Truly Epic - What people today do not understand is how far hardware can be pushed. Back then a computer lasted years and years. The devs learnt the hardware and were able to really push it. People still used machine code. The most optimal algorithms were hammered out and the hardware sang. Things that did not seem possible at first became so. Best mass market example is Driller. I'm a dev. Now we are lazy. We have no carrot to be any other than that. Optimal code is now a hobby. End of story.
I've just bought a ZX Spectrum +3, never knew that it was capable of producing video like this. Amazing for such an old machine. Great video thanks for sharing this is absolutely fantastic.
I love this! Never had the privilege of owning a Spectrum, but I did have a ZX81 kit (that was an utter failure) and ultimately, a Timex Sinclair 1000 (assembled at the factory!) with a 16K ram pack, lol. Oh the memories...
I have 8 of them. 3 Spectrum 48K, 3 Spectrum pluses, a Spectrum +2 (modded) and a Spectrum +2a and I also have a ZX81......along with a lot more retro hardware.
my friend from school called Duncan W. was online with his Speccy when we all had PC 486 and Commodore Amigas at home. I think the year was 1996. Awesome video by the way.
Yes, and I think it's great if you understand the ZX or the C64, you appreciate modern computing much more. I mean, last time I explained my mom 32-bit colour depth and she was like "How many million colours??!". They are all just used to it. When I also see small and short video games eating up 2-3 GByte of space when the coolest games fit within 15.2 MByte (DooM II) or 800 KByte (The Incredible Machine).. Going from 1980s to this day must be great for understanding computers - back then, the numbers were still to be understand by a normal brain (64 colours vs 16.7 million, 4 PCM channels vs 512+, 320x200 vs 6K video etc).
It goes right down to the protocols. Have you seen USB's complexity? Life would be better if we'd just stuck to something like CardBus, or just something not as complex.
I have a BBC BASIC emulator and love the way I can write games in basic but now they can run 1000 times faster. Plus if you learnt how to program in basic then you can see how C++ and Python work. Arduino`s and raspberry pi`s :)
I feel i'm missing something here. Like, some big chunk on Computer Story. Sometimes, i hate being born in the 90's... I wish i saw the start of all these technologies we are all used to... This here is pure gold, and i felt nostalgic for some reason.
@prangxxx Amstrad took over Sinclair just after Sinclair released the toast-rack 128K machine (the one with the heasink). All other Spectrums after that were produced and designed by Amstrad. The machine in question (as can be clearly seen) is a Spectrum +3, the last Spectrum model released by Amstrad.
This is brilliant. Not only does this show what the ZX Spectrum's rather basic video card was capable of, but also we get to see full motion video, at 24fps abeit at 1 bit stream, in 1982 (theoretically!). The DHCP server and NIC card of course help, but tbh its only a serial bit stream you are sending so I have no objection. Btw my only question is what is the clip you're streaming? It looks like an episode of 'Bold and the Beautiful'. So as you know my team teach CompTIA courses and use this clip with great pride as an example of what an 8-bit machine is capable of. We use it in the CompTIA A+, Network+ and Security+ courses. Kind regards, Matthew Bennett CEO - MBIT Training Ltd
MBIT Training Ltd Man, you're way off base... The DHCP server and NIC help in so much as it carries over the decoded video that's A) decoded on the PC, then B) post-processed into the sinclair resolution. Then, it travels across the network and arrives as screen-ready data that a simple looping program copies the data from the network bus to the video display. All the Sinclair is doing is moving data from point A to point B. More impressive would be a full decoder (of any sort) decoding, and displaying, all on the same device. It's been done, check out John Linville's Color Computer 3 video player. This... this is nothing special from what I see.
I think there's a case for managing expectations here. This computer was conceived before even betamax videotape was in common use. To have any sort of video playback on a speccy is something to behold. Great stuff. Reminds me of hearing 8-bit digitized speech in the Ghostbusters game for the first time. It felt like something genuinely amazing. That's what I love about working in computing, You're only ever about six months to a year from a genuine WTF moment. Downside is the constant treadmill to stay current. Meh. Swings and Roundabouts. :-) Luv and Peace.
It's a 2bit (black and white) low resolution image only stream from the modern PC. The ZX itself does not decode video or really do anything except POKE into memory that which it receives from the modern PC.
ok sod HD and 3d.. this is the business right here! That is awesome to see. If I could have done that with my spectrum when I was young I think i'd have had chickens! Brilliant stuff!
@syrus3k These eight bit computers from the eighties had loads of potential that were never realized back in the day. All of them did great things if put into the right hands.
Amazing work. There's life in the old dog yet. In the 80s if this was around I would have been up all night streaming stuff on some proto youtube site over my 2400 baud modem. Thanks for that. Very Steampunk. :-) Peace and Luv.
@jbase44 It's a memory mapped device, so LDIR to copy out the ethernet buffer to screen (a sequence of LDI instructions would be faster). When the spectranet is paged in there are 4 x 4K pages in the memory map between 0x0000 and 0x3FFF, two of the 4K pages (lowest and highest) are fixed but the middle two can be paged as RAM, flash ROM or ethernet buffers.
Call It optimization bro. Things that were not thought possible for this brave machine, which are, actually. Call it a "labor of love", a special dedication to a computer platform… Geeks are made of it. Stop thinking in terms of "purpose", "useage", "utility". Think about "challenge", "passion" and "hobby". "Video streaming on a 8bit computer of the 80's ? You gonna kidding me, right ?". This video kind of blew my mind… I have fond memories of the Sinclair line, even if i wasn't an owner.
