The British PCs were actually rather poor. The Commodore 64 was the second best selling computer in Britain during the 1980s. The Sinclair Spectrum was just cheap which was why it sold more but it was pretty poor.
All computers of the 1980s were pretty poor, but that misses the point. The Spectrum was less than half the price of a Commodore 64. It sold to households and children that couldn’t have afforded or thought about buying anything more expensive and had a profound impact on computer literacy
>"You could buy a Spectrum at WH Smith's for £125, take it home -- it would take you two or three weeks to go through the programming manual, if you're that way inclined," Goodwins said.
"Then start digging into the machine. You could, within two or three months, be writing little games that were actually pretty good, and in six months you could have something that was as good as the rest of the market. By yourself. While going to school. Kaboom! This is where the UK game industry came from."
> This industry took off after the release of the ZX Spectrum in 1982: by the end of 1983 there were more than 450 companies selling video games on cassette compared to 95 the year before. An estimated 10,000 to 50,000 youth, mostly male, were making games out of their homes at this time based on advertisements for games in popular magazines. The growth of video games in the UK during this period was comparable to the punk subculture, fueled by young people making money from their games.
>The Spectrum was less than half the price of a Commodore 64
not proportionally less to what you received, or rather didnt receive: rubber dead fish keyboard substitute, color clash, pc speaker beeps, no joystick ports, no floppy support, less ram, abysmal hardware quality (build using defective ram, failing ferranti ulas etc)
>by the end of 1983 there were more than 450 companies selling video games on cassette compared to 95 the year before
>Hohenberg later noted that after the 1983 Christmas season, Electron deliveries had increased to meet a demand that was no longer there, with the market having "completely dried up"
>1985, but this offering was postponed, ostensibly due to turmoil in the microcomputer industry, with Acorn Computers undergoing refinancing, and other companies such as Sinclair's competitor Oric and distributor Prism entering receivership.
Everything was crashing down and the only two winners were Amstrad (rock bottom prices and good grip on manufacturing cost) and Commodore (terrible management but great product).
The BBC Micro and Acorn Archimedes were very sophisticated -- with the Archimedes being lauded as more powerful than the Amiga.
The ZX Spectrum was garbage in comparison with some of these other machines, but it was much, much cheaper, and enabled British people in lower income brackets to get involved with computing at home than would otherwise have been able to. There's a vibe to the Spectrum scene that's as British as meat pie and Queen Elizabeth -- of doing a lot with a little, and of being able to obtain cheap games for your cheap computer, or even write your own, that look grotty compared to the posh kids' computers but are still fun.
I don't think "garbage" is appropriate. Yes, the spectrum definitely didn't have the expandability or build quality of the BBC, but the only people who cared about that at my school were those who owned BBC Micros (one of which was a good friend at school). Most of us were happy with our cheap speccies because they meant we were able to have computers, play games and write software.
Don't get me wrong, there was no comparison in the hardware - the keyboard was poor, there was next to no expansion capacity compared to the BBC, and there wasn't the graphics or sound quality. But it didn't matter for the most part, and while the BBC had some quality games (Acornsoft's versions of arcade games and Frak! spring to mind), the games we cared about were as good on the spectrum if not better (Manic Miner springs to mind). No-one talked about the issues in the way they do now. Only the kids with C64s and BBCs cared about the colour clash issue with the spectrum's colour attributes. It's clearly visible in games like Jet Pac, but no-one cared. We were living the dream, and there's a reason why I've got a spectrum in the house to this day!
Compared to other systems of its era, the ZX Spectrum is positively rinky-dink. But that quality is part of its charm, its low price enabled a scene to flourish, and that scene that emerged around it embellished that charm. That's what I was getting at.
The existence of Elite and Driller running on such limited hardware at all is a product of true genius. Anyone decrying the Speccy doesn’t understand the impact of the price differential on its utility and popularity. No-one I knew had a BBC Micro (although they were in our schools).
3.5x faster CPU than the C64, which showed in any 3D game, a way better BASIC graphics programming experience, almost all of the same games - with caveats of gaudy colour and shit sound. For half the price of a C64, it wasn't "poor".
Z80 instructions take, on average, about 3 times more clock cycles to execute compared to the 6502 so a 3.5 Mhz Z80 and a 1 MHz 6502 are about the same speed.
This gets repeated a lot by C64 fan boys and yet solid fill 3d games were playable on the Spectrum and not on the C64 because the C64 processor was dog slow.
Weird. It's almost like people have taken an extreme edge case example and tried to extrapolate it to the general or real world case.
Real world performance pegs a 6502 as the equivalent of a Z80A running at twice the speed, not 3.5 times.
It's a rough estimate based on clock cycles. The Z80 instructions take between 4 and 23 cycles to execute, with an average of about 13 cycles. The 6502 instructions take between 2 and 7 cycles with an average of about 4, thus the difference of about 13 / 4 = 3 times more cycles. It doesn't take into account how much is being done by each instruction or memory timing, etc.
Another reason the 6502 is faster is it was designed to utilize the bus on every other clock cycle, leaving the other cycles for a co-processor such as a video chip to read memory without impacting the speed of the processor. The C64 (1 MHz w/2 MHz RAM) and BBC Micro (2 MHz w/4 MHz RAM) both used this feature. The Atari 800 didn't and lost from 10% to 47% of its processor cycles to the video chip.
The Z80 also has more addressing modes, which speed things up. It depends on what type of computing you are doing. For most games, the 6502 @ 1 MHz is faster than the Z80 @ 3 MHz, but at maths, the Z80 is faster.
I see this repeated often, but if you load any 3D game side-by-side on C64 vs Spectrum, the Spectrum is significantly faster. I don't know why, but can only guess there must be optimisations availing more of the Z80's Mhz vs the 6502's.
It's a rough estimate based on clock cycles. The Z80 instructions take between 4 and 23 cycles to execute, with an average of about 13 cycles. The 6502 instructions take between 2 and 7 cycles with an average of about 4, thus the difference of about 13 / 4 = 3 times more cycles. It doesn't take into account how much is being done by each instruction or memory timing, etc.
Another reason the 6502 is faster is it was designed to utilize the bus on every other clock cycle, leaving the other cycles for a co-processor such as a video chip to read memory without impacting the speed of the processor. The C64 (1 MHz w/2 MHz RAM) and BBC Micro (2 MHz w/4 MHz RAM) both used this feature. The Atari 800 didn't and lost from 10% to 47% of its processor cycles to the video chip.
The Z80 also has more addressing modes, which speed things up. It depends on what type of computing you are doing. For most games, the 6502 @ 1 MHz is faster than the Z80 @ 3 MHz, but at maths, the Z80 is faster.
See the stack overflow answer in my sibling comment - there's a bunch of reasons. One is that the Z80 has a bunch more registers than the 6502, another is that the famed fractional cycle times of the 6502 compared to the z80 are based on highly synthetic benchmarks / cherry picked individual instruction comparisons rather than real world use cases.
Is Elite an ok comparison for you? Its ~6fps on C64 and ~8fps on Spectrum. Technically you are correct, Spectrum is whole 25% faster. Practically both are borderline playable.
This is true up to a point, but the spectrum was much more popular at my school than the "commie" 64,precisely because it was cheaper, and there were a lot more games available for it.
Even the spectrum was an expensive item for a single parent family in the early 80s. I have no idea how my mum afforded to get me one, but she did, and I'm thankful for it to this day as while I'm not a full time programmer, computer skills I gained programming my spectrum left me in good standing for my entire working life in multiple areas.
