Face-Off: ZX Spectrum vs. Commodore 64

This week saw the 30th anniversary of the launch of Sir Clive Sinclair's legendary ZX Spectrum - the more powerful, full-colour follow-up to the seminal ZX80 and ZX81 - and a genuine gaming phenomenon.While the Spectrum's place in gaming history is indisputable, it was not the only computer launched in 1982 that offered a generational leap in power over its predecessor; later that year, the brilliant Commodore 64 arrived to replace the lacklustre VIC-20. Coming in at over twice the price of the 48K Spectrum, the C64 wasn't cheap, but it was packed with custom hardware clearly aimed at offering arcade-style gameplay to the home computer audience. While the Spectrum dominated sales in the early 80s, the C64 began to catch up and thus the scene was set for the first great platform conflict: the basis for thousands of classroom arguments and countless playground brawls.So with the benefit of hindsight, which was actually better - the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64? On the face of it, from a technical perspective there's no real contest here. While the Spectrum enjoyed a resolution advantage, the C64's VIC-II graphics chip offered hardware scrolling and sprites that weren't available on the Spectrum, while the impressive three-channel SID chip annihilated the efforts of the poor single-channel speaker embedded in the Sinclair machine - and it was the C64 that helped define the chip-tune musical genre that is still going strong today. In short, one machine was designed primarily with home computing and programming in mind, while the other had advanced custom hardware dedicated entirely to smoother, richer graphics and vibrant sound."Commodore spent a huge part of their efforts developing the audio and video chips. Why else would you put them in there if it weren't to make games?" says ex-ZZAP! 64 reviewer, erstwhile C64 games dev and current studio head of Ruffian Games, Gary Liddon."The VIC-II chip seems to be built off of concepts that were already fairly common in arcade machines; mainly sprites and smooth scrollable screens made from character sets. Contemporary arcade titles like Scramble already had similar capabilities."Jason Page, the ex-C64 coder and musician for developer Graftgold, now heading up Sony Europe's audio R&D department, concurs with Liddon's assessment."I'd think that if the C64 was aimed at education and learning to program, then it certainly got it wrong - C64 BASIC was essentially a load of POKEs. I'd say that there was certainly an 'entertainment' element in the C64 design. If Commodore expected it to be used for games, I guess that's likely," says Page.Looking at the two major HD consoles of today, just imagine the cheaper Xbox 360 launching without any kind of graphics hardware at all, while the PS3 retained its Cell/RSX CPU/GPU combo. The technical curiosities and tweaks in visual effects work that tend to separate cross-platform games of our era would expand into an enormous gulf of difference if the same game had to run on one system with no graphics hardware support at all. To a certain extent, that's how it was back in the day on the Spectrum and Commodore 64.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...s-commodore-64