Outrun ZX SPECTRUM 128k Loading Sequence

[fo0kinell]

'Sorry about sound quality.' heheh.. it's the best bit!

The loading sound at 1:40 was a real blast from the past.. I always thought it sounded like a little tune! I didn't get any in-game music though on the 48k version. you had to play the audio tape that came with it - with the original arcade music on. load up game.. swap the tape.. play the music, swap the tape, load stage, swap the tape, play the music.. heheh.. awesome. :)

[Onotoleu]

у мну 48к был 

[uaujuan]

ocho horas cargando para esa basura.... XD

[markrobinson1977]

Kempston interface plugged in = check!

[bennyc333]

Burrr beep burrr beep crackle. Reminds me of hours and hours of my childhood. Sat in front of the Speccy waiting for games to load. Only for the load to fail seconds before the end. Don't make computer games like they used to :-)

[Firedragon41520]

SEIZURE ALERT!!!!

[TheRoyalDin]

The loading screens graphics would always be better than the game ones ... Never mind still loved these games :-)

[HalfmanhalfTwig]

there's was something magical about the loading of spectrum games, the colours the sounds, the moment the picture appears and you saw the countdown timer, nothing beats it. magical

[eleuterio4545]

fuck off

[commodore64fan]

wow the spectrum sucked major ass commodore64 kicked it's ass in everything sound graphics everything spectrum worst computer ever!

[rainxxxx]

@commodore64fan bullshit, speccy used to kick c64's ass im many ways"

[rafgc1982]

@commodore64fan reading such comments makes me hold back to tell i am a C64 user

[spaceman1979]

Good things come to those who wait :)

[Daghead]

I'd rather watch the zx load than play that game. blegh!

[drkamilz]

PRESS PLAY, bet you thought game will begin :)

[seancoppinger]

I remember getting this game and at the same time getting a taped version of the arcade soundtrack with "Your Sinclair" magazine.. magic daze :D

[jarrod679]

they were they days..... It used to seem like longer load times back in the day.

[Renew3D]

Being able to store a game in a simple TAPE was amazing enough for me as a kid.

[krazislav]

Ahhh, I love this sound.

[malad1]

Thing is you could turn it down if you wanted. Who did though? Inspired the rave music if you ask me.

[cerebrobro1]

R.I.P headphone users =(

[tubumu]

Terebly annoying!

[pwnageking5]

imagine if we had to go through this shit with today's consoles?

[Gigloronosonophonica]

Im addicted to this sound.

[Malirovinus]

LOVE IT Brings back memories man

[g3n3r4l]

que recuerdos... todabia me acuerdo que en españa salio la version de cinta con el pack 6 en 1... con el mitico GAME OVER.... ahi nacieron las primeras copias pirata... grabando en las minicadenas de musica las cintas.... y pasandola a los colegas....

jajajajjaa que recuerdos... GRACIAS POR SUBIR EL VIDEO... por unos minutos... he vuelto a ser niño....

[classicgamesplayer]

I had the 48k version and tried with much frustration to load 128k games as i could never find the 48k ones, and most of the time get through all the loading screen only to find the dam thing had not loaded after all.

used to buy mine from woolworths for about £1.50 to £2.00 with my pocket money of £2.00 a week that meant if it did not work i would have no sweets as well.

[paulisthebest3uk]

@classicgamesplayer Do you remember when BOOTS of all places used to sell games lol?

[HardWarUK]

@paulisthebest3uk Do you remember all the INDEPENDENT games stores seemingly owned and staffed by gamers?! I worked for one back in the late 80's called Gallery Software - one of the best jobs i ever had!

[whelkboy]

My brothers and I managed to smash the ear jack on our Speccy. Thankfully, we discovered that if we held the cable in just-so for four minutes, we could still load our games. How many eight, ten and eleven year olds have that level of concentration or patience now?

[sirloin3000]

I used to hate waiting for stuff to load as a kid, now i'm using a £800 PC and high speed connection to voluntarily watch 5 minutes of loading screens.

[rainxxxx]

@sirloin3000 lol me and u are deffinetly on the same page!

[StopItGCC]

See that kids? That's what DATA actually sounds like!

[rainxxxx]

@StopItGCC yes kids i hope you watching this and taking notes, this is where it all started from, its like discovering how the universe began, well this is how gaming began, so you better bluddy apreciate it!

