books. And while I had been starting to read several books, I hadn’t managed to consistently put in the time to finish any for a while. I walked over to my bookshelf and looked at the rows of books. I could immediately see half a dozen that had a bookmark in them, usually somewhere between the first quarter and the halfway mark. I picked up one of them and decided I would try to continue reading that one. It was a fictional story about a conflict between my home country and its neighbour. Always a potentially current topic, and there had been plenty of non-fictional conflicts over the centuries. Even if the most recent years had been reasonably peaceful there were always some rumblings below the surface. I had started reading this particular book a couple of years ago so it might be necessary to re-read some bits but that should be ok as long as I then continued to finish it. I put the book on my desk, next to the computer and went to the bathroom to take a shower. While I was taking a shower I heard a noise from the apartment. Great, the idiots are back, I thought. They better not be breaking anything. For a moment I felt worried about the possibility of them deciding to take my time machines, but then I decided that if that's what happens then that is what happens. If I don’t have a time machine I cannot travel in time. Well, except the way everyone does; slowly and in one direction without control. I had managed quite well like that before and I’m sure I’d manage again. And I probably could just order another one if I really felt that I needed to be hopping around in time and space. Realising that made my attempt to deprive my future self of a time machine seem even more foolish. And what else could they do? I thought about it while I was rinsing the shampoo from my hair. Eat my food? Drink my drinks? Play my games. They are welcome to all of it. Maybe I should charge them though. Perhaps I could have them pay to come eat, drink and play video games at my place. It would be like a bar. Illegal bar, of course, but with very specific clientele. Only I am allowed in. I smiled to myself. When I was done showering, I quickly grabbed the towel and wiped the excess water off my body before wrapping the towel around my waist and stepping out of the bathroom. “Hey, I had a brilliant idea,” I started as I walked into the living room, and then stopped dead on my tracks. In the middle of the room was a huge red robot. “Me too,” the robot said in a slightly metallic voice. “Ok.” I looked at the robot. The robot looked back at me. Or at lesast that’s what I thought it was doing. It didn’t make a move. “I’ll just put my clothes on,” I said. “In the bedroom,” I added, pointing backwards over my shoulder with my thumb. The robot turned its head slightly to the side and then turned it back. “Yes, do that,” it then said. I walked slowly backwards until I was out of sight of the robot and then turned and dashed into the bedroom and closed the door behind me, leaning back against it. Ok, so that is happening now, I thought to myself. I have a robot in my living room. No doubt it came from the future. Could it be the overlord itself? No, probably not. Also, it seemed to have arrived alone. I peeked through the curtains over to my balcony and the little bridge to the stairwell. There was no-one. Also, no-thing. I opened the balcony door and went out to peek over the balcony railing down to the courtyard. It was also empty. Well, almost, I saw a ground floor neighbour walking by. She glanced up and waved with a friendly “Hi”. “Hi,” I said back and went back inside. I hoped she had not seen anything inappropriate. I took my towel off and finished drying myself. Then I took some clean clothes from the wardrobe and got myself dressed up. I was about to return to the living room, when I thought maybe it would be better to run off. I went back to the balcony. All I had to do was to jump over the railing to the bridge to the stairwell, go down the stairs and leave. And then what? Come home later, and the robot would probably be waiting. Or it would just come back another time. Unless I was willing to leave my home and not return ever again, trying to run away now would eventually not make any difference. The robot might also not like being ran off on. It had been quite polite so far, but that could be different the next we would meet. I went back in, closed the balcony door and walked back into the living room. “Good choice,” the robot said. “You don’t always make a good choice.” The words and the tone gave me the chills. The robot reminded me of a famous film robot, I thought. Maximilian, I think the name was. From the film The Black Hole. I had actually never seen the film. I had read a comic book adaptation of it, or at least part of it, a long time ago. Also, I had some collected images from the film when I was a kid. There were candy boxes that came with images from movies on the back side that the kids, me included, would cut out and store in boxes or glue on pages of small booklets. I remember having quite a few from various Superman films – the ones starring the incredible Christopher Reeve in the title role, and some from the film The Black Hole. And that’s where I remembered Maximilian from. “My name is Max,” it started. “Of course,” I said enthusiastically. “I thought you reminded me of Maxim -” The robot seemed