Top 5 Retro Computers: Terms and conditions apply

ah it's almost Christmas the time of year where I do a video that does not match the format of all the other things on my channel last year I took the opportunity to show a whole bunch of YouTube channels that I really like that hopefully the rest of you had not heard of all of them this year I'm going to attempt aisal ooh even if you've not heard the term you will have encountered the format it's where you have an article that goes the top five retro computers ever the top 15 Innovations in gaming and most of these things are terrible I think there's a reason that this week in retro podcast seems to have a regular section where they just take the Michael out of one of these I'm particularly thinking of the Innovations in gaming which included good games because up until that point it never occurred to anyone to make a good game so am I just going to do a terrible top five well I'm hoping not cuz I'm going to do something that never seems to happen with listicles is I'm going to set some boundaries around what this top five can be but before we get into the rules and restrictions cuz I know everyone loves rules and restrictions I should say this video is sponsored by PCB wait sponsor of 50% of YouTube they also happen to make some pcbs as well yes design your PCB upload your design give the money pcbs come back in the post that's basically the entire thing they also do the same with 3D printing injection molding and CNC and you know make that 3D model upload it give money thing comes back in post and if you're not the sort of person who likes designing pcbs but would like pcbs designed by other people to do stuff with retro computers well they have a sort of project Gallery thing on their website where you can have a bit of a no existing projects and Order yourself a PCB that you can solder the bits onto you do have to like soldering bits onto things though okay let's get into the rules for our list of five right so first of all I'm going to lock it to a time period so we're going to say early to mid 80s so 80 to 85 why that time period well because I'm of a certain age and that's when I first started using computers so yeah we're doing this time period and if we don't lock it down to a time period Well then the whole list is completely meaningless cuz yeah unsurprisingly a PC from the year 2000 is just a bit better than a ZX Spectrum so yeah we really need to put some time bounding around this thing we're also going to have to put some rules in around what Market the computer was aimed for and we're going to go for the UK Home Market and that's because I lived in the UK and I was a child at the time so I had very little exposure to the business Market at the time and also in the early ' 80s cray did sell supercomputers in the UK and I'm not trying to upset Spectrum owners here but again a cray supercomputer little bit better than a zedx spectrum just you know a smidge so that's it that's the bounding criteria for our list UK Home Market between 80 and 85 now before we get into the actual top five because the delaying tactic is all part of the lisal format I'm going to do a bunch of honorable mentions things that did not make it into the top five that are definitely worth mentioning and also saying why they didn't quite make it up into the top five and let's go with the zx80 and zx81 from Sinclair for a lot of people in the UK this was the first computer they bought particularly the more nerdy members of society that just want a computer cuz they wanted to do computery things with it and they went for the zx80 and 81 because they were cheap this is the absolute main thing about these machines is they were designed to a price point that regular people could afford but also as computers go even for the time period they are not very good what these did was broaden access because of their price point but they had some very significant limitations in that was hardly any Ram in it by default so everyone had to buy the 4K expansion pack on the back that would wobble and fall off and crash the machine although you could really help that out with blue tack the keyboard may be the most singular awful keyboard I have ever used in my entire life and you might say well it's just as bad as the Atari 400 and it's not it is worse than the Atari 400 the Atari 400 has at least raise little ledge in there so you can kind of feel on the keyboard where you are it's still like pressing your fingers in the solid plastic but the 80 and 81 didn't even have the little raised edges around the well let's say keys so you could not tell without looking which key you were pressing the main thing about that keyboard design is it was cheap that's what we were going for here cheap not good cheap whilst hitting a minimum spec level that made the thing functionally enough to be worth buying in the first place and some coders did manage to do an amazing job getting any games to run on this thing at all because there is a significant flaw the circuitry handling the display can get access to memory or the CPU can they cannot both at the same time and there's no clever inter leaving going on here so this is why the display flickers so badly as you type because the CPU is running to detect the keyboard press and handle it therefore it can't display anything on the screen yep if the CPU is doing something the screen is not if the screen is doing something the CPU is not and some games got around this surprisingly well but it's still not what you would call a good feature in a computer next I should mention the dragon 32 which is a perfectly chrom link computer it just didn't quite make it into the top five because well there are other computers that are better than it at least five now some people unkindly refer to it is a clone of the T rs80 I mean it's much more of a clone than Coco if you ask me but yes that is a little unkind because the tsr80 and the Coco really did just take the reference implementation that they documented with the CPU that they used and well implemented it and metat toy the company behind the dragon they did exactly the same thing although it is worth noticing yes the cartridge Port is the same as the tsr8 and if you're doing an implementation around this reference design of course you're going to use exactly the same cartridge design as the already pre-existing surprisingly successful computer so you can you know share software with it and it was basically a perfectly good computer it just wasn't quite as good as some of the other computers you could buy at the time now some of when we get into the top five we'll be thinking where's the Apple 2 particularly our American viewers and the reason it's not in the top five is we've kind of qualified it out I mean yes it's a 1970s design but you can still buy it in our time period but it's not really what you call a British Market home