[jimmysnailshoes]

Used to love outrun, but the screenshot when loading showed the car in red, but when playing on the speccy the car was green and yellow

And mates in school who had amstrads and commodore 64 always said that outrun was in full colour, oh well spectrums still ruled the 80's, and that kid who had an amiga can go and jump before I care, ha ha

[rainxxxx]

@jimmysnailshoes out run on the speccy had the best grafix, just lack of color, im no fanboy i know what i can see, check it your selfagainst the other 8 bit versions, and the st and amiga!

[janmansde3dede]

@rainxxxx Yep, Im a Commodore fan and sometimes lots of colors is aren't enough to get great graphics,

Lotus esprit turbo challenge on the ZX Spectrum looks 10 times better then the C64 version due to its

high resolution and same goes for switch blade on the C64 and Amstrad CPC.

[yambalaja]

Magic sound of memories ! :)

[SuperNESFreak]

Paint chips and ZX Spectrums...

Your childhoods were special, I'll give you that.

[rb1003]

What made that noise?

[jazzx251]

@rb1003

The cassette tape.

The computer "listened" to this stuff as it was being played in and that's how it knew what the instructions for the program were.

[goncalom90]

who needs lsd when you have spectrum

[Carbon657]

Good old speccy

[Keijz74]

My XT should have had this while waiting for the slow diskdrives to load anything.

[FunkFactoryCrew]

memories

[n136ha]

That was the best thing I have ever seen

[HiDefKing]

I love the loading sound. So back to 1984

[nverrier]

Magic! Takes me back that, at least it didn't crash!

[rainxxxx]

@nverrier mine always used to bluddy crash, i took that dam game back 3 buddy times cos it wouldnt load!

[renegadeplatinum]

Sounds like a 56k modem connecting lol

Didnt know the spectrum made those noises while loading :O (my first machine was an Atari 520 STF in 1989).

Anyway, that was interesting :D

[Snoopy7868]

actually speccy games didnt take that long to load... i mean c mon, 5 mins at most?

[rainxxxx]

@Snoopy7868 what you saw was outrun loading and thats EXACTLY how long it took!

[DJGahann]

That sound really brings back memories :-) I used to own the same Spectrum by the way. They're hard to get by these days, or so it seems.

[bl00sadr]

@bl00sadr Youtube dropped the comment. As I said, I want this played at my funeral as I am lowered into the ground.

[paulisthebest3uk]

@bl00sadr what the games music or the loading sound from this video?

[bl00sadr]

@paulisthebest3uk The loading sequence. You know, as they're loading me into the ground.

[biggyzoom]

I just bought a 128k spectrum +2a with 3 cases full of games, manual and a joystick for £15. I was well chuffed. The first thing that shocked me about the system was the ginormous ac adaptor it uses. It's massive and it weighs a ton. Then of course I find out when I try to play it that the temperamental bastard simply doesn't feel like loading games for me. Asshole.

[paulisthebest3uk]

@biggyzoom yeah good old +2A and its gigantic power supply. I think that was designed like that for the possibilty of future addons, and to help with the +3 (the +3 was a +2a, with a disk drive instead of a tape drive) the +2 was a totally different motherboard and even used a transistor based on a heatsink so was prone to failure. The +2A however used a much more uptodate motherboard, im sure the brick power supply wasnt necessary, but the +2A had things like AScii ports and even midi!

[SPeacock]

@paulisthebest3uk The +2/+3/+2A machines were more of a cross between an Amstrad CPC 464/664/6128 (built-in tape/disk drives) and an Atari ST (expansion and MIDI ports). :)

[seancoppinger]

@biggyzoom you must feeeeeeel the speccy... become one with the speccy.. gently nudge that tape recorder volume into the sweet spot and nail that bitch :D

[rainxxxx]

@seancoppinger yeah but on the plus 2 you needed a screw driver for the inbuilt tape deck!

[1990chrism]

The countdown timer is a good feature and quite useful as well I bet.

[bazfanv2]

The game runs like your stuck in neutral.

[bazfanv2]

Why you sorry for sound quality, it sounds like a spectrum should.

[John845]

Dear god, what the fuck. This has to be the most maddening loading sequence in all of gaming history. It could of been a blank screen for 5 minutes and then it'll load but nooooo, the ZX Spectrum decides to ear rape you instead.

[TheBluesader]

I'd love to see today's children sit there for 2 minutes while their Xboxs or PS3s did this before every game.

There's a reason the original gamers were only the hardest of the hardcore nerds. You had to earn the right, man.

