Yes, Sinclair was incredibly bitter that he lost out to Acorn for the BBC Micro, but there was no way that the rubber keyboard would stand up to use in schools day in day out.
I still marvel that anyone did any serious development on it, without also developing RSI too! Surely most professionals used cross-compilers/emulators on real computers ("real" in this context meaning, with mechanical keyboards), but I can find little evidence of that. You could buy proper[1] dev tools (like Hisoft's Devpac) than ran natively on the Speccy.
[1] Of course the Beeb had an assembler built in :-)
> Surely most professionals used cross-compilers on real computers
I've often wondered about that. Writing machine code on an off-the-shelf Spectrum with a tape deck was extremely painful, and I never really got beyond a few funky machine code graphics routines. I'd be really interested to know how many of the people that did were working with the same limitations I was.
Early on there just weren't cross compilers and "real computers", at least not in the British "back bedroom" games scene. I didn't write on the Spectrum, but certainly on the Dragon and the C64 it was a case of write, save, execute, reset, load, write some more.
It was this sort of tedium which provoked at least one of my more able chums to write out his assembly in longhand and then produce pages of handwritten hex to type in instead.
After I made a bit of money I upgraded to two C64s and two floppy disk drives, so I could write on one and test on the other. That would have been about 1985.
And then a while after that a miraculous invention called "PDS" came along, which involved a hardware connection from a PC to the target system, and simplified everything greatly. You wrote code on the PC and just squirted it into the target's brain. Oh how I wanted to use that, but by then I was out of programming...
Both of those had keyboards you could use comfortably for long periods tho' (as did the VIC-20 and BBC Micro). Certainly they're as good as if not better than many modern keyboards!
I first got a ZX81 and learned to program on that. When I got the Spectrum I started writing assembler on it. The first few games were developed entirely on one Spectrum in my bedroom. In hindsight it probably was difficult, but at the time it was wonderfully exciting and that is the way it was.
I did use Hisoft tools at some point, can't remember from how early. I also wrote a few of my own.
When I later went in-house with a company they used TRS80s with a hardware link. The code was edited and assembled on the TRS80 then downloaded and executed on the Spectrum.
They were fantastic pioneering days to me. I owe a lot to Sir Clive.
I once read an article on "Ultimate Play The Game", masters of the Spectrum from Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and they did indeed cross compile their code from a mainframe I believe.
garymcm, I'm not sure about a mainframe for Ultimate - they were very clever guys though.
I know Imagine (spin off from BugByte) used Unix workstations for development. I can't remember what they were called but when they went bust I went to the auction and drooled over all their kit
Surely most professionals used cross-compilers/emulators
What is this "compiler" you speak of :-)
I have fond memories of writing a version of Tron's light bikes on my 16k Spectrum by hand-assembling Z80A machine code from my notebook[1] using the opcode lookup in the appendix of the manual.
[1] and if it isn't obvious - by notebook I mean one made of paper
Yeah, I was using the modern terminology, any Z80 assembler is going to produce the same machine code, it just needs to be loaded into the Spectrum's memory somehow.
Can you imagine using that keyboard 8 hrs a day as a fully grown adult?
I still marvel that anyone did any serious development on it, without also developing RSI too! Surely most professionals used cross-compilers/emulators on real computers ("real" in this context meaning, with mechanical keyboards), but I can find little evidence of that. You could buy proper[1] dev tools (like Hisoft's Devpac) than ran natively on the Speccy.
[1] Of course the Beeb had an assembler built in :-)