The biggest downside to this computer was it was harder to code something to loop printing rude messages on the screen in Lasky's before a nosey shop assistant came over to see what you were up to.
Owned one of these. Loved the Forth language and back then most of the time we had to write our own games anyway-that was half the fun. The fact that Forth interfaces so well with machine code meant it was easy to write little machine code subroutines to integrate into the main code. I didn't have the 16K ram pack but the zx-81 one that I owned was compatible apart from all the pins being in different places. Fortunately I knew how to solder so I made an adapter (A mess of wires between an edge connector and a PCB connector) that let me use it with my ace. Pity it wasn't well supported but still a good little machine for the time but things were moving that fast it just got swept away.
The Spectrum was released in April of 82 for 125 pounds for the 16k variant. This steaming pile was released Sep of 82! With 1kB!!!! No graphics. For 89.95!!!!!!!!! For 35 more Pounds, you get a spectrum.
Well this was a real kick in the nostalgias..!! 😂 I'd forgotten all about this little computer, but the memories come flooding back! They used to be sold in the small independent computer shop I was working in during the very early 1980s, alongside the Spectrums, C64s, Atari 400/800s, Dragon 32s, Tandy TRS-80 Colour computers.... That flimsy case on the Jupiter was vac-formed thin plastic, and it felt like a yoghurt pot!! 😜 The keyboard was 'similar' to the Spectrum, but less responsive; though equally "dead flesh" feeling! 🤢 Sat alongside all of the competition on the shelves, the only thing that stood out was that it was black & white amidst all the colour displays! We never sold many. No surprise there then!! 😉
The Jupiter Ace was designed by two former Sinclair employees who were involved in the ZX-81 (I think) and I once found a video by a somebody with a collection of 20 Aces out of the around 300-400 which seems just a little selfish.
So I just fact-checked it and compared CPU speeds of various micros from that era. Jupiter Ace had a 3.25 MHz Z80 CPU, but when it came out, Japan already had tons of micros with 4 MHz Z80 (-compatible) CPUs. Also, BBC Micro was already there, with a 2 MHz 6502, which depending on what performance-per-megahertz ratio between 6502 and Z80 you believe in, was most likely faster than Ace. However, what was actually much faster on Ace is its built-in language: FORTH is much, much faster than BASIC.
@@vytah if it had said micro it would have been more OK but it said computer. There were many faster computers, both high end desktop computers based on Motorola 68000 and other advanced computers. But I get it, it was early 1980s micro and the competition was fierce :)
I built one from a kit supplied by Tynemouth Software. Forth will not go down in the annals of history as the easiest, but when you did manage to write something, it was incredibly fast.
A school friend updated his ZX-81 to a Jupiter Ace. He extolled the virtues of Forth and RPN calculations but no one rushed out to get one. He did code a reasonable demo of a Defender clone that showed off the graphics and speed quite nicely, but it wasn't enough to make me give up my TRS-80 M1 L2.
I spent some time last year exploring the Jupiter Ace game library. Quite interesting to explore this almost forgotten relic. Mostly terrible stuff, but there are a few little gems in there. Great to see more modern games opening up more potential than the designers probably thought was possible. Back then, computer development was moving faster than designers could keep up with and quite a few machines were uncompetitive in the market by the time they came out. Probably the best example was the Aquarius, and the Ace was another.
I've been a PC tech/enthusiast for nearly 4 decades and I've never heard of this machine. You guys across the pond had all the goodies. Thanks for all the vids!
I tried the Jupiter Ace as a child at a time when my Dad would bring home computers from work that he sold as a manager of Typewriter Centres (bankrupt long ago).
This was a great video, this for making it. I’ve heard of the Jupiter Ace but never seen it in action before. Some of those games looked really playable, the Galaxian style one in particular.
This was even below the Aquarius, Enterprise (luckily I got fed up waiting) and the Adam in my choice for my first computer. Saw the Atari 400 in Laskys and that was that.