[SamusDrake]

I swear the Spectrum was trying to tell me something when it was loading up a game! Never did find out what it was...  o_O

[Audiosonicity]

Hey Paul, me too, I load games into my ZX only to watch the loading itself, but I don't play so much...I love those stripes, sound and the counter...this is Speedlock 4 encoding scheme, but I prefer the Speedlock 1 with bubbling sounds :-DDD Thanks for the video ;-)

[paulisthebest3uk]

@Audiosonicity The scary part about yesteryear, the machines used to rely on literally AUDIO noise for the data input from a piece of saved software. Thats scary in a way, no wonder they kept getting loading errors, can you imagine the potential for audio cassette depreceiencies, just a bit of fluff on the magentic tape... Fantastic! Love it!

[rainxxxx]

@paulisthebest3uk no wonder this game never loaded for me, must not of liked the +2, i remember the loading sequence to this game, the best game loader of all, i cant beleive the speccy relied on audio noise for the data, how does it do that, and btw, the speccy is the best version of out run from all the 8 and 16 bit computers!

[MrGaragenation]

its gonna crash soon , and it has to load all over again , lol

[jimmyconway]

there was something magical about a spectrum loading

[paulisthebest3uk]

Absolutely! I dont know what the spectrum had over the top of the cpc and the c64, but im with you there!

[factor6]

@paulisthebest3uk Loading on CPC is very similar to Spectrum loading. Original games use border stripes and Speedlock as well. The C64 original games loading was also influenced by ZX Spectrum border stripes. And at last, Atari XL/XE Turbo 2000 system is copied ZX Spectrum loading system (with higher speed) :)

[SPeacock]

@factor6 The music on CPC is similar to 128K Spectrum, too - in fact, it's the same song but usually in a different key (usually a tone lower than the Speccy version). :)

[factor6]

@SPeacock i think it's exactly same tune, but due to different timing of AY chip in CPC and Speccy it sounds different.

[SPeacock]

@factor6 That explains the difference in pitch/tone/key between the two versions.

[MrShnitzelbinks]

@jimmyconway Its sounds like some of todays techno ;)

[paulisthebest3uk]

you know if i actually went the disk drive option of spectrum i prolly wouldnt have liked the game as much! the loading noise i actually enjoy!!

[bub777]

Like a freakin' modem!

[jaycee1980]

@bub777 Modems work on exactly the same principle, just more advanced.

[pmanngw]

What do you think the point could have been of the multicoloured loading bit between 1:10 and 1:32? Clearly it is not actually loading any data here?

[paulisthebest3uk]

With you there, i think when it entred some part of machine code section it had blank noise in a sort of very early protection scheme perhaps? At that part of the tape no data was being loaded ...

[jaycee1980]

@paulisthebest3uk it's a decryption sequence. The noise is used by the decryption somehow. This is part of the well-known Speedlock protection, although it isn't very often used.

[SPeacock]

@paulisthebest3uk At that point, the computer is trying to load encrypted data. The data have to be decrypted in order to be loaded - the multicoloured loading stripes represent the decryption stage. :)

[KieranD212]

make a brew or go to the corner shop while it loads ; ) coincidently corner shops used to sell cheap clones of games lol

[djchronica185]

I remember playing this on the 48K speccy. Actually I correct myself. I recall spending much much longer, waiting for the thing to load than playing it. However I felt really excited at the prospect of paying ziltch to play the speccy version, rather than constantly feed 50p coins into the arcade machine down the local chippy. Nice upload.

[GrandDizzy]

The arcade machine was SLIGHTLY better in terms of graphics and sound. :)

[routchane]

thank you so much, this remind me so many souvenirs

[nooblet911]

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu­uuuu

[nvstewart]

those were the days!

[dannyofthededd]

i often wonder what listening to hours on end of these mad frequencies has done to our generation..then i just look at me and my mates and the results are sadly obvious

[superhooper1983]

I had this game! You gotta love the SFX and tunes on the spectrum!!

I still remember the music to Target Renegade, Nomad and Brat Attack. I know its sad, but always reminds me of being young and the world seemed a whole lot more innocent.

[JayArgonaut]

lol nostalgia - can't believe this was how I used to load and run software back then. Often waiting for the tape to load into memory was longer than the actual gameplay!

[Foebane72]

Ugh! At least the Atari loading sequences were in nice even blocks.

[cosine303]

atari 8 bit.. I owned one as well as a c64 + speccy. that atari 800xl 's loading times were a pile of s*** .. 1 game was like 20 minutes etc =(

[Foebane72]

Yes, unfortunately. And that's if the tape didn't have dropouts... The amount of time I spent waiting for loading as opposed to playing the games. That's why it was best to get a floppy disk drive for the Atari.