micro in that technically it was sold here again into the home but it's sold in such few numbers that it wasn't really part of the British home micro scene so but also even if it wasn't out of bounds based on our rules it probably still wouldn't make it into the top five simply because although it's still being made in the80s it's '70s technology is showing a little bit particularly in terms of its display capabilities I'll also mention the Tata and Einstein because if I don't at the very least Johnny Blanchard's going to ask me hey how come the Einstein didn't make the list and again I'm going to use the doesn't quite fit into the whole UK Home Market thing again was on sale here you could technically buy one and have one in your house but mostly they were sold businesses wanting to do a bit of micro Computing and developers who were using them to write games for much more popular systems for the home in the UK but if it was not for it being qualified out yeah this thing might actually make it into the top five cuz it's a really good quite sophisticated computer and I'm going to use exactly the same excuse for qualifying out the Atari 400 and 800 as was both really good computers they didn't really do enough sales in the UK for us to say well they were part of the UK Home Market I mean they were on sale but I certainly didn't know anyone at the time who had one or even heard of someone who had a friend of a friend who had one or or a second cousin's former Roommate by putting that qualification in around Home Market I don't just mean that it was on sale in the UK and technically you could fit one in your house it needs to have done enough sales so that you could go into a retailer of say computer games in the UK and buy some games for it for the UK viewers we can think of that as the wh Smith's test okay that's hit the format point of listing a bunch of things that don't make make it into the list without having to go to the trouble of actually ranking them now I probably should just say one more thing about the ordering principle here now we said what can and can't be on the list now I'm judging these machines on how good they are at being computers not how good they are as games machines as those two things are not the same am I going to take gaming into account yes it's a home computer that's a lot of what we did with them but I am principally going to focus on how good they were as just a computer into that I will factor in the ecosystem so the kind of software that was available for them peripherals Etc particularly any peripherals from the manufacturer of the computer itself right let's get into our top five and in at number five we have the zedx Spectrum okay I know putting this at number five is going to be very controversial but Spectrum on is put you pitch folks down I will explain why if this does make it into this week in ret this the point Rack in here Neil saying to Dave Oh Come On Dave as Dave argues that this was a bad place to put thep spum well as I mentioned before I was going to prioritize how good a machine was at being a computer versus how good it was at being a games machine cuz again I don't view these as exactly the same thing and the spectrum is a device that was very much engineered to a price point and it was a pretty low price point too which is probably the major factor in its success that and the time that it was released as in terms of becoming the UK's leading games platform well the field was wide open and with a wide open field and attractive pricing Point well that meant that the Spectrum really was able to become the successful games platform right out of the gate which me that more people targeted games towards it and with more games available for the Spectrum than any other machine you could buy in the UK well that led to more people buying it as games machine which meant even more people publish games for it but as a computer the design decisions made to hit that budget price yeah they're not so great I mean for example let's start with the keyboard for a games machine the rubber key Spectrum keyboard was just fine you just need to mash the buttons in time if you want to do a lot of application use or spend hours word processing something or coding that keyboard's a nightmare yep use case really matters as to whether you found the Spectrum keyboard okay or not the problem is with ranking it in terms of how it was as a computer well all the things it was not good for are all the things that you're thinking of when you're thinking computer rather than well games machine admittedly keyboard did get better over time different models did have improved keyboards but if you remember we're only running up to 1985 and in 1985 you just add the original rubber key Wonder or the plus we didn't have the 128 yet and we wouldn't until 1986 other things that were not ideal on the computer is there isn't a monitor Port it's RF out or nothing on the original Spectrum then your other two ports a mic in ear that connect you up to cassette tape power in and an edge connector for expansion you might not there no serial ports there are no parallel ports so you want to connect a printer well you're not going to have much luck with that one Sinclair however did make their own range of add-ons which did include a printer but I should mention that that printer is just awful now essentially it takes a till receip roll coated in kind of an aluminium powder and it then uses a electrified head to basically burn the aluminium off the paper or burn it into it to make the text that you get to see and is just rubbish you can't really use the output from it really for anything you're not doing your homework on this one or writing an essay and you're certainly not going to hand in a CV printed out on till receipt paper and there was a second printer option from alfacom and that thing's basically just as bad Sinclair did make some other add-ons but again they're largely focused on the games here so we have the ZX interface 2 which is two joystick ports and the cartridge slot so you can load your games off cartridge were many games ever made available on cartridge no no they were not Sinclair of course weren't the only people to release a joystick interface for the Spectrum oh no some of those interfaces were quite good some of them yeah really not the one my friend had consisted of a plug board and a series of fly wires we had to wire the whole thing up before you switch to the machine on double check that you'd wir it up correctly again before you switch the machine on because if you got it wrong and you switched the machine on there was a chance your spectrum was dead forever genius now the other major product made available for the Spectrum bis and CLA themselves were the Micro Drive the idea of the Micro Drive being it was a rapid digital cassette interface so it didn't have to do the whole convert it to audio