#zx81 art

[arcadefan]

Steinar Lund's box art for QS Defenda, a Defender clone by Quicksilva released in 1981 for the Sinclair ZX81. I use the word 'clone' here rather liberally.

A grotesque alien craft rises from the pink glow of the horizon, firing a salvo of Meson torpedoes at you. You thrust forward, swooping over the surface, firing your ruby laser, with a blossoming of flame and metal fragments the first alien is destroyed.

A second wave of alien ships drop at you from space ..Your fingers tighten on the controls...

[yellowmanula]

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[bitmapbooks]

Sinclair ZX Spectrum: a visual compendium

Experience the ZX Spectrum’s library of games, brought vividly to life using special inks in this high-quality, full colour compendium.

Reprints are due in November. Sign up for an email reminder here: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/sinclair-zx-spectrum-a-visual-compendium

#bitmapbooks #book #retrogaming #retrogames #gaming #art #reading #foryou #zxspectrum #bookstagram #booktok #fyp

[rizzonen]

drawing zinnia (my zx81 gijinka/os-tan) oc in this outfit!

[hyakcore]

[metabotulism]

[smbhax]

3D Defender (ZX81)

[gertlushgaming]

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review (PlayStation 5)

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review, 42 of the weirdest, trippiest, sheepiest games ever created. Enter the mind of Jeff Minter, the legendary creator of Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner, and Tempest 2000, in this interactive documentary from Digital Eclipse.

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review Pros:

- Graphics are from every generation. - 3.97GB download size. - Platinum trophy. - You get the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5 versions of the game. - Interactive documentary gameplay. - You work your way along the timeline of events. - Videos can be fast-forwarded, rewound, and paused. - Subtitles can be turned on and off with a button press. - High-quality video. - Simple controls. - You can turn menu music on and off. - Clear crisp and clean menu system that is just so good to look at. - An excellent time capsule. - If you have played the Atari 50 The Anniversary Celebration you get that again but for the one game. - Thumbnails for the games show the original box art and original scans of the floppy discs. - There are four chapters to the documentary and each has a completion percentage. - Original scans of paperwork, notes, concept art, letters, and more. - All images can be zoomed in and out and pan around. - Attack the documentary in any order you like. - Such high production value. - Full games list - - Sinclair ZX81 - 3D3D - Centipede Commodore VIC-20 - Abductor - Andes Attack - Deflex V - Gridrunner - Hellgate - Laser Zone - Matrix: Gridrunner 2 - Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time - Ratman Commodore 64 - Ancipital - Attack of the Mutant Camels - Batalyx - Gridrunner - Hellgate - Hover Bovver - Iridis Alpha - Laser Zone - Mama Llama - Matrix: Gridrunner 2 - Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time - Psychedelia - Revenge of the Mutant Camels - Revenge of the Mutant Camels II - Rox 64 - Sheep In Space - Voidrunner Sinclair Spectrum - City Bomb - Headbangers Heaven - Rox III - Superdeflex Atari 8-bit - Attack of the Mutant Camels - Colourspace - Gridrunner - Hover Bovver - Turboflex Konix Multi-System - Attack of the Mutant Camels '89 Atari ST - Llamatron: 2112 - Revenge of the Mutant Camels - Super Gridrunner Atari Jaguar - Tempest 2000 Reimagined - Gridrunner Remastered - A real joy to experience. - It's such a fun amazing insightful trip into the mind of one of Britain's most popular and famous Developers. - You get a glimpse into how the British gaming scene was in the early days like events and the art of selling. - Play all original and concept games. - High-scan images of the cassettes and box art with all of them in 3D. - Each timeline has an explored percentage and makes a noise to say you've done it. - Handy just play the games option. - 43 games to play including the different versions of the same game. - You can launch games from the timeline. - An excellent mix of games and mini-documentaries laceEvery game has a fast save/load feature. - Each game has a screen mode, filter, and border settings. - Stick settings can be adjusted – Invert the axis and sensitivity sliders. - You can reset games. - All games can be quit and returned to the main menu. - This shows again why Digital Eclipse is the team to deliver these exceptional museum pieces. - You get to see how devs used to show off and introduce their games to the public. - Full history of the Llama obsession? - Shows how the game used to be whacky, fun, a bit out there and dare I say experimental. - Gameography shows each game in a list. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review Cons: - No cheats or adjustments are built into any of the games. - Doesn’t have any online leaderboards. - Uninspiring trophy list with nearly half of them being for one game. - The background music is not great. - Timelines in this one seem a bit more subdued with a lot of images and only a few videos per chapter. - Doesn't include the newer games like PSVR games and Atari branded games. (more an FYI) - Needs a physical release. Related Post: Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft Review (PlayStation 5) Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story: Official website. Developer: Digital Eclipse Publisher: Digital Eclipse Store Links - PlayStation Read the full article

[gmlocg]

104.) Dragon's Lair

Release: June 19th, 1983 | GGF: Action, FMV, QTE | Developer(s): Advanced Microcomputer Systems | Publisher(s): Cinematronics, Inc., ReadySoft Incorporated, Philips Interactive Media, Inc., SEGA Enterprises Ltd., Elite Systems Ltd., T&E Soft, Inc., Digital Leisure Inc., 1C Company, Electronic Arts, Inc., Dragon's Lair LLC, Destineer, Microsoft Studios, Coleco Industries, Inc., Software Projects Ltd., Encore, Sullivan Bluth Interactive Media, Inc. | Platform(s): Arcade (1983), Coleco Adam (1984), Amstrad CPC (1986), Commodore 64 (1986), ZX Spectrum (1986), Amiga (1989), DOS (1989), Atari ST (1990), Macintosh (1990), SEGA CD (1993), 3DO (1994), CD-i (1994), Macintosh (1994), Jaguar (1995), DVD Player (1998), Windows (1999), Blu-ray Disc Player (2007), HD DVD Player (2007), iPhone (2009), Nintendo DS (2009), iPad (2010), Nintendo DS (2010), PlayStation 3 (2010), Android (2011), PSP (2011), Xbox 360 (2012), PlayStation Now (2014), Windows Apps (2014), ZX81 (2015), Browser (2017)

[flipflopflying]

Sir Clive Sinclair

[treacle81]

Subscribe to my Youtube Channel

https://youtu.be/pS66R3iLIi8

Original ZX81 keyboard by BinarySequence

WikiMedia Commons

[arcadefan]

Steinar Lund's cover art for QS Asteroids, a 1981 clone of Asteroids by Quicksilva for the ZX81.

You are the only person who has flown the Svlegian Raider. You sit back, the seat moulds round you and you blast towards the alien asteroids. Suddenly they are upon you, you thrust at them, dodging, swerving and firing Phaser Beams at them. They come at you again and again. Still you fire, wiping them from the skies.... You keep firing as they drift towards Nolveg, you fire again...

[antiques-for-geeks]

Game Review : Space Raiders

Sinclair ZX81 / Sinclair Research/Psion/Mikro-Gen / 1982 / Originally £3.95

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the golden age of cover art.

Good artists borrow, great artists steal. A comment that is often associated with the late Steve Jobs about his appropriating the GUI concept from Xerox PARC in the 1980s. It’s not an unromantic ideal - the young upstart company taking a technology from another, bigger organisation that had gold on its hands but didn’t know it.

Except Steve Jobs didn’t come up with the quote. He said as much in Triumph of the Nerds when interviewed. He didn’t claim to be the father of the modern GUI either; he just happened to see the potential of putting a low(er)-cost computer in the hands of the public that had a GUI.

The early days of the computing revolution were a kleptomaniac’s dream; intellectual property was respected, however it was done very much in a homage sense, rather than a paying-a-licencing-fee-and-doing-an-official-conversion sense.

Bedroom coders everywhere were getting in on the action, developing home versions of popular arcade titles, safe in the knowledge that Atari, Taito or Namco would not send the lawyers after them. After all, this was the early 1980s. Most of the time these companies didn’t know the kids were making these clones in the first place.

So, enter Space Raiders published by Sinclair Research. No prizes for guessing which arcade machine is being ripped-off here. It seems rather pointless to go through the gameplay; it’s so famous after 40 years of public consciousness that going through the mechanics of the game would seem a waste of time.

Let battle commence!

This version does not deviate too far from the golden formula. Some features are missing, like the bonus saucer craft that you can shoot. That said, alien ships come down the screen, and you with your moving gun must defend. Clear the screen and it continues. Over and over and over until they finally manage to land or you lose all of your lives.

Or get bored and unplug the computer.

Or stand up, knock the desk causing the memory expansion on your ZX81 to wiggle and the machine to promptly crash.

So, with the game being so ubiquitous, it’s difficult to stand out without ‘ruining’ the pure Space Invaders experience. Also, at the time there was little need to; this game would come at a time when recreating the arcade was impossible on home machinery - the Atari 2600 might have been the reference hardware for the home in the US, but even that could not hope to live up to the experience you’d get shoving small change into arcade machines. Though you could get some distance to replicating the feel by turning the lights off, have your younger brother spit out his half-eaten sweets on the floor near the machine to make the carpet nice and sticky and get your Mum to shout at you “This is a cafe, not a change machine. If you want change for those bloody machines you’ll have to buy something you little prick. They should bring back conscription. You’d learn some proper respect!” each time you ventured from the gloom into the kitchen.

Your shot is the upper case I, the alien bomb is the *. Interestingly neither you nor your foe can fire again until the projectiles hit their mark or whizz off the screen.

While released by Sinclair in 1982, the game is actually the older Space Invaders coded by Mikro-Gen in 1981. That release had the usual (for the time) monochrome packaging and was not available on shop shelves as games would come to be. The Sinclair release sees the title packaged with another, Bomber, a Blitz variant on the B-side of the cassette. Sinclair seemed to have worked with Psion (later of Organiser fame), who developed the ZX Spectrum version of Space Raiders to bring a similar game to the ZX81 at the same time. Shame that Psion did little more than just recycle an old title.

Buying it today

There are two versions - the ZX81 and Spectrum. The covers are more or less identical, so it’d be easy to get the two mixed up if you were not too careful.

The Spectrum version seems to be the more prevalent on auction sites. The ZX81 version reviewed here was not produced in as great numbers and so commands a higher price. Prices do vary from £10 to £50 depending on condition and how gullible the seller thinks people are. Expect to be able to get it for the lower end of these two figures at the present time.

Note that there is a cartridge version for the Spectrum. These are quite rare and can cost around the £60 mark. If you end up with that, well done. Now you just need to find a ZX Interface 2 so you can play it.

Commentariat

Tim : I’m going to be straight with you. This was the first game that I ever played, so my opinion of the game is really tinted. Back when I first got my ZX81, I absolutely loved it and played it for hours and hours. One particularly epic game was played at the end of the day with the prospect of bed-time looming. I made it count, going further than ever before; my parents, failing to understand the seismic nature of what they had just seen, sent me to bed instead of cracking open the champagne.

Playing it again, I can’t pretend it’s not a disappointment; it certainly isn’t how I remember it, but in these situations, it never is...

Graphically it’s not impressive, even for the ZX81; the coders could really have got more out of the hardware especially as game requires a 16k expansion in order to play the game. That said, it certainly plays well enough. It is harder than other Space Invaders clones out there, but it kind of has to be to ensure you get your money’s worth, which probably says more about the higher quality of the opposition than anything else.

The hardness kept me coming back for more when I first had it, but given that it was this, Bomber or the ICL “Fun to Learn” educational series tape that my folks had bought me in the vain hope I’d learn geography from the computer, it was an easy market to please. Now, it can grip me enough to play it, but the longevity isn’t there.

So is there much to recommend it today? Sadly no. A trip down memory lane, but not a particularly good one.