If it was a Spectrum(even a 16k) with VRAM, it could've went somewhere, but by 1983 you were gonna be struggling to shift a pure monochrome machine. People might point out the green screen Amstrad, but that was 'cause it had the full compliment of 64k of RAM and included monitor in the price meaning parents with only 1 TV were picking them up to save a few bar. Mind you, that's why the knowledge of how it happened.
PLEASE make a "Demos that pushed the limits of..." Series!!!!!! Don't care if you can't dissect them as deeply, would be awesome just to hear you provide running commentary with the knowledge you do have on some of the premier tech demos for legacy computers and consoles. I love these limit pusher videos they are great! Thank you big time for your contributions to the community!
I remember travelling to Debenhams in Luton Arndale Centre some time in 1983, to view their display of computers. I already had ZX81 and a Spectrum and I used to enjoy trying out things like the Atari 400/800, Oric, Dragon 32 and so on. Every computer had something that looked fun running on it....except the one, little forlorn Jupiter Ace. It sat there with a black screen. Debenhams had no games cassettes for it, and nobody knew any Forth. We couldn't even get it to display rude words. Had they been able to launch it with colour and at least 16K RAM and 8K video RAM, maybe it might have generated some interest. But Forth never caught on, and by the time it reached the market it was already outdated in terms of hardware capabilities. Poor little thing. Still, in some ways it got the last laugh. Try buying one now for under £1000.
fun fact: forth is the basis for postscript, which was a very popular language for graphics. many printers, like the apple laserwriter, could be controlled via postscript.
Fun fact: they were going to call it CLYDE but one of the key developers came from Edinburgh and devised the acronym FORTH out of spite, since the rival city Glasgow is on the river Clyde and the more up market Edinburgh is on the Firth of Forth.
@@pdsnpsnldlqnop3330 You made that up, there is no Scottish connection. Forth was developed by Chuck Moore at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US. Forth is not an acronym: he wanted to call the language "Fourth", for fourth generation language, but the IBM 1130 operating system restricted file names to five characters so he dropped the U.
And postscript is the basis of EPS and PDF, which itself is the basis for Apple's rendering APIs. Also *Open Firmware* - a hardware interface specification system used on many older Sun, Apple, IBM and ARM based machines - is a forth stack, doing for those systems what BIOS does for the x86 architecture with arguably more elegance and flexibility. I had forth on my BBC Micro back in the day, and was always curious to try a Jupiter Ace, even though its flaws were obvious, and the machine was barely available anywhere.
@@BrennanYoung Join the club with the BBC Micro, although I just borrowed the school mahine for the summer holidays to play Defender excessively. The Jupiter Ace was the dream machine because it had that ZX81 form factor with sensible keyboard and Forth. Despite this childhood fascination, I have never downloaded Forth to play with. I have never heard of Open Firmware and I had no idea that Postscript was Forth based. Someone needs to do a video that describes this whole stack.
Fascinating stuff, the 3D Monster Maze conversion does look really good in white on black mode (the shading on the far walls does a lot of work there). And the demo is clever.
One of the many Many MANY home computers released in the 80s that just didn't make it for one reason or another. Not terrible, but not good enough to be remembered. Others were great, but too expensive like the one from Epyx. Anyway, it's always interesting to find out about yet another computer I've never heard of! I'm surprised that Sinclair didn't sue them for copyright infringement.
The 16k RAM expansion looks almost exactly like a Gameshark for the Playstation. It would have been amazing to get a PSX RAM expansion, considering how great the N64 RAM expansion is. Addon hardware has always fascinated me in general, but addons that add to the power of the base system really are something special.
I keenly remember it and actually wanted one back then. FORTH was something different and the (real) performance benefits over BASIC was appealing, but I don't think I missed anything. Thanks for filling a few more holes in my history. (As I learn more, it seems to me that the most technically attractive 8-bit computer of the era was the Amstrad CPC).