convert it back again system so could in theory load AG into the Spectrum much more quickly than the regular cassette tape Cod you know there's a book coming don't you and it's a big book and I cannot lie mostly what the micro drive seemed to do was stretch the tape as it used it rendering the thing unreadable so as a data storage method it was a bit flawed in that it didn't store your data for very long there were some floppy disc interfaces available but Sinclair seem to leave that to third parties to do so Miles Cordon Technologies would later give us the Sam cang a souped up Specky clone produced the plusd interface for the Spectrum which allowed it to just about make use of floppy disc it kind of you actually choose the commands that you would use for the micro drive to control the floppy drive as far as I can tell you also have the beat to disc interface which their creator had to create a system called tros its own little operating system it could load up in order to be able to use the floppy Drive which brings us on to our next major shortcoming of the spectrum as an actual computer doesn't really have an operating system what you've got is a basic interpreter now there is a sort of Kernel subsystem that lies underneath that because they just licensed the Microsoft version of basic like everybody else did and for each leny for that they had to produce their own little kernel support system and that provided a few basic routines to basic they allowed it to load files save files Etc well that's not really a hindrance to the likes of the spectrum where you're mostly a gaming machine and maybe you might do a bit of basic programming for a lot of computing tasks not having an OS is you know non-helpful for example want to load a binary utility into memory will d directly you can't you have to write a basic program that gets that junker data off the tape puts it in memory somewhere and then tries to execute it want to copy some stuff around well know you're going to have to load a special utility for that and this makes dealing with alternative kinds of filing systems or storage actually really quite difficult for the machine to do you have to effectively patch that little kernel not this set of routines to hook in support for your stuff there's no operating system there iterate through the different storage devices and filing systems because there isn't really an OS there now one last thing I do want to talk about is its graphic subsystem because in a way that was quite good for the time but also quite flawed in other ways its display has a decent resolution it also has 16 colors available at once but how those colors work well that's the very far from ideal part so the Spectrum has a one bit per pixel model which means you can switch a pixel on or off but I did mention before it has color well color is not as related to pixels as you might assume color is in fact not stored with the bit map at all in fact the way Color Works is effectively if you overlay the grid of characters over top 8 by 8 pixels your color is set per character so you can set a foreground color and a background color and if your pixel is in that 8 by8 block if the pixel is on it gets displayed as the foreground color if the pixel is off it gets displayed as the background color and this is where the spectrum's color class issues come from because as I say a Sprite moves over the background well you can only have two colors in the same character block so your Sprite either ends up changing colors or your background ends up changing colors now skillful programmers did learn a way to work round this limitation but yeah this really is a limitation in hardware and while you can think of it as part of the aesthetic charm of the spectrum and its games it truly is not a great feature of the spectrum so hopefully some of you now understand why this is at number five because yes if this was the best British gaming machines from this time period Then the Spectrum would be a lot higher up the list but it's not it's the list of the top 10 best computers in the Home Market in the UK in this time period And as a computer it's just not as good as the other ones I'm going to list above it so in at number four we have the acor electron oh God the Spectrum owners are going to come for me in the comments the electron was acorn's entry into the budget end of the home system Market in fact it was going to be their game system but acor being acor even when they're trying to make a gaming system also made a surprisingly good computer in fact I think the compromises they made in their design in terms of trying to hit the price point they wanted to sell it to compared to S if you want a computer they were a better set of choices so let's start with a quick look around the machine for start it has a really good keyboard I mean it's not just an okay keyboard like keyboard it's actually genuinely quite nice to type on and I know this might feel like you I'm laboring the point here but the keyboard is how you interact with the machine everything is texted keyboard input with these computers we are not at the point where any home user is using a GUI as their daytoday thing so the quality of keyboard really does matter in terms of using your computer as a computer and I think the electron may have in this budget end of the market the best keyboard of any of the machines out there we have RF out so you can plug into you know your regular TV after all it is a home machine but we've also got a proper monitor Port so we can connect a decent monitor or RGB scar output into a TV that had such fancy things back then there's also monochrome composite out as well and then the final Port is the cassette Port which has your audio in and out pins but also a way to stop and start the tap player as well now depending on which Acorn electron you ended up in your pack with you either have just then this big expansion connector on the back or it came with the plus one which gave you a number of other ports so we got a printer port an analog joystick port and these two cartridge slots at the top technically the plus one is an expansion so you may feel it's a little unfair to include it in the initial description of the machine but it was so common to sell the electron with the plus one that everyone I knew as a kid who had the electron also got the Plus one with it when their parents went and bought it from curries I think curries just sold it as one thing the electron and a plus one one bundle with a pair of some of the worst joysticks I have ever used in my entire life now for the budget end of the market this is a really good home computer we'll come back to its ability to run games later on but as a computer and this is where we're judging it and ranking it remember it's surprisingly sophisticated for a start it chips with the best version of basic that was available in the 1980s BBC