![]() ![]() Then would come a series of tones – pilot signals – followed by bursts of data (which caused the border to go crazily Swedish with loads of blue and yellow stripes :-). You’d plug in the cassette player, type LOAD “” and hit Enter on the rubber keyboard, and hopefully you’d see an alternating red and cyan border on the screen as the carrier was recognised. The loading of games was therefore a feast of anticipation. I have no other way of explaining why: some would simply never load from certain players. You had to think about head cleaning, bass, treble and volume settings and still there were just some games that certain players just didn’t like. I typically had two or three working cassette players in use: the specific one needed would depend on the game (and dare I say the quality of the copy, if it was indeed a copy). Later Spectrum models had integrated cassette players, but I never owned one of those, myself. ![]() You usually tried one or the other first and switched if it didn’t work. This was always a little confusing: the “Ear” socket on the Spectrum was used for audio input, while “Mic” was for output… but anyway. To load one into your computer, you’d need to place it into a tape player (sorry if this is getting a bit basic – I just thought I’d better spell it out for any millennials who stumble across this post… -) and connect the Ear sockets on both the player and the Spectrum via a 3.5mm audio jack. World of Spectrum has a great collection, and if you go further afield you can find “complete” archives that people have posted.įor those of you who have never experienced the loading of a Spectrum game, it’s worth taking a quick step back and looking at that in more detail…īack in the day, ZX Spectrum games were bought (or copied, ahem) on audio cassette. Pretty much any game you’ve ever played or heard of for the Spectrum is available online in digital format, although it should be stated that most are still protected by copyright. As mentioned in this previous post, I’ve been having fun with an old 16K ZX Spectrum that a colleague kindly gave me a few months ago.Īfter getting it working with a modern TV set, the next challenge was to get some games loaded into it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |