Screen res 256x192, only two colours per 8x8 block of pixels, 8 colours total + 2 levels of brightness = 16 shades. It's incredible what these guys did with that!
i dont mean to be offtopic but does someone know a method to log back into an Instagram account? I somehow forgot the password. I appreciate any tricks you can give me!
@@cthutu ... actually, they weren't! :) The difference is VERY subtle, but it is there...I think that one just has to possess good enough colour vision, to be able to distinguish it. It's not easy.
really cool, i would go see some of those in an art gallery, really like the style that the spectrum colour-limitations impose on the pics too, gives them a more expressionist/hyper-real quality than pics on other computers.
I wish this computer had been more popular in the United States. I have only become familiar with it thru emulation but I have come to like it quite a bit. Definately one of the best 8-bit computers of the eighties. Some of its games show perfectly well its about good programming, not graphics.
As a DOS bastard and a pixel artist, I envy those who had Spectrums because the color palette is just better than EGA. Based on the hex codes I think EGA just cut corners by having simpler color codes for performance's sake, but the result was a selection of washed out colors compared to the Spectrum. A fitting name for such a colorful system.
One of the images is of a pilot in a spacecraft. I can't imagine how these artist can work out where to place pixils and choose 1 of 8 colours to fool our minds into thinking where seeing more than we are. I think this would have to be one of the best images I've seen created on zx spectrum. I wonder how they go about it.
colour clash is such an interesting issue. Technically it's common to nearly all systems that use tiles, but in some the limitations are much weaker than in others. Consider the background graphics in a SNES game for instance; 256x224 composed of 8x8 tiles (eg 32x28 tiles). In all cases besides 'direct colour mode' you can choose all the colours in a palette out of 32k shades. Each tile can have one of 8 palettes, though depending on mode this could be 3 colours + transparent, 15 colours + transparent, 255 colours + transparent, or a really weird 'direct colour' mode with 255 + transparent colours specified uniquely per pixel, but then each tile has 3 more bits of colour resolution shared between all the pixels. (so technically 2048 colours direct colour mode, but you can only use 256 of the colours in any given tile and all 64 pixels share the same lower 3 bits.) Now, strictly speaking colour clash is theoretically still possible on such a system, but in practice that's just so incredibly unlikely you're really have to be making an effort to make it happen. (and of course a big issue on the spectrum is there are no hardware sprites, so sprite graphics clash with background graphics) Now consider an entirely different kind of system; The Atari 8 bit computers. That has an extremely long list of graphics modes, and then you can mix and match modes and create all kinds of effects well past the expected limitations... But while you can technically get 16 shades of one colour, or 15 colours (+black) of the same intensity (which is surprisingly difficult to do anything useful with), or even a 9 colour mode where any pixel can be any of the 9 colours... You sacrifice so much resolution to do it! So... If you go back to modes with more reasonable resolutions, such as 320x192 or 160x192, you find that the best you can hope for is 4 colour bitmap mode, or 5 colour text mode. (which, bizarrely, is 4 colours per character, but you can pick a single colour out of 2 options for each character) Then there's the high resolution text mode which gives 2 colours... Kinda. See, it actually gives 2 shades of the same colour. Which is actually pretty dubious for text readability, since the background and foreground colour are different intensities of the same colour. In general the Atari doesn't have any way to specify colour attributes per character/tile. Thus colour clash isn't possible. But that's because you can't use more than about 4 colours at once. (except with tricks or massive sacrifices.) However, it's colour choice is 256/128 colours. (in practice for most modes 128 is more accurate). And you can change the palette entries midframe of course. So you find that with careful coding you could change the palette every few lines, but each individual line can only have 4 colours. In some ways this is a lot more flexible than the colour clash issues on a Spectrum (and c64), but in other ways it's arguably quite a bit more limited. Of course, all that goes out the window with the many many graphics hacks for the Atari that can get you anything from a 27 colour mode to 256 colour mode, to even a 4096 colour mode if you're careful... But the basics... Yeah, these old systems could be very weird...
Nice collection! Some really good ones here I hadn't seen before. It would be nice to have a list of sources for these so we could go back to the original demos or intros that they came from.
the one colour that always stuck out to me was it's take on bright purple. don't know why it's just what i think about when someone mentions the spectrum
Note that all the screens are in the standard graphic mode (8 colours in 2 bright levels). Have you seen interlaced screens displaying 80 or more colours?
exactly this restriction made spectrum graphics more pure, but in some games lacked of a bit better grafics, others worked around this issue very well, i loved most ultimate games
@peloquin1979 The Spectrum has a lower resolution and can't display as many colours per a 8x8 pixel square. But you'll never see any double width pixels on a spectrum unless the artist chose to draw them.
It has 8 colors and every volor can be with two levels of brightness. So you can use 16 colors. But it has one important restriction. In area of 8x8 pixels you can use only 2 colors.
You ARE right about there being 16 colours - *not* 15!! The difference is very feint, but it is there between the blacks (just realized how racist that sounded! 🤦), and it's difficult to understand why more in the community don't seem to acknowledge this (maybe unless their colour vision isn't all that it could be???).
unbeliveable graphics if remember the colour clash and other technical restrictions. Is the soundtrack ripped from some ZX spectrrum game or demos? The soundtrack uses only 3 channell AY-3-8910 during all time?
Lovely, vibrant colours and some nice scenes. Sounds like a C64 tune though. The Spectrum never made music this good, right? I don't know, coz I never owned one, but the only good tune I heard on the machine was on a platform game.... Desperate Dan? .... No, Dynamite Dan! I'm sure that had good music for a Speccy :)
THe sound chip used here was the 128's tho let's be clear? The original spectrum had a woeful sound capability. People did great things with it but the 128 finally got a decent multi-channel sound chip. Luv and Peace.
The BEEPer has been shown (or should I say _heard)_ to produce wonderful symphonies in the right hands. Soundpaint's RU-vid channel produced a video which demonstrated the true capabilities of the one channel beeper. Impossible to tell that it came from a ZX Spectrum unless you think extremely carefully about it. The potential hadn't been untapped for decades before this came along.
The ZX spectrum graphics hardware really sucks, and these are just astonishing. It's amazing what people can achieve when under such limitations. Who'd have thought you could do anything good with a 2 colors per 8x8 tile restriction?
some of the newer spectrum clones had a keyboard shortcut to switch to black and white mode, which would make 16 shades of gray, and these pictures would look great ! I actually think they were intended this way, since the colors are crazy otherwise. Well, except of the guys at 1:12, who are photorealistic depiction of metrosexuals :)
I loved the Spectrum, definitely the Xbox of the 80s IMO! C64 was the Playstation, purely cos the Speccy had better games even though according to the fanboys, the C64 was technically better.
@andyukmonkey You can double pixels but you got 4 colors in one character, spectrum only has a graphical mode without complicated tricks. You can see spectrum demos with similar modes than C64 8*8 pixels/2 colors or 4double*8 pixels/4 colors, but you must be a better programer in spectrum. Sorry for my bad english. :>
It is the game makers fault not the actual systems fault, you also got to consider that these older systems no matter what it is, is not capable of doing all that much.
Sony Trinitron game makers fault? every single game looks like shit in this system, is the system makers fault not the game makers fault, also, other computers who also sucked, are not even this awful, even the commodore 64 is better