basic you might be thinking oh hold on come on that's just a preference no not all Basics are made the same now if you seen much basic code you may be familiar with the CF goto that it often be back then as in terms of jumping around in your code most basic implementations didn't provide anything more sophisticated than that go sub was about as sophisticated as it got but BBC basic on the other hand provided functions and procedures so your code could Define a function and other bits of code could call it and get values back you know like you would in any modern development language and this thing for basic was a real game changer there is a huge difference between using BBC basic and other basics in terms of the sophistication of the program and importantly its structures that you can use BBC basic also provided way to draw stuff on screen and you might be thinking surely they all did no they didn't many of provided a way to do text that was it if you wanted to do some graphics well you were going to start peeking and poking values in and out of ram you had support for doing sound too amazing a version of basic shipped with a machine that supports you know all its graphics and sound features you know all things the version of basic that with the Spectrum kind of didn't do and on the assembly front the electron also has you covered as BBC basic has an assembler just built in so you could write code was a mixture of assembler and basic run it it would assemble your code and then you can call the machine code or if you only doing a machine code program you just do all your assembler in basic run it it assembles the output take that save it and then just load and run it at the budget end of the home computer Market nothing else did this there was no other machine that shipped with a sophisticated version of basic as this and with all the assembly tools you need again just shipped with the machine the other thing you should probably talk about in terms of this being a good computer is it has an operating system now some of you will be thinking but all 8bit machines had an operating system at least of some description right well no quite a lot of them just had a basic interpreter with some some very low-level machine code functions for doing a basic IO and those functions are basically the hardware abstraction layer for the basic interpreter but for the electron things are very different its operating system is much more akin to say MS DOS or CPM only all in the ROM now you still have the same basic is available and works the moment you turn the machine on thing but whenever you typed into the prompt a Star Command soal because you prefix it with a star that's a command to the operating system anything else you type in that does not begin with a star that gets passed to whatever the current language is in the electron by default this is BBC basic but if you added another language ROM say via the ROM cart through slot then that can be whatever language is in there and it's relatively noticeable that the machine starts up a bit differently to other machines on power on it's not just just starting up the basic interpreter it actually starts the OS and the OS is responsible for checking a few bits of Hardware going through all the ROMs installed in the system and we'll go on the ROMs thing in a second working out which one of those ROMs are language ROMs and then starting up the default language and then we'll see the machine prompt at the top of the screen which will tell us which language it's brought up now the OS itself is as sophisticated as at least CPM or dos was in fact in certain areas maybe a little bit more sophisticated at least compared to the version that was available at that point in time so the OS supports multiple different filing systems and you can have filing system ROMs in the machine the electron comes with two built in the cassette filing system which unsurprisingly lets you do things with the cassette and the ROM filing system that lets you store files in a ROM that's how the ROM cartridges tended to work being a real operating system we also have the ability to manipulate files and the properties of file so this is why the OS for example can produce a catalog of all the files on the tape if you're willing to wait long enough or almost instantly all the files on the ROM and with certain add-ons all the flowers on your floppy disc the operating system could also be expanded through other ROMs that were utility ROMs that provided extra commands to the operating system the OS also provides all the kind of facilities you expect for manipulating the machine setting screen modes you know changing things like the board rate of your serial Port those sorts of things and being aord of course all these things were supported in BBC basic as you as the ORD and O bik commands that could be used to send stuff to the operating system to do things there's another home8 bit systems if you wanted to have basic do something to say some of the hardware well then you going to start peeking and poking biting to RAM and figuring out how to drive the hardware directly yourself with BBC basic you just Lo up in the manual the OS call you needed and the parameters it took and then You' use osbon number for the procedure and passing the arguments and the way you go I'm hoping what you're getting from all of this is that the electron is much more of a computer for computer users not so much a games machine that happens to be implemented as a home computer now let's have a little look at the ecosystem around the acorn electron because it's got a pretty good one now being a cut down version of the BBC micro effectively it benefits from a huge library of application software and utilities and it can use a lot of the it can't use all of them I'll quickly get into why and that's because it's missing something known as mode 7 the BBC included a teletex graphics chip in there which was extremely useful for applications cuz what it let the BBC do is get a surprising amount on screen using very little Ram as you could do quite a lot of let's say Graphics using the teletex graphical characters that's in the teletech font set now the electron just doesn't have that so you can't use any of the software Ware that was super reliant on mode 7 if you try and access mode 7 the machine doesn't just explode it implements a text mode but but it doesn't do any of the teletex graphics or control characters so stuff kind of just looks wrong and that does basically break all but the most simple use cases of this so for a lot of these we just got an acor electron version of that application which was a updated version of the B application just avoiding using the mode 7 thing hey soft also made sure that all their primary applications just worked on the electron so view view sheet Etc they worked we had versions of them for the electron we could get them