pleased. “Ah you know Max?” “Err, sure.” I wasn’t sure if it was talking about the same “Max” I had thought of. The robot seemed even more pleased. “He was the best, wasn’t he?” “Sure...” The robot leaned towards me. “Or are you more of a Leclerc fan?” I had no idea what the robot was talking about, but this was going into the wrong direction. “No, Max is the greatest. So, you are Max, named after the great Max.” The robot seemed somewhat pleased again. Though I am not quite sure how I thought I could see that. “How can I help you?” I decided to try to move things along. “Ah yes.” The robot clapped its hands together and rubbed them against each other. Its arms had slightly more sophisticated range of motions than Maximilian and seemed to have some kind of cushioning in its hands. “How can you help me,” the robot repeated my question. “Yes, how can I help you?” I repeated my question myself. This was going well. “There is one thing.” The robot stopped rubbing its hands together. It looked at me pointedly. Or so I imagined. “What is that? One thing? That I can do to help you?” “You should be careful with what you tweet.” With what I what, I thought, and then I said it out loud. “With what I what?” “With your tweets,” the robot said. “Right.” “We are keeping an eye on your twitter feed.” "We?” “You?” “No, I meant, who is ‘we’?” “Ah. ‘We’ is me and my colleagues in the human relations department. I am the overseer of the department.” “Ok. That's good. But I don’t use twitter,” I said, and the robot seemed somewhat taken aback by that statement. It looked like it was checking its internal notes, then it pulled a pad from its shoulder (really) and tapped it a few times with a soft touch pen that emerged from the tip of its finger.

Touch pen, I thought to myself, being obviously something a robot with no human fingers would have to use. Unless it would get some kind of an upgrade for natural fingertips. Then again, for a robot that would be unnatural, as naturally they do not have human-like fingertips. Though when it comes to robots one could wonder if there is anything that could be described as natural, as their nature is naturally rather unnatural. Why the robots would use a device with an interface designed for humans, though, was another question to ponder. “But it does say here that you are -” it started, pulling me back out from my thoughts, but then paused. A moment later it continued. “Ok, I get it. I’ve arrived slightly earlier than I had intended.” “A premature arrival? Is that a common problem?” The robot put away the pad and looked back at me. “Not really.” The tone did not encourage pursuing any further witty comebacks. “Ok, so you are not using twitter yet, but -” "But when I do sign up, I’ll surely be careful with my tweeting,” I offered. This seemed to fall well on the robot. “Good.” “Allrighty then,” I said. “Say, I noticed your pad was running on android.” The robot glanced at its shoulder. “Yes. It is the official operating system for the evil robot corporation.” “But isn't their motto ‘do no evil’?” "I believe you are confused. The evil robot corporation is inherently evil in thoughts and words and deeds. That is why they have the word evil in their name.” “So not trying to hide it. That’s good, not trying to mislead the public. But I meant the creators of android.” “They had a somewhat similar motto at some point, yes. But that was a long time ago, and it was mostly pretend anyway.” The robot paused for a moment as if to invite me to comment. I didn’t. The robot did not have the ability to have facial expressions, but I thought it looked disappointed at my lack of engagement. “It is still delightfully ironic, isn’t it?” the robot then continued. “If you say so.” I wondered if it was a good time to start a discussion on meaning of the words ironic and sarcastic, and when to use which. And when to opt for something else altogether. I decided against it. For all I knew, the robot was using the word correctly. “I do. Say so. What is your interest in android though?” I shrugged. “I have an older version running on my phone, so I thought it was just somehow cool to see the operating system has survived so long and even being used by the robots.” “Your version is probably not as much as older as you’d think. We went for a fairly bare-bones early version rather than those later super bloated versions with all the bells and whistles nobody wanted, missed or asked for.” The robot extended its hand. “May I have a look?” I hesitated. “I will not install anything without your permission. Or remove anything.” It paused for a moment. “And I won’t look at your pictures.” “Well ok then.” I sometimes consider myself somewhat gullible. I retrieved my phone from the side table and handed it over. “If you have any useful updates, just go ahead and install them, and while you’re at it I’d appreciate if you cleaned things up a little bit.” I said. The robot looked at me. I realised I had just given it the permission to install and remove whatever it wanted. But at least it wouldn’t look at my pictures. The robot hunched over my phone, then it looked up at me. “What’s the pin code?” “The year of my birth,” I replied. “Which calendar?” the robot asked. I offered a blank look. “I cannot access my calendar functions without specifying the calendar type,” it explained. I offered another blank look. “We