Pop : Ah, gaming on the ZX81… a tricky proposition on the painful and unresponsive keyboard. If you’ve never experienced it, try to imagine using the buttons on your microwave to play your PS4. Luckily this game of space invaders can be enjoyed at a slow pace! I can’t honestly remember if it was this or another invaders clone I played back in the day, but it’s barely passable fodder for the ‘81. Space Invaders is already a simple game, so leaving out stuff like the saucer is and the invaders speeding up as they get fewer is criminal. At least the bunkers are all present and correct. Still, I’d have happily played this back in may games-starved youth. If you’re going to (re)visit the machine today, check out something like 3D Defender or even better 3D Monster Maze...

Meat : Really, have we reached the bottom of the barrel this quickly? In some ways I jest, but really you’d only want to play this for nostalgia’s sake. Given that it needs a 16k expansion to run, I’d want to have something far better than this. Even for the time. It’s not that the aliens don’t traverse the screen properly sometimes. It’s not the missing saucer bonus alien. It’s not the absence of sound (which I can forgive - you can’t magic up sound from a machine with no ability to generate it). It’s not the lack of bitmap graphics. It’s just that in 16k you’d expect them to do something half decent. Like redefine a character set. For heaven’s sake, they could squeeze a game of chess into 1k at the same time, so I expect better here.

There is so little recommend this today. A couple of goes and the fun is exhausted. Unless you are a collector, save your money and head for better titles on the machine. If you really must have a Space Invaders clone from the era, try Avenger for the Vic 20. Hell, even the dull Atari 2600 Space Invaders cart is better than this.

Score card

Presentation 6/10

At a time when a photocopied inlay with a dour pencil drawing was the norm, the cover was incredibly stylish and smart. Seriously, look at it!

Originality 2/10

Sadly it can’t score highly here. Even in 1982 Space Invaders clones were ‘me too’ products.

Graphics 2/10

Uses the inbuilt graphics character set - plenty of scope (and memory) to do something else, even without a bitmap display.

Hookability 7/10

Plays well and draws you in quickly and effectively.

Sound N/A

The ZX81 has no sound output so unsurprisingly, neither does the game.

Lastability 3/10

While it hooks you in, at the end of the day it’s still ‘just’ Space Invaders. While tough, the missing features means there isn’t the depth to bring you back too often.

Value for Money 5/10

Will give you a fair amount of fun, even with its’ drawbacks. Plus there is a second game - Bomber - on side B.

Overall 4/10

You will get some fun out of it on your ZX81 but if you’re emulating, it’s not really worth the effort, sadly. Nostalgia will only get you so far. If you must play Space Invaders on a ZX81, try QS Invaders.

[bitmapbooks]

Sinclair ZX Spectrum: a visual compendium

Celebrate the artistry of the pioneering UK computer industry, with this beautifully produced visual compendium, packed with classic games for the ZX Spectrum.

Reprints are due in November. Sign up for an email reminder here: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/sinclair-zx-spectrum-a-visual-compendium

#bitmapbooks #book #retrogaming #retrogames #gaming #art #reading #foryou #zxspectrum #bookstagram #booktok #fyp

[graveyardmarch]

Graveyard March main menu

[uwmspeccoll]

SPOTLIGHT: Society for Appreciation of Small Furry Animals that Bite.

The SASFAB Year Book was printed in 1984. The appreciation in this particular year book seems limited to the Mustelid family, which are small, furry, and can certainly bite.

The concept and production of this “yearbook” were by British conceptual artist Ron Summers and Munich-based audio artist Tom Winter. We know more about Summers than Winter (likely names). Summers is a person of many interests, including book art, conceptual art, performance poetry, and mail art. In 1973 he established VEC (Visual, Experimental, Concrete) as a basis for many of the art projects he developed. You can see VEC listed in the colophon of the piece we are showing. His influences are the intermedia pioneers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, like Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Allan Kaprow (both of whom also have work preserved in UWM Special Collections).

This book, 4 inches wide and 45 inches long, was produced on a ZX81 home computer using Sinclair ZX Printer paper. The roll of Sinclair paper is black with a thin layer of aluminum. A small current was passed through the aluminum layer causing the aluminum to evaporate revealing the black underneath. You can still see the silvery coating.

We are appreciating the very 1980s-ness of this artist’s book. We are also appreciating the several small, furry animals that bite who provided inspiration for the publication.