ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 - My Computer is Better Than Yours
Thursday, 19th May 2011, 15:19

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Ah, the olden days of home computing, when monitors were not only not LCD, but not even monitors. We used to use the house TV, or if you were really lucky a portable in your bedroom. Myself, for many years I had to use a black and white machine for my ZX Spectrum 48k. But at least it was mine, and I could play with it in my own room. Yes, I admit it, in the my-computer-was-better-than-yours wars that filled playgrounds of the 80s, I was firmly on the side of the Speccy.

That isn't to say I didn't like many aspects of the Commodore 64, it had a much better keyboard, at least until Amstrad bought the Spectrums and made the +2, sprite hardware and a really funky sound chip. Even when Sinclair added the advanced audio of the AY-3-8912, some three years after the original machines first arrived, the C64 still sounded better.

Now, many years later, I own a couple of C64s, the C versions with the nicer case, a couple of disk drives for it, oh my original ZX Spectrum 48K, a Spectrum+, a Spectrum+ 128k, a +2 and two +3s in various states of repair. I love both machines dearly, so I feel compelled to revisit that classic debate, which was the better machine? Was this the olden day equivalent of PS3 vs XBox360? Where one machine had the hardware, and the other had the games?

Programming
On this one, the ZX Spectrum won hands down. I can't comment on machine code, since I only ever coded the Z80 of the Speccy here, and I'm sure there was probably little to choose between them, but when it came to BASIC, despite it's bizarre input mechanism of one keyword per button, programming Sinclair's machine was actually very easy. Now admittedly, BASIC as a language is abhorrent, but if you think it looks bad now, you should have seen what it looked like on the Commodore.

The Spectrum's version was written by a company called Nine Tiles Networks Ltd, whilst the Commodore's was licensed from Microsoft. For many that would be reason to declare Sinclair a winner already, but for me it was always the fact that whenever myself and friends sat down to write the next great Football Manager game on our respective machines over the summer holidays, the C64 version always seemed to need POKEs and PEEKs to do anything remotely useful.

The C64 did have more RAM, but because it didn't tokenise any input, everything took up much more room. So all in all, for getting into programming, the Spectrum was where it was at, even more so when the 128k came along with a new ROM and the ability to enter code letter by letter rather than the one button per command method (with about thirty zillion shift key combinations).

Next Page

Posted by Robert John Shepherd