Per The Register's extended article celebrating the Spectrum's birthday yesterday, there was more than a kilobyte of spare space in the ROM but they intended to put the Microdrive stuff in there before shipping. In the event it wasn't ready in time and the machine sold too well for the intended free ROM upgrade to make economic sense.
So, with hindsight: • no flash attribute (ideally starting on the Spectrum, but at least in Mode 2); • a graphics mode that uses the Mode 2 amount of data for 128 non-attributed pixels per line; • hardware scrolling. Hooray for hindsight! On 24 April 2012 16:45, James R Curry <[email protected]> wrote: > Given that, at least going from my memory, there was space to spare in the > original ZX Spectrum ROM, the flashing cursor in Spectrum BASIC could have > quite easily been implemented with interrupts and each character square > could have had complete freedom to pick any two of sixteen colours. > > But what do they say about hindsight? > > > On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Ian Collier <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 04:16:28PM -0700, Thomas Harte wrote: >> > I'm unsure why they >> > decided to go bright + flash in the Spectrum, to be honest. Was >> > flashing a must have feature of the 1982 computer market? >> >> No but you forget one thing... the cursor. :-) >> >> imc > > > > > -- > James R Curry > [email protected]
