New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

Hi all,

I joined this site after watching Terry's awesome videos. I have a collection of mainly Sinclair computers such as ZX81s, Spectrums of various types, a few QLs not all working perfectly, Amiga 500s, 600s, software and plenty of peripherals. I also have other computers such as a Spectravideo, Dick Smith System 80 (not working), plenty of HP calculators and some various consoles and bit and pieces.

My first experience with a computer was a ZX81 at Kings High School in Dunedin in about 1982/1983. The main driver at that stage was the fact we could play games without having to pile 20c pieces into an arcade machine. Although the ZX81 was nowhere near the sophistication of the coin ops, it was a great start. I bought my own and then upgraded a couple of years later to the Spectrum which I has a lot of fun with. A friend of mine who is a few years older than me was a great inspiration as well. I later upgraded to a Dick Smith Wizzard which I feel was probably a bit of a backward step in ways but it did come with some good game cartridges. I only briefly dabbled in BASIC programming at the time. I then progressed to an Amiga 500 which I absolutely loved. I sold all of these computers with exception of the Wizzard which is still alive and well today.

It wasn't until about 2003 when I purchased a Spectrum 48K and caught the classic computer collecting bug. At the moment I am learning Z80 machine code from some really good books I have.

I'm always keen to help if I can.

Regards
Gary

Interesting how your going from the spectrum with its minimal capabilities to the wizard with its vastly superior graphics and sound seemed like a backward step ? Yeah the specy would have been better known but going to 32 hardware sprites and multivoice hardware sound and hi-res 16 colour graphics with 16K bytes of independent video RAM is an upgrade.

The ZX81 surely drove you to the coin-ops ?

Gavin.

The spectrum was a far more "complete" machine, with mature software, support and peripherals for quite a few years to come.

If one wanted a 6502 based games machine, the Commodore 64 could pretty much match the wizzard for games performance with 100 times the support and availability of peripherals. (and a decent keyboard)

The wizzard had a nice set of specs for game graphics, but the machine was practically orphaned from the moment it came out. The cassette existed, but more advanced peripherals never materialized...And the membrane keyboard-cum-joysticks were awful.

Another also-ran games console with a handful of in-house clone games. It was a step backwards.

Welcome to the forums Gary,

Those System 80's are not too difficult to fix! (:

Welcome Gary - its always nice to meet other Sinclair aficionados...