I feel very old now, Speccy is 30yrs old, I got all misty eyed today reading various articles about it. My fondest memories are of through the wall and manic miner games which I played with my uncle. Many great games were published for this computer and each and every one was different and interesting. Although the graphics was bad, they had spirit I can only find in Indie games and certain GOGs ;)
Share your experiences with ZX80 & 81 here good people of these forums :D

I was just about to start a thread about this. Incredible, isn't it? Makes me feel old, but also very, very proud that I've been there to experience it.

The ZX Spectrum helped very much in making me who I am today. It showed me the beauty of gaming, made me understand how computers worked and probably ruined my eyesight, too. And I honestly admit I cannot watch this without getting tears in my eyes.

If you want to celebrate with us dinosaurs today, the best shrine dedicated to the Speccy on the net is the World of Spectrum; just grab an emulator (I prefer right here in the archive. [url=http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002589]are [url=http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0009366]tips [url=http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004549]get [url=http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002351]started.

Thank you, Sir Clive, for everything.

I still have some of my original Speccy games somewhere. Mostly Level 9 adventures and the Ultimate games. And Fairlight, which was awesome.

Also, for some reason I feel the sudden urge to tell people to get off my lawn. And I don't even have a lawn :P

One guy from my dad's work, a proper wizard with electronics, sometime in the early nineties took my Spectrum and rebuilt it into an awesome desktop computer with a 5 1/4" floppy drive running TR-DOS which pretty much uses the original Speccy as a keyboard. And it actually still works! The power switch is a bit wonky, but surprisingly enough, the drive works and the floppies are still readable. Caused a bit of a nostalgia overload when I fired up Jumping Jack on that.

Just before I tried powering it up, my wife half-jokingly said that if it's broken, we can just throw it away. She claims I've never looked at her with so much anger in my eyes ever before or since. And I sort of believe that.

EDIT: Also, this sound is burned into my brain.

I just realized that you can actually hook your audio out cable to spectrum and load up manic miner oO
My wife only rolls eyes when I bring in old hardware to the house, she already knows that threats to dump it all to garbage bring out the murderer in me so she never goes down that road lol XD

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum.
I wasted months of my life on games like Lords of Midnight, Doomdark's Revenge and Elite.

I still pull my rubber-keyed 48K bastard out from time to time.

Elite
Mercenary
Tau Ceti
Tau Ceti 2 : Academy

Gods, but the HOURS and WEEKS and MONTHS I put into them over the years!!

<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

My +3 died years ago ; Well, technically, the Amstrad Spectrum +3 with the Amstrad 3" drive that died, and the audio socket snapped off, and was repaired too many times :(

Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach tought me how to map!

I had Tir Na Nog!
I absolutely HATED it!!

What was that similar game, on a space station, or something....that one too!

Very fond memories of the rubber specy. So many great games and fun. Happy Birthday you old rubber keyboard bundle of fun.

Marsport I think. I completed that one, what a pain it was. Never quite did the other two though

When the cool kids were out burning rubber, I was burning the rubber on my Spectrum keyboard.

Fun little tidbit some of you might get a chuckle out of. Apologies if it's just old news: http://www.therwp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=48139

I never owned a Spectrum, and I'm happy I went for the C64 instead, but there were some really great games that originated on the Spectrum platform and for that it deserves to be remembered.

(btw, I owned Tir Na Nog too, never understood a thing though)