A couple of days ago we decided to repeat the experience of loading games from tape, but this time with my ZX Spectrum+. It is evidently a different system. Which is a funny thing to say because when I had my ZX Spectrum +2A almost 40 years ago I didn’t really know there were different systems, I just had a “computer”. In this case, the biggest change is that the ZX Spectrum+ doesn’t come with a built-in tape drive, so I had to find one I bought a few years ago and I had misplaced somewhere. Technically speaking you don’t need a tape drive, because you can plug the audio output from your phone, for example, into the input of the speccy and just play the audio version of a digital tape (tap or tzx, format used by emulators). But I wanted to have an experience as close as possible to the real thing. Vanity shot again: loading The Return of Traxtor We started again with The Return of Traxtor, as per my son’s house rules. And it didn’t load first time, we had to adjust the cassette player volume a bit and it did load just fine. Speaking of an authentic experience. I don’t have that many cassettes for this system, unfortunately. I’m not a collector, so we only had a couple of new games, “Werewolves of London” (that like my “Traxtor” had the Amstrad CPC version on one side and the ZX Spectrum on the other), and a handful of magazine tapes with demos and the occasional cheap full game. But that’s fine, because I have one of those “fake cassettes” that come with a jack that you can plug into any audio output, for example my phone, and use it with the cassette player. Why not? Livingstone, I presume (supongo!) Back in the day, I played mostly using the keyboard to control the games. I had a joystick, a Quickshot 2, which wasn’t great. This time we had a nice modern micro-switches based joystick I bought a few years ago that is compatible with several 8-bit systems, but if you aren’t used to “up for jump”, it really sucks. And that was the other big difference in the gaming session, because I think the GX4000 gamepad is much better for kids these days. Then we hit the big problem of retro-gaming these days: if you have access to the whole catalogue of an 8-bit microcomputer, what do you play? Too many games! We still managed to play a few that I thought my kids would like. Let’s run the tape length script again, to see how long some games are. Not all the games we played on the Amstrad CPC were available for the ZX Spectrum, but most of them were. Game Time (mm:ss) Manic Miner (UK) 3:14 Livingstone Supongo (UK) 4:23 Starquake (UK) 4:45 The Great Escape (UK) 4:48 Arkanoid (UK) 4:54 Firelord (UK) 4:55 Batman (UK) 5:00 Everyone’s a Wally (UK) 5:03 The times look similar to what we got in the Amstrad CPC, perhaps a little less load time. But these are quite different systems, with the ZX Spectrum using 1 bit per pixel with attributes and the Amstrad CPC generally 4 or 2 bits per pixel. Together with different firmware and encoding for data, it is not a surprise that the times are different even for the same games. All in all, another fun session. The kids liked the Amstrad CPC better, because we had more actual tapes than in the speccy, but I suspect the difference in the controller was also a factor. What shall we play next? Some Commodore 64 or some MSX?