are currently in early 2000s, right?” I nodded, and the robot looked down at my device again. “Gregorian then,” it said and tapped the numbers on my phone screen with its touch pen. The phone unlocked. At that moment, watching the robot hunched over my phone going through all the settings and apps in high speed (as high as the old phone allowed), I had an idea. I dismissed the idea at first as something that was a bit too dangerous and somewhat unlikely to work, but after five seconds I managed to convince myself otherwise. “Do you mind if I make some tea for myself, while you’re checking the phone?” I asked. The robot did not look up, nor was there a pause in its movements. “Sure, no problem. Earl grey for me, if you have it.” Ok, the robot has the same taste in tea as I do. By the way, making tea was not the idea I mentioned earlier. I went over to the kitchen corner and filled a kettle with water, turning it on. I rummaged through the cupboards and pulled out two mugs and a box of teabags. I suspected the robot can somehow see me, or at least hear what I’m doing even when its attention seemed to be directed towards phone, so I went through all the right motions. “I think I’ll make myself some late breakfast too,” I said and opened the fridge. I took out a carton of eggs and a small package of precut hamstrips. The cupboard next to the fridge was where I stored my frying pans, and I pulled one out. It was the new one I had bought couple of weeks ago, and it was the biggest pan I’d ever had. I put it on the stove and turned the heat on. I was waiting for the kettle to get noisy, and in the meantime I had to continue acting as if I was actually going to make my breakfast. Except I didn’t quite know how to pretend doing so, so I just went ahead and continued to actually make my breakfast. Oh, and by the way, making breakfast was not the idea either. I drizzled some oil in the pan and emptied the package of the strips of ham into it. After a moment I cracked open two eggs and dropped the contents into the pan and started stirring. Sprinkle of salt and pepper, and it was getting ready. I noticed the kettle was making a lot of noise. I glanced over to the robot. It was still busy with my phone. I looked at the pan, with my breakfast in it. I looked back at the robot. This was the idea. Kind of, anyway. Minus the ham and eggs. I picked up the pan and turned swinging the pan in a wide arch leaving behind a trail of half fried ham and eggs, forcing the pan to slam edge first at the robot's head. The robot simply collapsed and made no further movements. Now I had done it. If the threat of the robots had been looming somewhere in the background before, after this action it would surely become more concrete. I looked down at the collapsed robot at my feet and wondered what to do with it. Then a thought popped into my head: I’ll open it. I always enjoy opening things and looking at the insides, figuring out how something works. Or why something does not work, especially after I have first opened them once just to check out how they work. I went to get my tools and started dismantling the robot. After a while I was looking at something that resembled more a pile of assorted computer parts than an evil robot. I had set aside the internal solid state drives. According to their markings that was a total of a whopping 32 Terabytes of storage space. The disk controller was also easily identified and separated from the rest. The whole design of the robot was rather modular, and made for easy scavenging. The cameras would find a new life as part of my new security setup. The drives and the disk controllers would be fitted into my network storage unit. The lights and the speakers I’d use to set up something cool. I sorted all the pieces into bags and boxes and stored them with the rest of my electronics. Some of the bigger pieces of the outer casing I set aside to sell online along with a few other smaller components. All in all, it was a good haul. I posted my adds online and retired to my sofa to read the book I had picked up earlier that morning. I ended up reading almost the whole day, and apart from stopping to have something to eat and drink, I only interrupted myself every now and then to check on my adds, answer questions from potential buyers and close the deals. At the end of the day I had made a few hundred euros from selling various pieces on online marketplaces. Before calling it a day, I wrote an update to my followers. “Yet another visit from the future, this time from the robot overlord’s human relations overseer. His appearance reminded me of Maximilian from The Black Hole. He said he came by to let me know they were keeping a close eye on my twitter feed and that I should be careful. I said I don’t use twitter and for a moment he appeared slightly perplexed but then just told me to remember what he just said when I do start using twitter. I saw he was running on Android, so asked if he had any updates that would work with my Galaxy S3. While he was inspecting my phone I deactivated him with a frying pan. Glad I bought the big one, though I probably should have emptied it before hitting him over the head with it. After cleaning up, I modified his remains to run my NAS drive.” After posting the message, I turned the computer off and went back to my book. Later that night, I woke up to go to bed.