[paulisthebest3uk]

By the way dont even think about connecting your audio out on your computer to your real spectrum - it WILL NOT load from the audio from this youtube video - youtube compression is too poor. Trust me!

[ayrshoredotcom]

You can download a .TAP plugin for Winamp, download .TAP games and do it though.

Right now I'm looking at the audio from this video on an oscilloscope and it's NOTHING like what proper spectrum data looks like!

[paulisthebest3uk]

wow cool for analysing it very impressed! liking that getting the old oscilloscope out!!

[dtfageet]

Wow geek.

[paulisthebest3uk]

If you have any loading sequence requests let me know you might be amazed on what i can do... Spectrum, cpc or c64!

[paulisthebest3uk]

also due to copyright laws i have put in on purpose defaults on the audio! its a waste of time!

[Foebane72]

Big deal, Paul. It's not as if it's not available on emulation file sites everywhere!

[vortexlisa]

@paulisthebest3uk Going to sound dumb here but what do you mean by defaults on the audio? o.o;

[bastardtubeuser]

Paulisthebest3uk , could you put up the loading sequence to renegade on the spectrum ? i think that was one of the games that during the data load there was a very audible sequence ?

thanks for the videos, im glad to have found more speccy/c64 reviews from uk residents.

[racefaceec90]

ps had turbo outrun,thought it was pretty good,but not as good as super cycles in my opinion!!!!peace!!!

[racefaceec90]

never had a speccy,had a c64 though.first games that i got were copied versions of suicide express,and bruce lee,inc photocopied covers.ah those were the days!!!

[paulisthebest3uk]

love this version of the game, actually my favourite. Interesting, if you search for FM TOWNS TURBO OUTRUN, you will see a version of turbo outrun that is awesome, definetely best home version of the game! Wish i had an FM TOWNS machine, too rare!!

[Wolfy2k4]

Great review. Keep it up paul! :)

[paulisthebest3uk]

lol it isnt a review!

[Wolfy2k4]

Video, i meant video. lol, sorry, so used to watching your reviews :)

[paulisthebest3uk]

apologies for the brief thing near the beginning at the beginning of the video, as i use hypercam recording software, bloody incredimail notified i had email and slightly overlapped my recorded window lmao!

[cossieboy2007]

paul spectrum  emulator do you use?

[paulisthebest3uk]

If im to do it via emualtor i use ZX32 for windows. However this was done on a real spectrum +2A connected to my machine using a tv tuner device.

[cossieboy2007]

ok thanks paul, my speccy +2 died about 10 years ago and i miss it

[SqueeksoAo]

Then when you think it's over...

[phatmanxxxl]

lol that loading and noise would drive me insane! And just to see a pixelated mess. Im so glad my mama got me an NES instead..

[paulisthebest3uk]

I had a friend in the day who had the NES and was impressed on the instant loading, but wasnt impressed that every game would cost 20 quid plus lol, whereas on my speccy i could get them as cheap as 99 pence lol! Nes is a classic in its own right mind

[goodoledayz]

Just think how much more educated we would have been, or what better jobs we'd have if we'd of concentrated on school work rather than staring wide-eyed at the telly, joystick in hand, fixated with these old games! Not sure that I regret it though.

[Markyboy28]

man that loading screen takes me back :p

[Kebabage]

WARNING! This video contains 80% loading and 20% gameplay! Worth it just for the music though :P

[richardh754]

The C64 version was CRAP!

[falkerhard]

PAUL IS THE BEST!!!! ^^

[madmomentsgo]

this is great to watch this again, i always said that the spectrum version has good graphics for this game, great music as well.

[69moondog69]

What superb music i forgot about this tune amazin or what thumbs up if u agree

[69moondog69]

paul is back with another great installment

[wrestletube1]

We at the realretromaniacs are pro Speccy, C64 and Amstrad, thats why we have the 8-bit wars.

Great video as always, seriously I'll think you'll find yourself at home on the forum.

[paulisthebest3uk]

Its a great game, one of my favourite versions of it too, much better than the c64 and cpc versions. Its in HQ aswell kind of picture wise (click HQ Button), but the sound is just mono and of substandard quality unfortunately.

[paulisthebest3uk]

lol i mean on MY video the latter part about substandard quality regarding the audio! Not the original spectrum game! What i said is slightly misleading! The music score on the spectrum 128k is amazing!

[wrestletube1]

That can be fixed by swapping your emulator to K Live which allows stereo sound playing a game is as simple as drap and drop too.

[cossieboy2007]

awesome video paul!