What's that sound?

Is it the sound of one hand clapping? Is it the sound of a tree falling in the woods, when nobody is there to hear it? Is it the sound of my brain grinding steadily to a halt?

Nope, it's the sound of a Spectrum loading Horace Goes Skiing off a tape cassette! After a rather geeky chat about retro computing last month, 23inertia revealed that she probably still had her Spectrum+ somewhere at her mum's house. Seeing as we were down there for Easter, I had a rummage about in the loft to see if I could locate it.

Here is a short list of things that I found:

• A dead mouse


• A very 70s hair dryer


• A box brownie camera


• A metric ton of Sylvanian Families toys


• A Spectrum+ with datacorder and a bunch of tapes!

While 23inertia played with the Sylvanian Families, I set about refreshing my brain with the immaculately kept Spectrum+ User's Manual. Considering it's been 23 years since I last used a Spectrum, it was surprising how much of it I remembered. I had the classic rubber-keyed Spectrum 48k but the plus operates in much the same way.





I haven't actually had a chance to hook the thing up to the TV yet, but I've been messing with an emulator on my MacBook to get myself back into the swing of it. Remembering where all the BASIC keywords are on a Mac keyboard is tricky, to say the least, but I got as far as designing a space invader sprite and making it wiggle about.

One thing that struck me about the users manual is the assumed basic use of the system. Loading programs off a tape isn't touched on at all for most of the book, and the first half is about how to write short single-use programs to make the machine do what you want. Even the last sentence of the system set-up page says, after tuning in the TV, "now you are ready to start programming." It's stuff like that that makes old nerds like me go all misty eyed and nostalgic.

I think it might be fun to apply some modern software paradigms to the Spectrum's capabilities. Last time I programmed one I didn't even know about procedural programming. GOSUB was as close as I got to structured programming and there were GOTOs everywhere. To be fair, though, I was only 7 ...

So. What shall my first conquest be? And where can I source a copy of the DK "Spectrum Machine Code Reference"?