pah, I was a Kempston-interface man early on.bcass wrote:At the time, I was a ZX Spectrum man. Most Spectrum owners didn't own a joystick as the early models didn't have joystick ports as standard. This lead to most owners using keys (usually redefinable). The most popular configuration was Q (up) A (down) O (left) P (right) and SPACE (fire). It was some years later that I started to really get used to joypads. I could only ever really use joysticks on arcade machines.
Bombed?bcass wrote:You should be grateful that Spectrum coders even bothered to support the MSX. It bombed in Europe.Shatterhand wrote:I used to love my MSX arrow keys configuration, it was perfect indeed. And I always hated when there was some ZX Spectrum port where they didn't bother to give me an option to play with the MSX arrow keys, so I had to stick with the worse QAOP-Space configuration.
I never liked this configuration too much. When one of those ports had the option to configure the controls but had no support for the MSX arrow keys, I would configure ZSXC + Space, always felt much better.
Which might be the main reason for you thinking MSX bombed in Europe.bcass wrote:I live in the UK
If only you left out CPC and changed "bombed" into had quite less machines per 1000 Europeans" I might agree.bcass wrote:but in Europe, overall, compared to the other 8-bit machines (C64, Spectrum, CPC) it bombed.
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The rest of what you say is reasonable, but this part isn't - Russia is the biggest country in the world, but I doubt they sold many spectrum in Siberia. Even if spectrum clones did spread in the USSR block, I doubt it would shift the total european sales significantly in favor of Spectrum. It may have been used in universities and research centres, and among the richest part of the population - which sadly wouldn't make a grand total. At least, that's what I suppose.bcass wrote:Russia is the biggest country in the World (even after the break-up of the former USSR) whose overall computer sales would constitute a large portion of Europes computer sales. Of course, most Spectrums sold there were clones and not official, but I still count that as Spectrum ownership. If sales of all those clones were added to official Spectrum sales, it would almost certainly dwarf C64 worldwide sales, never mind MSX sales.
Never played it, but sounds lovely. it290 is a great fan of that game:Ceph wrote:Deluxe Galaga is a pretty neat shareware shmup for Amiga 1200/CD32.
It was pathetic, but it kept the hardware very very cheap (compared to all the other 8-bit home computers). This is a vital issue when you look at the growth of home computers in Europe in the early 1980s. What is even more astonishing is how coders overcame these limitations of the hardware to produce some stunningly original games.Ceph wrote:I wonder why anyone ever chose Spectrum over C64, 8bit Atari, MSX, CPC etc. What was Richard Altwasser thinking when he selected a graphics chip that could display only two simultaneous colors per 8×8 pixels? That was pretty pathetic even in 1982.
This isn't true. The Spectrum clones were very widespread throughout Russia/USSR, and not just in academic institutions either. The shere variety of Spectrum clones indicates that there was a substantial home market for them. My friends in Russia/former USSR countries owned Spectrum clones. They certainly did not come from middle-class or wealthy families.Turrican wrote:Russia is the biggest country in the world, but I doubt they sold many spectrum in Siberia. Even if spectrum clones did spread in the USSR block, I doubt it would shift the total european sales significantly in favor of Spectrum. It may have been used in universities and research centres, and among the richest part of the population - which sadly wouldn't make a grand total. At least, that's what I suppose.
I didn't deny substantial home market - I just doubted that those sales figures would be enough that if added to Spectrum sold in the west, the total would surpass the grand total of C64 sales in the western europe.bcass wrote:This isn't true. The Spectrum clones were very widespread throughout Russia/USSR, and not just in academic institutions either. The shere variety of Spectrum clones indicates that there was a substantial home market for them. My friends in Russia/former USSR countries owned Spectrum clones. They certainly did not come from middle-class or wealthy families.Turrican wrote:Russia is the biggest country in the world, but I doubt they sold many spectrum in Siberia. Even if spectrum clones did spread in the USSR block, I doubt it would shift the total european sales significantly in favor of Spectrum. It may have been used in universities and research centres, and among the richest part of the population - which sadly wouldn't make a grand total. At least, that's what I suppose.
Well, according to Wikipedia, the former USSR had the 3rd largest population of any country on Earth. As of 1991, it was 293,047,571: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UssrTurrican wrote:I didn't deny substantial home market - I just doubted that those sales figures would be enough that if added to Spectrum sold in the west, the total would surpass the grand total of C64 sales in the western europe.
Substantial home market has little to do with Russia's dimensions as a country.
Anyway, as I said, I'd love to know more.
people into home computers already are a fraction - the problem is to understand if home computer diffusion in the soviet bloc was comparable in terms of sales and penetration to the western phenomena. Ah, we'll probably never know for sure...bcass wrote:Well, according to Wikipedia, the former USSR had the 3rd largest population of any country on Earth. As of 1991, it was 293,047,571: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UssrTurrican wrote:I didn't deny substantial home market - I just doubted that those sales figures would be enough that if added to Spectrum sold in the west, the total would surpass the grand total of C64 sales in the western europe.
Substantial home market has little to do with Russia's dimensions as a country.
Anyway, as I said, I'd love to know more.
Even if just a small fraction of those people bought a Spectrum, we're still talking about substantial sales figures.
It's quite a leap, even reducing those 17 million units to just the european sales figures. If Russia had been a market so big on its own, now Europe would be the first of the three markets by a large margin. Take the UK 6 million Spectrum: UK was and still is by far the most prominent market for videogames in the whole EU. I don't think Spain, Netherlands, Italy and France together would have piled up another 6 million. Same goes for the C64 of course.bcass wrote: It is estimated that there were over 6 million Spectrum sales in the UK alone (and that's before Amstrad bought the company and continued to sell the Spectrum for another 8 years). Add to that figure, sales in the rest of the World (not least units sold in the former USSR) and it wouldn't be hard to imagine that the Spectrum came close to or even outsold the C64 (total Worlwide sales). Official Commodore Worldwide sales figures for the C64 (publsihed in their annual report) stand at a total of 17 million units.
Times were hard, and it was cheaper. On a personal level, it was also the easiest to find games for locally. Back in 1988 I wouldn't have dreamed of paying the crazy expensive £9.99 that mail order games in mag ads charged for new releases. Ditto the big high street chain stores; WH Smith being one of the few I recall carrying games back then. But the thing that it's easy to forget in the current market is that computer games were everywhere back in the 8-bit era. A substantial chunk of my old Spectrum games collection was bought from newsagents and corner shops. The average price of a budget Speccy game around here was £1.99, while C64 games averaged £2.99. When I was a kid subsisting on £1.50 per week, it was a big difference.Ceph wrote:I wonder why anyone ever chose Spectrum over C64, 8bit Atari, MSX, CPC etc.
You have to look at how many other countries the Sepctrum was popular in (not just the USSR countries). Also remember that that 6 million sales figure was prior to Amstrad buying the brand. The Speccy enjoyed about another 8 years of sales to add to that. A realistic final total sales figure for the UK would be around 8 million, pehaps more.Turrican wrote:It's quite a leap, even reducing those 17 million units to just the european sales figures. If Russia had been a market so big on its own, now Europe would be the first of the three markets by a large margin. Take the UK 6 million Spectrum: UK was and still is by far the most prominent market for videogames in the whole EU. I don't think Spain, Netherlands, Italy and France together would have piled up another 6 million. Same goes for the C64 of course.
I'd be impressed to know that Spectrums in the whole USSR reached a 6 million total, equal to the UK. Of course all of this is speaking of hardware alone - games are all another matter altogether.