on tape or we could get them as ROM cartridges to go in the plus one advantage of the ROM cartridge version being that we had all of the electron 32k of RAM for the data for the application and the application lived in the ROM so in terms of printers you can use basically pretty much any printer out there because it's just got a centronics port so dot matrixes Daisy Wheels Etc even Laser Printers admittedly those Laser Printers cost more than the house you were living in but but they were a thing corn also produced addons for the electron including an entire floppy disc unit known as the plus three which gave you a 3 and 1/2 in drive and a connector that let you attach an external 5 and A2 in the plus three came a filing system ROM to allow it to read and deal with the desk drive now it is adfs and this again for the time very sophisticated disc filing system in that it allows you to have directories and subdirectories like we would now on a modern filing system whereas a lot of 8 bit micros at the time you just had a flat filing system in fact Doss got through a few versions before we got hierarchical disc structure in fact the plus three was the first outing for this filing system for acon and later they'd shove it in their BBC master and an updated version would appear in their later archimedia series of machines there was also an incredibly large third party Hardware manufacturing scene as well for the electron most of which seem to be geared around and adding back in the ports and Facilities into the electron that didn't make it from the BBC which meant if you had one of those things that gave you the ports you missing from the be then you could suddenly start adding BBC add-on Hardware to your acor electron like a hard disk or a network interface Acorn also did create some Hardware to add-on to the electron with BT that were aimed purely at the business market so there's an add-on for the electron that adds modem and other things in that would package together to become what was known as the inter Flora terminal used by the network of Flores to send orders between the machines there was also a Merlin branded terminal that BT would ship at this again is an electron with a modem box kind of bundled on the back that let it get stock information Etc there were a number of banks that would have them just out on the floor so customers could use them now let's quickly have a look at the whole game thing cuz I said I'd come back to it and it does have quite a decent games Library most of them are games that were also available on the BBC as it could play a lot of the BBC's games just straight out the box and a few needed modifying for the electron and that includes quite sophisticated games like Elite but in order to hit that price point the electron does have some performance issues it can only get into its own memory four bits at a time so it takes though it takes two CPU cycles for the CPU to actually read a bite from memory from ROM it can do it in one CPU cycle so the OS the basic interpreter etc those things do tend to run faster than things just running purely from the electron RAM and that did hurt its performance as a games machine but given that the 6502 was clocked at 2 MHz it didn't hurt it that much Graphics wise it had a number of resolutions that it could run at some fairly High resolutions for the time at two or four colors and then some lower resolution modes that could run at 16 colors well sort of 16 colors because a number of the colors are flashing combinations of two of the other colors it can be used as like a cheap sprite animation honestly I don't think think this was a particularly great idea but there we go and we even have a sound chip too all in all the electron is a pretty good compromise on trying to get a good home computer at a budget price point and certainly from a computer standpoint the tradeoffs made in the electron were a better set of tradeoffs than those made in the Spectrum trading some performance in terms of memory bandwidth for the CPU was a better tradeoff for the user experience than for example the keyboard tradeoff in the Spectrum the losing of modes 7 teletex was again a better tradeoff than the attribut mode color Clash thing in the Spectrum and this is why I put the acorn electron at number four and the Spectrum at number five and at number three we have the CPC 464 the first computer in this list to be sold by the foot the poor CPC never seems to quite get the love from the Retro community that it deserves and I think because in some circles it's seen as a little bit of a soulless machine and I think that's because it was developed by amstrad a company that made an awful lot of things so to it the CPC was just another product and that seems particularly true of it's rather well-known or at least in the UK managing director cotney Geer Alan sugar all the other machines in this list so far have all been from companies set up by people who are well nerdy AF and really liked computers so I think that's why some people might be surprised to discover this listed at number three as they may not ever have given the CPC much F now time period wise the CPC just about makes it in being released in 1984 so it just sneaks in before our 85 cut off but that slightly lat to datee did give amstrad the chance to see what else was in the market and Target their machine into where they saw a gap and that was they were going to build a machine that could be used as a games machine but also for people doing business stuff at home hence we get a fairly competent actual computer again with a quick look at the thing we get a pretty reasonable keyboard a built-in cassette drive so we don't have to worry about obtaining our own one and twiddling around with vault volume knobs and the likes its only output display is the monitor Port yep it came with its own monitor so you didn't have to worry about sticking a UHF modulator in here or composite out we have ourselves a joystick port a printer port and an expansion port and for a first from our machine's listed so far we actually have an audio output that's not for the tape but gives us somewhere we can plug in external speakers to our sound chip we have ourselves a z80 processor and 64k of memory which is the most amount of memory in any the machines we've covered so far Graphics Wise It's also the most capable machine we've referenced yet as we have a low resolution mode with 16 colors chosen from pallet of 27 a medium resolution mode with four colors and a higher resolution mode with two colors and soundwise we have a general instrument ay3 8912 zbc was a pretty good games machine but we're looking at it as a computer and from that point of view we have a pretty decent basic implementation in here locomotive basic which has a lot similarities to BBC basic and that's because it is sort of related acor did start to get other companies to