Meet the Machine
Spectrum · Machine
What the Spectrum was, what it could not do, and why that shaped everything written for it.
5 units
What this is
A briefing, not a course. Before you write anything for the Spectrum — in BASIC, in assembly, in anything — it helps to know what the machine was and what it couldn’t do. That’s all this is.
You won’t write a line of code here. You’ll meet a machine that had sixteen colours but could only show two in any eight-by-eight square, a speaker that could be on or off and nothing in between, and 48K to hold your program, your data and the screen at once.
Why the limits come first
Every one of those limits shows up later as a decision someone had to make. The reason Spectrum games have that particular look — the colour bleeding at the edges of a sprite — isn’t taste. It’s the attribute file. The reason the music sounds the way it does isn’t ambition. It’s one bit.
Meet those constraints now and the rest of the course stops being a list of rules. It becomes a set of consequences.
Who it’s for
Anyone heading for the Spectrum, whichever language you’re going to use. This briefing feeds Meet BASIC and the assembly track alike — the hardware is the same either way, so it’s taught once.
New to programming entirely? The Basics is there if you want it. Nothing here assumes it, and neither Spectrum track requires it.