Every time I see something like this done on a old system I get excited and think what these systems would be doing today if the people who made them (and the software in them) had the tools we have today. Any possibility of making the video in color ? How about doing the same thing using on board mass storage (there's a IDE card for the Spectrum, no ?)
@owczarekn yes, very impressive. But what you fail to mention is that demo needs an external blitter, the C64 can't shift memory around nearly fast enough by itself. This particular demo used the Spectrum's Z80 to make the video. I'm sure with an external blitter it could be made a lot more impressive.
Я тоже делал подобное видео на Спектруме. Идея с форматом видео, та же, только до ресайза видео его размер 32х64. Оцифровывал с телевизора платой на дохлом но разогнанном 8051 и ADC. Результат похуже, без звука, и слегка с пропусками. Но... подобное видео я видел. Отличный результат.
@NWOareScum One thing I learned recently "past year or two" about my Commodore, was that they could be used as extremely cheap and efficient controllers for various devices with their USER port. They could do many things like control the lights in a house. Read the temperature outside with a home made sensor. Or even act as a auto controller for your sprinkler system by reading how dry the ground is by way of a home made sensor. To be continued.
No. There's strictly no character based mode on the Spectrum, only graphic mode exists, the characters are drawn from a 8x8 pixels table in ROM (or separate ones in RAM for additional software text modes, such as 64 or 86 columns). However, the original Specturm can only display 2 colors per 8x8 pixels group, which is an annoying limitation. The American Timex models had additional modes with more color modes and even a two colours 512x184 mode, including a 2 colors per 8x1 pixels row mode and a low resolution (similar to Commodore 64) 128x184 pixels full colors mode. These additional modes can added to the original Spectrum models through either add-on cards or replacement ULA chips (Baltik ULA by Zaxon). They can also be sotfware emulated with a few limitations (28 characters wide, i.e. 224x184 resolution, to allow time to process the data during each scanline), by switching the color attributes data on the fly while the picture is being displayed. Check for Einar Saukas "Bifrost Engine" : an utility to add mode simultaneous colors that you can freely use to create your own applications, games, etc., complete with software sprites management, and its upgraded version, "Nirvana" (30 characters wide, i.e. 240x184 full color display). The limitation is still 2 colors per byte (2 different colors per 8x1 pixels row), but it's still a huge improvement, making it actually similar to other 8 bits computers from then. www.ime.usp.br/~einar/bifrost/
@owczarekn Because the author says so - "It's not a gfx expander -- that's the point. The REU only provides RAM and a blitter that is fast enough to copy the images to normal system memory." In any case, it's pretty easy to calculate, even the most optimized code for a 1MHz 6502 will not do a full screen 4bpp 50Hz video, it simply cannot move the data around that fast. The Commodore REUs effectively behave as a blitter with fast memory transfers that do not involve the CPU (i.e. DMA).
If you did colour, complete with the infamous colour clash, then it would look like one of the special effects from Top of the Pops (usually reserved for punkish bands they weren't sure about).
I remember by dad had a setup in the early 80s where he could output VHS video through his CPC 664 into a green monochrome monitor. Not sure if this was through hardware or software. Got to be hardware, I think cause the 664 wasn't powerful enough to do it all through software.
One thing I've never understood about the spectrum is why the BASIC command to run a machine code routine is RANDOMIZE USR, that suggests it's randomizing something. If I designed the speccy I would have made that command something else (like CALL, as on the Amstrad CPC).
It's because if you're not using RND, then RANDOMIZE is just a convenient way of throwing the return value away from the machine code routine. All other ways (PRINT USR, LET A=USR etc) will cause something to happen like a value printed on the screen, or a variable get allocated etc. If you're not using RND, then RANDOMIZE just allows you to throw this value away without allocating any memory to a variable or doing anything else.
@26highstreet Hi 26Highstreet, note the absence of the character 'X' after 'Z' - the Z80 (made by zilog) was the processor inside the ZXSpectrum, and yes, its more powerful than the zx80 :)
azerovc Original? I've seen video on russian clone of ZX-SPECTRUM on russian demoparty CAFE'02 in Kazan City at year 2002. It was playing from HDD, connected to ZX-SPECTRUM and maybe was colour (don't remember exactly). But transfer video stream by ethernet is original maybe.
@doodydude234 well, I didn't know the Speccy had a sexual orientation... and considering this was shown live at the University of Zaragoza last week, shown live at RetroEuskal, and countless other shows, and also appeared on Aragón TV, as well as ETB-3 it's provably not fake.
@ToricoUK There was some concern raised over the validity of this intro. Someone in the comments section said the Dallas intro was fake. Only one way to test it. Get a copy of the file and play it on a real 64 or an emulator.
So long as the Timex has a ROMCS line so the ROM can get paged out at the appropriate time, it should work. (Presumably the edge connector has at least all the signals that the Spectrum has)
@pastorrtom Not only does it exist on the C64, but also with four greyscales (instead of 1 Bit black/white) and synchronized sound. Look for: Demo C64 with AFV 6502 @ 1Mhz has plenty of bandwidth to deal with this kind of quality.
This is awesome of awesomeness and you are the king of cool, really not joking. And whoever speaks about "purpose", "waste of time doin' this", etc..really did not live that era and does not understan a s**t. This is hypercoolness in a fantastic geek magic manner.
It makes you wonder what could have been done with a video digitiser back in the day if there had been one for the spectrum. I remember a big bulky digitiser I had for the Atari ST but obviously that's a much faster machine with better graphics and still you could only capture still or about 2 second video clips.