implement BBC basic for it running on other processors than the one they shipped in the BBC micro and locomotive developed something called malard basic for acorn and that was a version of BBC basic for a z80 CPU that you could run under CPM and the version of locomotive basic that shipped with the CPC well that was based on malard basic so we have ourselves a pretty decent development environment we also have an operating system available for the machine in the form of AMS Doss very early into the cpc's life amstrad also got out a disc drive for the system and with that disc drive they shipped CPM so this is the first machine on our list where CPM is our manufacturer supported thing and is a big part of why this machine is at position number three because thanks to CPM there's an entire pleora of applications utilities development tools all available for this platform hence it's a very good machine to be a computer cuz we can do all these things with it that we can't so easily with the others because we have the whole library of cpms programs and utilities available to it now admittedly by 84 CPM was on the decline a little bit as MS DOS had started to Eclipse it in the the business space But as a home computer this is still a very powerful thing to have and hence position number three on the list I bet you're all wondering which machine's going to get number two well it's the Commodore 64 now the c64 is best known as a games machine and it is extremely well suited to being a games machine it has the best graphics and sound of any of the machines we've listed so far it has 16 color display drawing from a palette of 16 colors and I was surprised to discover that only one of those colors is brown it's also the first machine here to have Hardware Sprites it sound chip the Sid is one of the best regarded sound chips of any home computer of that period and there is a good reason for that it's powered by a 6502 or a variant of it pled at 1 MHz and it has unsurprisingly 64k of ram hence the name of the machine in terms of physical machine we've got a pretty reasonable keyboard a cassette interface a Serial interface which can be used either for printers or discs we also have a cartridge lot which can also be used as like an expansion Port as well so what out of all these things makes this machine a really good computer and not just a really good games machine and the answer to that I'm afraid is going to be a little bit more woolly than all the other definitions I've given you so far because the reason to this outside its graphics and sound capabilities come much more to do with the ecosystem around it than the machine itself because it's all just so darn well in the US it means that for pretty much everything you want to do computer-wise with the c64 you can do it because someone's either written the software to do it or created some Hardware add-on for it so that you can do it without any computing task you want to have happen you can make happen with the c64 without having to know write it yourself but the machine does come with a whole bunch of built-in inherent limitations that really as a user bite you in the ass and c64 owners didn't seem to really mind this stuff too much but it's definitely what's keeping this machine off the top spot let's take its operating system for example it doesn't really have one it's got a basic interpreter and again a couple of lowlevel binary functions in it's Cur on for a machine that's all about graphics and sound amazingly its basic language has no support for either Graphics or sound yet if you want to make use of those Hardware Sprites in basic where you're just going to be poking values into RAM or if you want to display anything that's not a character on screen poking values into RAM yeah this thing ships with the same version of basic and I mean literally the same version that the Commodore pet shipped with you know the machine that doesn't do Graphics or sound and that's all because Jack J didn't want have to pay Microsoft any more money but you can see other ways that this bites the c64 in the postera for example let's have a look at how we use its hilariously awful floppy drive and don't worry I am coming back for that floppy Drive say you want to get a list of the files that are stored on your floppy disc normally with a regular operating system you just you know list the files oh no no not on a c64 on a c64 you tell the basic interpreter to go load a basic file off the serial Port that we've got the floppy Drive plugged into you don't tell it the file name and it returns back to you a basic listing that has a list of the files that are stored on the disc yep for people who have not used the Commodore 64 before let that one sink in I know many of you wondering the how the hell is this number two don't worry I will screwing back to that now before you probably notice me say and load it from the serial port cuz of course the floppy Drive is plugged into the serial Port which makes this the most singular slowest floppy driver all the floppy drivers we've mentioned today now you may be wondering why did they just not put a disc controller on the c64 well again it said that they could use stuff from the pet cuz that's how the pet floppy Drive worked so you can connect pet floppy drives up to your c64 I mean it was substantially larger than the c64 but you could plug them in fortunately Commodore did make a reasonably sized floppy disc drive for the c64 but it had to work the same way as the pets one did and again for the non 64 owners way you hear how the floppy Drive works the floppy drive is not a floppy Drive in the sense that we think of it for any other of the 8 bit machines from this era the floppy Drive is actually a separate computer yep inside the commodore's floppy Drive Unit is a 6502 microprocessor memory and the drive control that they should have put inside the Commodore 64 and the serial interface and a ROM containing the software that it boots to allow it to be a floppy drive so this is how you end up with an incredibly expensive and yet incredibly slow floppy disc system on the Commodore system 64 now c64 owners will be bouncing up and down wondering why I've not mentioned fast load yet and now to the point where I'm going to mention it so you could make this whole situation less sucky and things like the Epic fast load are example of this sort of thing in use and these fast load systems they essentially replace the software running inside your floppy drive because the floppy Drive is a computer so we can do that right and some of these utilities should give you about 4 kilobits a second more notice I said bits not but right so so this is a significant speed up for the c64 but compared to everyone else's disc subsystem it's still slow as balls now you'd think these sorts of thing would have pushed the c64 further down this list but the simple ubiquity of the machine