He is drinking from the INQwell when he should be drinking beer - Anonymiser
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The Spectrum 48k is reborn
YOUTHFUL MEMORIES of early computer game enjoyment are about to be shattered with the re-release of the Spectrum 48k, or at least something very much like it.
Any gamers that made their bones in the early 1980s are likely to have done so, at least at home, on a Speccy, and memories of those games will be fond in those minds.
However, how well they stand up against these memories remains to be seen, as for the first time, anyone - without an emulator - will be able to play them at home. Again. On the telly.
It is unlikely that the full Spectrum experience will be replicated as ten minute load times with screechy soundtracks are no longer the norm, but according to a report on the Daily Telegraph website, the rest will be fairly similar.
The Telegraph reports that games developer Elite is getting ready to launch a Spectrum 48k replica in 2012, the thirtieth anniversary of the home computing legend.
Although the machine looks like the original Spectrum, it is in fact just a Bluetooth keyboard, but then it always really was just a keyboard. Details other than that though, were few and far between.
Elite has never really been out of the games business since it launched the eponymous Elite game for home computers and since then has worked in mobile games development.
Most recently it announced that it had released a pack of genuine Spectrum classics, including Monty on the Run for Ithing devices. Some thirty-six other titles, including Manic Miner, are also available. µ
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Yes, Elite was an Acornsoft game, so the tired "eponymous" term is inappropriate here (as opposed to just being overused - maybe it's on the journalists' must-use list, or incurs some kind of Scrabble score-like fee if included in an article, or something).
And yes, this is just an excuse for one of the few companies who managed to survive from that era (or maybe just the brand, long since bought by some behemoth) to milk those disappointing Spectrum games where the action barely resembled the original arcade version of whichever "licence" or "franchise" was being pushed at the punter, let alone the cover art.
If this is running on an iPhone then clearly emulation must still be involved.
"Elite" was the trading game by David Braben and Ian Bell ... see elite.frontier.co.uk & www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/
Elite - the company - where responsible for the licensed games Blue Thunder, Airwolf, the weirdly named Kokotoni Wilf .. and quite a few others.
Elite Systems did make some good games, but Elite the famous space game was by Acornsoft and Frontier.