The British PCs were actually rather poor. The Commodore 64 was the second best selling computer in Britain during the 1980s. The Sinclair Spectrum was just cheap which was why it sold more but it was pretty poor.
https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/clive-sinclairs-zx-spec...
>"You could buy a Spectrum at WH Smith's for £125, take it home -- it would take you two or three weeks to go through the programming manual, if you're that way inclined," Goodwins said.
"Then start digging into the machine. You could, within two or three months, be writing little games that were actually pretty good, and in six months you could have something that was as good as the rest of the market. By yourself. While going to school. Kaboom! This is where the UK game industry came from."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_the_United_Ki...
> This industry took off after the release of the ZX Spectrum in 1982: by the end of 1983 there were more than 450 companies selling video games on cassette compared to 95 the year before. An estimated 10,000 to 50,000 youth, mostly male, were making games out of their homes at this time based on advertisements for games in popular magazines. The growth of video games in the UK during this period was comparable to the punk subculture, fueled by young people making money from their games.
not proportionally less to what you received, or rather didnt receive: rubber dead fish keyboard substitute, color clash, pc speaker beeps, no joystick ports, no floppy support, less ram, abysmal hardware quality (build using defective ram, failing ferranti ulas etc)
>by the end of 1983 there were more than 450 companies selling video games on cassette compared to 95 the year before
While UK was spared from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 the market died in 1984. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron :
>Hohenberg later noted that after the 1983 Christmas season, Electron deliveries had increased to meet a demand that was no longer there, with the market having "completely dried up"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Research#Amstrad_acqu...
>1985, but this offering was postponed, ostensibly due to turmoil in the microcomputer industry, with Acorn Computers undergoing refinancing, and other companies such as Sinclair's competitor Oric and distributor Prism entering receivership.
Everything was crashing down and the only two winners were Amstrad (rock bottom prices and good grip on manufacturing cost) and Commodore (terrible management but great product).
The ZX Spectrum was garbage in comparison with some of these other machines, but it was much, much cheaper, and enabled British people in lower income brackets to get involved with computing at home than would otherwise have been able to. There's a vibe to the Spectrum scene that's as British as meat pie and Queen Elizabeth -- of doing a lot with a little, and of being able to obtain cheap games for your cheap computer, or even write your own, that look grotty compared to the posh kids' computers but are still fun.
Don't get me wrong, there was no comparison in the hardware - the keyboard was poor, there was next to no expansion capacity compared to the BBC, and there wasn't the graphics or sound quality. But it didn't matter for the most part, and while the BBC had some quality games (Acornsoft's versions of arcade games and Frak! spring to mind), the games we cared about were as good on the spectrum if not better (Manic Miner springs to mind). No-one talked about the issues in the way they do now. Only the kids with C64s and BBCs cared about the colour clash issue with the spectrum's colour attributes. It's clearly visible in games like Jet Pac, but no-one cared. We were living the dream, and there's a reason why I've got a spectrum in the house to this day!
Both my parents had good well above averagely paid jobs and we still had a Spectrum
Another reason the 6502 is faster is it was designed to utilize the bus on every other clock cycle, leaving the other cycles for a co-processor such as a video chip to read memory without impacting the speed of the processor. The C64 (1 MHz w/2 MHz RAM) and BBC Micro (2 MHz w/4 MHz RAM) both used this feature. The Atari 800 didn't and lost from 10% to 47% of its processor cycles to the video chip.
The Z80 also has more addressing modes, which speed things up. It depends on what type of computing you are doing. For most games, the 6502 @ 1 MHz is faster than the Z80 @ 3 MHz, but at maths, the Z80 is faster.
Weird. It's almost like people have taken an extreme edge case example and tried to extrapolate it to the general or real world case.
Real world performance pegs a 6502 as the equivalent of a Z80A running at twice the speed, not 3.5 times.
For reference: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5748/comp...
Another reason the 6502 is faster is it was designed to utilize the bus on every other clock cycle, leaving the other cycles for a co-processor such as a video chip to read memory without impacting the speed of the processor. The C64 (1 MHz w/2 MHz RAM) and BBC Micro (2 MHz w/4 MHz RAM) both used this feature. The Atari 800 didn't and lost from 10% to 47% of its processor cycles to the video chip.
The Z80 also has more addressing modes, which speed things up. It depends on what type of computing you are doing. For most games, the 6502 @ 1 MHz is faster than the Z80 @ 3 MHz, but at maths, the Z80 is faster.
Even the spectrum was an expensive item for a single parent family in the early 80s. I have no idea how my mum afforded to get me one, but she did, and I'm thankful for it to this day as while I'm not a full time programmer, computer skills I gained programming my spectrum left me in good standing for my entire working life in multiple areas.