meant that for all these problems there are solutions there are workarounds and some of these Solutions and workarounds actually turn this into a really good computer experience for those wanting to use it as a computer and less of a games machine for example got no oper ating system well GEOS is a thing we have a GUI based operating system we can run on our Commodore 64 the floppy Drive systems rubbish well there's work around some things for that too we even end up with Hardware accelerators for this thing so we can substantially turbocharge the thing if we were just looking at the machine in isolation no the c64 would not be in position number two here but I did say at the beginning that we weren't going to look at these things in isolation because these machines are never used in isolation so the ecosystem around it m in the case of the c64 it's the ecosystem that got it to position number two so the big question remains which computer got the top spot which one is number one if this list does actually get covered on this week in retro what will Dave's reaction be have I built up the attenion sufficiently as thetical format demands dramatic drum roll it's the BBC micro which the people who regularly watch my channel this may come as no surprise also maybe having the acor electron at position number four and having not mentioned his bigger brother yet it's probably a bit of a clue now for those of you not familiar with the BBC and that's probably mostly my American viewers it's an 8 bit micro made by Acorn that was basically ubiquitous inside schools in the UK but also was aimed at the Home Market as well and sold reasonably well into that space admittedly reasonably well to slightly well off middle class people as working classes had the acor electron I know my place ooh first tww3 reference for this video so let's get straight to the why the top spot then now let's start with the BBC micro is not built for games it never was it does run games and it has a lot of really good games and no one should die of shock that this is the platform that Elite started on but its creators were not thinking about let's get a home gaming machine together they started off by trying to create a computer for the scientific lab World which is what most their previous machines had been but they had realized that there was a wider market for computers developing for the home and of course the BBC was looking for a machine so their proton machine was tweaked to match the specs of what the BBC were looking for a machine that could be used in schools and the home and this gave rise to a really good computer I mean computer for doing Computing stuff first up it has the best keyboard of any of the machines here and also the most robust keyboard of any of the machines here I mean this thing can survive contact with a child who's just down the sherbet Fountain is experiencing a pure sugar high and has now decided the keyboard as the computer in front of him has to Die the Fury with which a 5-year-old ktip who's just being told he's doing a Maths game rather than a game is a sight to behold but the BBC's keyboard could take that kind of a pounding and yet still be a good typing experience in terms of ports and this is going to be a long list it does seem to have one for pretty much every occasion we have a UHF out so you can plug it into a TV we have a monochrome composite video signal there's an RGB port for connecting to proper monitors there is an rs232 serial Port there's the cassette Port which again like the electron has all the signals including tape stop start all on the one port we have the analog Port which many refer to as the joystick Port because that is where you put the joystick but this thing basically an analog to digital converter that will convert any analog signals that we can put into it within its voltage and current limits on the underneath yes we have connectors on the underneath the machine we have the disc drive Port which you can use to connect any shoe guard standard disc Tri we have the parallel printer port the user Port the 1 MHz bus Port which you can think of as like the expansion port on all the other machines we've looked at so far and finally the tube Port which we're very much going to come back to later there is also a power output Port underneath here which is intended to be used to power your floppy Drive which provides two 5vt and 112 volt output as brought up before the machine un surprisingly ships for BBC basic which is basically the best basic that was available for the time and in fact also one of the most rapid basic implementations for the time at least on the 6502 which is what's in this machine clocked at 2 mahz which makes this a pretty rapid machine for the time it also doesn't have any weird memory contention things going on like in the acorn electron guess we can read all eight bits from Ram in one cycle there's also no weird bus contention thing going on between the video stuff and the CPU as really we clock the machine at 4 MHz so it's 4 MHz capable memory it's just on one clock tick the CPU gets access to the memory on the next clock tick it's the video chips turn which means CPU performance- wise we're about twice that to the comment 64 it's other key Advantage for being you know an actual computer computer is that it has an operating system like a real proper one now I covered this talking about the acorn electron so I'm going to try and not recover all the same ground here but it is easy to show off some of the features with the BBC than it was with the electron so if we open the machine up there are a number of rum slots in there where we can have our multiple filing system support ROMs so we can have a DFS ROM for doing the dis filing system there was also a ROM available so you could read m dos floppies but the one I'm going to highlight is the NFS ROM for the network filing system because yes you could genuinely Network bbcs together I don't just mean link it to another machine with a Serial port and transfer some files around although there was an option to do that I mean like a genuine Lan Acorn had something called echonet which assuming you had all the ic's fitted in the machine meant your BBC could be part of a lan and there was a whole file and print service available so you could store files on a remote machine but it's not just just file and print as I said it's a proper landan with network addresses station addresses broadcast unicast thus it could do a lot more than just basic file and print I mean there were countless services available for it one BBC could even remote control another BBC or just capture its screen or send it notifications you could use eanet to allow one BBC to live debug code that was running on another BBC and while eonnet was by and large there for the schulls market I do know people who back in the day used it at home one example was a developer