Never really heard of this one before, but at the very least I have added one more bit of data to my banks. Jupiter Ace once existed, and people tried to make it a thing. I see why it didn't but still they tried. Still they tried...
Wow, a whole 1K of RAM! My first venture into the home computer market was a 48k Spectrum. What about the Elan Enterprise? A lot of computers came and went and passed a lot of us by, a lot of more better established Spectrums, C64's, BBC Micro etc already had a grip of the consumer market.
Ive never hear of it, but cool name. I had heard of Forth and seen it used on some test equipment I became responsible for. I threw away the test equipment and just built new
Forth was awesome back in the early 80's, unlike the BASIC of the time it was fully structured and even had some rudimentary object oriented features. Once a few basic commands were written in assembly, the rest of Forth was written in...Forth. It was also brutally memory efficent using a threaded code and stacks. Actually the Motorola 6809 which graced the TRS-80 Color Computer was optimized from the ground up for Forth. The logic was that a combination of the extreme efficency of Forth and cartridges was well suited to the needs of the time. I did a lot of Forth back in the day on the C64 using the Forth cartridge. While RPN is very much a acquired taste, once you got in the mindset it was a joy. Unfortunately as computer power and memory increased the efficiency advantages fell by the wayside. But in an environment where memory was in kilobytes and processors were crude Forth was a huge advantage. Also it was, as noted, completely structured and infinitely more elegant than BASIC. Had Forth been adopted in more early systems we would have seen much more efficient code and not have had to force BASIC users to unlearn most of the horrific programming it engendered.
@@IkarusKommt BASIC structured in the '70s and 80's my foot! The code was pure spaghetti, as bad as early FORTRAN. Barely had subroutines, goto's everywhere. The language only got revised in the late 80's to hew to marginal structured principles. Just look at 101 Basic Games by David Ahl (full text at atariarchives) or just look at the code in contemporary magazines . Forth's operation was, by necessity, structured due to the threaded interpretation. Doing a GOTO would be nearly impossible and more trouble than it is worth. The nature of the language demanded building up concise routines in a hierarchy, Structured, modular, position independent, and with glimmerings of object oriented code in the Create...Does> blocks. The use of RPN was also very elegant simlar to the PN lambda calculus form of LISP. Actually Forth has been called LISP backwards without prarenthesis As for the "trashy calculator" appellation, the systems this ran on were a few MHz and had memory in a few kB, a TI-84 would be considered a mainframe in comparison. For all intents these were underpowered calculators with video displays, and a small fast language was necessary.
"Also it was, as noted, completely structured and infinitely more elegant than BASIC." -- Surely, and it was also considerably faster. So why was the Jupiter Ace not a huge success? Why is not everyone using FORTH today? The problem I noticed most with FORTH on small home-computers was that you can't edit code in random order. All 'words' build on each other, this does not support an 'iterative' programming style. If you make a mistake (unnoticed) early enough, you can only wipe everything defined afterwards and start over. With BASIC, you can change or add a line of code in an existing program (on most systems even a statement within a line). Then - because it's interpreted - you can immediately run the changed code and test if it works. With Kuma Forth on the CPC464, I could edit, save and load 'screens'. But without a floppy drive it felt very slow and cumbersome. (For the people who don't know what this means: You use a cassette-tape-based editor to write Forth code, then load this into the machine.) Once you are willing to do this, why not directly use Pascal, C or Assembly and compile your program directly into a binary? Yes, on very small machines FORTH has an advantage as its code can be very compact. Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all against FORTH or the Jupiter Ace: My first contact with the Jupiter Ace was on a Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe), and over two days I enjoyed a good number of hours programming a FORTH benchmark on it (not knowing at the time how bloody rare the machine was that I was typing on!). Tinkering with FPGAs, I also decided to implement (=use existing cores and writing some video display and glue logic) a Jupiter Ace on a Spartan 3E FPGA in a PapilioOne 500K. (I even made a video about it, planning to show it on a remote version of the VCFe, unfortunately this never happened.) On the way to this I also learned a ton about the Jupiter Ace tape format (an FPGA version behaves like the real thing, so I had to use tape in/out to load/save programs) and, changing/fixing/extending some TZXduino code, solved a problem you will have when trying to feed most existing Jupiter Ace cassette files into a real machine or an FPGA variant. Good times!
