ZX81 reminiscing

Saturday, August 16th, 2008 | Editorial

Have you gone back as an adult and checked out something that you loved as a child? I find that often times that I am astonished at what I loved as a kid because the quality was so poor. He-man, Transformers, TRON, all have let me down. Well, I still love TRON, because no matter how bad the writing is (which I didn’t know about as a child) those light cycles are still as cool as ever. And some things have manged to maintain their integrity in my memory; the Princess Bride is still fantastically entertaining. The point is that as a child I looked at things differently. It didn’t matter if something failed to resonate in the deeper intellectual corners of my mind or was manufactured entirely of the lowest grade resources available.

But there are few things which I enjoyed as a child that have actually gotten better with time. For instance. I think I respect games on the ZX81 more now than I ever did. I’m not going to bother trying to explain what a ZX81 was, if you know you’re already there with me, if not I’m not the resource to go to for technical specs, except to say that I remember having access to one as a child. In fact if memory serves my father had one in a suitcase with a screen built in, a portable computer, complete with space for cartridges or tapes that were loaded with games. And as I remember when I saw the games I wasn’t impressed. At the time we had a commodore 64. As interesting as it was to see a black and white frogger that could only show half the game at a time on the commodore 64 the game was much more impressive.

As an aside, I played frogger on the commodore 64 so much and got so good at it that I discovered that after level 7 the game couldn’t offer you any greater challenge and you ended up playing level 7 in an endless loop until you died. I lost count, but I suspect I was in the double digits on the levels when I was sure that there was nothing more the game could do, and then I ran my frog headlong into traffic just to end the game. I also remember finding a frogger stand up arcade machine at a local pool one summer and being surprised at it. I had only ever played the C64 game and thought it was native to that system. In fact the C64 version was very close to that arcade game except that the arcade game’s screen waved like a sheet dangled from the ceiling and wiggled left and right. I thought that’s the way it was supposed to be in the arcades, a trick that they couldn’t pull of in the C64 version, because he was a frog and part of the game took place in water. Then again it could have been the frenzied effect of having 120 volts join me on a spiritual level to the machine because, as I said, this was at a pool and the floor was wet.

Back to the ZX81.

It turns out the ZX81 didn’t have much in the way of graphics, most games used only text (32×24!). And no color or sound (which I noticed that as a kid). Still, those limitations didn’t stop people from doing some really cool games within that framework. Thanks to YouTube, we can peek at the past and marvel. I won’t link to an comment on every video here, just give you a starting point and let you wander around YouTube’s related links for a while. Unfortunately ZX81 frogger isn’t available so we’ll have to start with City Patrol instead:

I look at these programs and can’t help but think that PDCurses programs have more complexity than these games, by which I mean PDCurses could reproduce these games perfectly and still have some wiggle room. And considering the technical limitations of the system I’ll bet the code would be compact enough for this site. Unquestionably this inspires me. However, whether or not my interest in the idea lasts long enough for me to actually do something about it is a different question. Especially since I’d be working without the source in most cases, and in the few cases when I did have the source it would probably be in assembly.

Still, if I did discover the source for these game and they were in something more decipherable than mov and jmp then I might have a hard time resisting.

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