who would use one BBC to debug the code he was running on another BBC another I know his company had put in BT killer stream line is an x21 lease line had bought themselves an eanet killer stream Bridge which let him connect his home eanet network which admittedly just had the one machine in the bridge on it to the University's echonet Network which meant he was able to work at home just like he was at the University and in fact thanks to some x25 Gateway software the university had running on their eonnet Network he was in fact able to log into mainframes and other large computers in a number of different universities across the country or without using a modem the BBC had basically every development language Under the Sun available for it a lot of them provided by Acorn soft acor inhouse software development arm which meant you could just install various language ROMs into your BBC and have it boot up into say ISO Pascal for example now if we get back to the graphics for a second you do have all the same Graphics modes we mentioned mentioned with the acor electron as well as this mode 7 teletex thing I mentioned earlier but this meant the BBC was also able to connect up to services like prestel that relied on view data which is basically the teletex graphic and control set just running over a modem rather than coming in with your TV signal it's the same thing that miniel used as well and this meant for a home computer you could dial into a number of official government services banking services all from home with a simple addition of a modem that you plugged into the rs232 Port now it's not the only platform that could access this but it was certainly one of the easiest ones to do it from and speaking of teletex there was also from acor a teletext adapter that you could plug into the 1 MHz bus Which allowed you to get teletext directly to your BBC but it also had another neat trick up its leeve with regards to the teletex system and that's something called tsoft the BBC as in the broadcaster rather than the computer would embed software into its teletech surface so software could be shipped over the air to remote machines with the teletext adapter allowing you to download it and store it on say a cassette or a floppy Discord you know whatever storage you got attached to your BBC all as part of a service called tsoft the sheer range of things you could do with a BBC and the software available for it in the add-ons helps to make the BBC or at least as far as I'm concerned the best computer for the home but there's one last thing I want to talk about with the BBC that I think will convince the unconvinced among you and that's that tube Port I mentioned earlier the tube Port lets you add a second processor to the BBC micro so for example a second 6502 now this doesn't do multi-processing like you might think of now inside your machine but it does let the BBC do something very special so if we take this second 6502 to start with when connected that gives you a processor running at 3 MHz with 64 KF memory now you may be thinking so what we now have a slightly more powerful BBC micro well it's a lot more clever than that because the processor inside the BBC is not Switched Off and out of use that's now in charge of running all your I/O while your second processor is just running the application code you want to run so a fun example of watching this running at home is being able to run tubete the single best version of elite out there for the 8bit micros but your second processor does not have to be a 6502 it can for example be a z80 and when it's a z80 the OS when it starts up will select whichever language ROM zat compatible and that's the one that will start up so for example the Z8 version of BBC basic of course now it's got a z8c CPU well you can just run CPM so this makes the BBC the second machine in our list that can officially run CPM in a way that's supported by the manufacturer of course at this point cpms may be getting a little bit dated so there was a 186 and 286 second CPU available and that let your BBC become a PC yet it came bundled with digital researches dust and even had the gem desktop environment but we're still not done with second CPUs from acor as we had one based on an NCR chip which let us run an operating system called Panos which frankly is not very good but probably the most famous of its second CPUs was the arm microprocessor now the really clever bit of the tube with the second processor is this is all supported in its operating system you're not installing any weird packs of ROMs or anything like that you just connect up the second processor and the OS understands how to boot up with any second CPU and this has meant these days we've seen a development called P tube direct which is essentially a Raspberry Pi connected up to the tube Port of the BBC with a bit of software on the Raspberry Pi that lets it pretend to be all the second processors that the BBC ever had or just lets the BBC talk to the native arm 7 CPU that's on the Raspberry Pi which makes this the only machine on our list today where you can run Quake 2 and not have to modify your BBC you just connect up your arm 7 CPU and everything in the BBC just works the way it was initially designed to as the idea was always there that you could connect up increasingly more powerful processors to your BBC now I will say a second CPU is not something everyone bought for their BBC it was a minority of people that bought it but no other home computer had this kind of capability and I do know of people who at the time had second processors for their BBC largely the z81 as they had a need to run CPM I hope you've enjoyed this listicle as much as I've enjoyed making it and I promise my cell motivation was not to try and get this on this week in retro although if any of you want to pop onto their subreddit and tell them about it cuz that's how they find things you know feel free cuz it'll amuse the hell out of me if this thing does actually get mentioned on there but I would like to say thank you very much for watching I'd also like to say a thank you to Lee for more fun making it as he was able to sort me out with some Boll footage of the correct versions of certain machines if you want to jump in the comments and give your list then feel free I'm looking forward to reading some of them although given the subject I probably should say play nice with each other everyone if you really enjoyed the video and you would like YouTube to know that fact there is a button to indicate it and if you really really liked the video and would like to help the channel out please feel free to subscribe cuz it really does help the algorithm know that someone vaguely cares and so it might want to mention this video to other people right I'm have to go curl up in a bucket of lmip I think

2024-12-28 11:32

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