@@hagen-p Much of that is a "not a bug but a feature". There's an old adage that "You can code FORTRAN in any language". BASIC was "good" for rewriting code on the fly, but such code became a hopeless snarl at any scale. Forth was well ahead of it's time in what we take for granted in modern times. Chuck Moore himself Called a Forth an "amplifier" language which made good programmers better and bad programmers worse. Thankfully we now have Python which is fast to code and elegant. Unfortunately, tape storage, and nonexistent IDEs did limit the utility of Forth back then. The difficulty of refactoring in such claustrophobic enviroments was the primary downfall of the language.
@@ledhceb Sorry, I don't think lack of good editors on resource-constrained devices was the primary reason FORTH never reached 'critical mass' to become ubiquitous. All programming languages had the same problems at the time. Maybe it's the difficulty of providing plug-in libraries for a functional language (unless you use they in source form)? Maybe it's the need to re-compile everything if you change something early on? As I said, I'm not at all against FORTH, just trying to work out why we don't have more of it visible to developers.
That system just became sooo primitive that i hardly could imagine that even a person with a low budget would use it as a serious business machine or playing games on it. It’s the last thing i wanna ever use in my life because of it’s primitive capabilities, primitive software and awful keyboard.
I was offered one of these for a fiver in 1990 as intended to learn different programming languages instead of basic (this was forth I believe) in the school holidays. Instead in the end, I think I spent it playing football and mini golf. Memories.
Huh, why did they target a computer with a language built for business (insurance especially) at the home market? It feels like either a spite project, or something they just wanted to build, rather than a complete concept.
i think the main selling point was that it was faster and could do some other handy things. but most users didn't program their own stuff as less technical people were getting into computers for the first time and just wanted to buy software made by other people. but a few years earlier you only had very well educated technical people buying computers so everything was changing too quickly
@endymallorn Forth was not designed for businesses: it was designed to control equipment, such as telescopes and spacecrafts. @belstar1128 Fortran (FORmula TRANslator) was also not a business oriented language, it was designed to do mathematics and engineering calculations. I used to work at an astronomy observatory, and while both languages are used there, they do not resemble each other in the the slightest, they require completely different mindsets to program. Both are still used for different things: Forth to control the equipment, Fortran to calculate the results of the observations.
This video was created by someone who really doesn't know what they're talking about. 🤦♂ The Ace was never designed to be a games machine and thus there aren't many games available. Forth was very popular in the 70s and 80s, really until 16-bit CPUs came along that could compile C code, it has good performance in the hands of someone who's not a beginner, whilst using minimal resources. A key Forth advantage is that you can prototype something really quickly and, if there are parts that need speeding up, you can optimize then using assembly language. Forth is still popular today, if you know where to look, especially for embedded work and there are annual in-person conferences, commercial vendors, enthusiast groups, forums, everything you need.
The sort of person that buys a Renault Twingo that has to be specially imported from France and has the steering wheel on the wrong side would by a Jupiter Ace. I wish I had one. BASIC and MS-DOS held back the computer industry by decades. Linux picked up the UNIX baton and got things moving again. Line numbers, GOTO statements and much else that has to be unlearned is what made the BASIC language morally wrong. FORTH rejected BASIC, Jupiter Ace was the rebel choice.
There was no alternatives to BASIC and MS-DOS in the 80s. Also, MS-DOS ran DOOM, and what did Linux do at that time? It didn't even have a network stack.
