The Spanish ZX Spectrum + 128K by Investrónica

#retro #sinclair #spectrum

This post was previously published in Spanish, in ZonaDePruebas

This computer was designed and released in 1985 by Investrónica, a subsidiary company in the El Corte Inglés group at the time, holding the distribtion rights for the Sinclair products in Spain.

Due to the Spanish law, the engineers of Investrónica couldn't release these Sinclair computers without support for the Spanish language. This especially included the 'ñ' character, as well as translated system messages.

With the experience gained after the development of the 128k, they would later release a Spanish ZX Spectrum +, translating all system messages and including support for the 'ñ' character as well.

Investrónica always tried to convert, or at least show the Spectrum as a bussiness machine. Thus, this microcomputer came with a keypad included (also known as independent numeric keypad), which made program edition more comfortable, since it allowed advanced editing (word-by-word skipping, for instance).

This Spanish computer's final shape probably didn't convince the engineers at Sinclair UK, since they finally discarded the keypad, removed the text editor, the BASIC editor advanced capabilities, but added screen menus. Those menus made the computer more pleasant at first glance, and a completely different aspect in contrast to the Spanish Spectrum 128k. A year later the English Spectrum + 128k was finally out, selling the keypad separately, and completely diverging from the path opened by Investrónica.

With the pass of time, the Spanish 128k almost fell into oblivion, ditched as a rarity in a local (the Spanish), market. Especially in regard to its differences with the UK computer, its advanced possibilities became forgotten.

A text editor embedded in ROM

The Spanish Spectrum 128k had an embedded text editor. In order to enter it, you only had to use the command edit, followed by the name of a string variable. All the text typed inside the editor was stored inside that variable, which could handle many pages, almost up until filling the Speccy's memory. For instance, typing edit e$ from the main screen, you would enter in the text editor mode with the current contents of the e$ variable. All changes were stored inside it upon exit, of course.

The Spanish Spectrum 128k memory

The amount of available memory was around thirty-some kilobutes. Where was then that extra memory (up to 128k) to be found? It was only accessible using some special commands, such as save ! "" and load ! "". In order to list its contents, you could type cat !. Thus, that extra RAM was made available as a RAM drive.

All this survived in the UK model, and it was indeed called RAM Disk, and identified as "m:". The extended commands using '!' would be removed, and drive selectors would be supported in file names, such as "a:', "b:" and "m:". You could save screens (screen$), machine code (code), and arrays (data), as well as regular BASIC programs, that is.

REM storing in the RAM disk
save ! "pant.scr" screen$
save ! "gamestat" data pos
cat !

The text editor capabilities

The text editor included many functions present in other professional editors (such as Tasword, for instance), though it was really lacking, so it could hardly could be called professional itself. It's true that this was more related to the Speccy's internals than anything else.

The text editor supported word wrapping, insertion and overwriting, and, using the keypad, word skipping, text's home and end by line, and other cursor movements unknown in a Speccy.

The limitations of the editor, were severe, though. In the first place, the output was of 32 columns, only as many as the Speccy was able to show. This made it possible to print the text correctly only in a ZX Printer, using the command lrpint e$. From the perspective that gives the pass of time, I think they should have tried to double the columns as Tasword did (using 4-pixels-wide characters). Maybe the space in ROM was too limited for that, I don't know.

The problem was that the ZX Printer was rubbish (though probably a smart invention), and nobody would have thought of delivering a document on the mini-paper used by this device. It was a special thermal paper, more similar, both in quality, technology, and size, to a modern supermarket ticket printer.

The official way to plug a ZX Printer to a Speccy (or any other printer, by the way), was to use the Interface 1. This interface was incompatible with the ZX Spectrum 128k, however. For starters, the 48k mode was forced, and all extra capabilities present in the Spectrum 128k were therefore gone, such as the RS-232 socket, the advanced editing capabilities, and of course, making the access to text editor in ROM impossible.

Using the RS-232C output (the physical inlet was the same one as the keypad), plus a serial to centronics converter available for the Sinclair QL, you could connect an actual printer to your Spectrum 128k. The result, however, was disappointing. As one could expect, the text would only reach column #32 (instead of using the whole 80 columns), almost wasting the 60% of the available space of a DIN A4 piece of paper.

You could print your documents in the Spanish ZX Spectrum 128k, but without using the text editor in ROM.

Thus, the actual utility of this text editor was very limited in practice.

Editing BASIC programs

The capabilities of the text editor were also used for the Sinclair BASIC editor, widely improved in contrast to the Spectrum +. These were, for some reason, discarded by Sinclair UK for their Spectrum 128k. Maybe this was due to incompatibilities, though the Spectrum 128k was quite compatible with the 48k software library, and you even could type SPECTRUM in order to force a 48k 100% compatibility mode. The notion of a whole-screen editor was adopted, anyway.

The Spanish Spectrum 128k presented your programs in a more cleaner way than any other Spectrum, including the later ones such as the +2, +2A, +3B and +3. This is shown in the previous image of a small BASIC program, as well as in the next image with the listing of the typical Hello, world! program.

The source code can be edited using the whole screen, or over the status bar (provided it fits), by means of the edit <line_number> command.

Apart from this, the Spanish Speccy 128k supported a few extra useful commands:

RENUM: It renumbers all the lines in a program. It does not only change the line numbers, but it also keeps them in sync with all jumps (GO TO's and GO SUB's). This possibility survived in the UK Spectrum 128k, though widely limited. RENUM could be feed with three parameters, of which all were optional: the starting current line number, the new starting line number, and the increment between lines. For instance, RENUM renumbered all lines starting with the new line number 10, and using an increment of 10 between lines. RENUM 1000, 5000, 5, would renumber from line 1000 on, using 5000 as the starting line number, and 5 as increment, so the current line 1000 would become 5000, and the current line, say, 1010, would become 5005, and so forth.
DELETE: You could remove all lines in a given range (thus, it's dangerous). The parameters were indeed the starting line and the ending line, such as in DELETE 100, 200.

Also, as it was commented above, the whole system messages set were translated into Spanish, and the keyboard included ñ and ü. Instead of the UK Pound symbol, the Spanish Peseta Pt was included as a single character instead. Amusingly, the accented vowels were not supported, you could only show them using OVER 1 with the regular vowels.

print at 1, 1; "a"
print at 1, 1; over 1; "'"

A calculator

The calculator survived in the UK Spectrum 128k, though it seems to me to be more elegant in the Spanish Spectrum 128k. It was not necessary to enter any special mode, nor choose any special option, in order to access the calculator. Just entering a numeric calculation in the status bar or in any blank line of the screen would do (you could just press ENTER to make space below the current line).