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From: rupe...@charlieindiaxray.charlieoscar.uniformkilo (Rupert Goodwins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sinclair
Subject: Re: Sinclair Loki Superspectrum
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Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 13:16:30 GMT
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On 12 May 2002 00:02:45, Duncan Snowden <d...@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:

>On Saturday, Rupert Goodwins wrote:
>
>> Pandora was a lot further advanced, but that's another story.
>
>Do tell. That was fascinating - I always assumed that Loki was just a
>figment of SU's imagination with only the barest of groundings in
>reality.
>
>-- 
>Duncan Snowden. 

No, Sinclair was always a leaky ship when it came to talking to
journos! Even when everyone kept their traps shut, Clive had a habit
of going to lunch with a journalist, opening a can of worms and
spilling the beans. (I remember a rather fine cartoon in the in-house
newsletter, Wham, by Ben Cheese celebrating one such disclosure to
Jane Bird of the Times). I remember one further little snipped about
Loki -- it was so named by Andrew Cummins, moped-riding,
cider-drinking marketing man. He went on to Arm, where he was until
very recently. There are a couple of references to him and to Loki in
the Sinclair quotes.txt file I posted in c.s.s a couple of years
ago...

Pandora was the last project I worked on. It was the size of a large,
rather deep laptop, and was basically a portable Spectrum 128 (ie,
paged memory, sound) with some 'new' graphics modes taken from the
Timex 2048 and - of course -- a flat-screen CRT. (the QL was also
going to have one of those -- which is why the video timings were
strange -- until a surprisingly late date).  Because it wasn't
possible to make colour ones -- there were some experiments, but they
all looked sepia -- and because any ones that were bigger than an inch
or so across tended to implode, the flat CRT was green, tiny and
overdriven. It hid in the base of the lid, and when you opened up the
thing a variety of mirrors and lenses hinged out to make a much bigger
'virtual' screen that looked like a 12" monitor hovering somewhere
beneath your knees. Bizarre doesn't begin to cover it. But it did
work, after a fashion; I did the screen driving software and designed
some fonts (the screen was so weird that if you didn't have fonts
explicitly matched to it, the chances of reading stuff was minimal).,
all tested on an old Zenith green monitor I'd jimmied to match the
aspect ratio of the final screen.  Only a couple of prototypes got
made -- I expect Perran Newman, the project manager, has one
somewhere.

Can't remember too much about the video modes, although I think there
was one that had 64 x 24 characters. That was going to be the main
one, because Pandora was seen as a productivity tool rather than a
games box. It also had, IRC, a 6 or 8 MHz CMOS Z80 -- I think it was
the Hitachi variant with some extra instructions -- and everything
else bar the memory in one ULA. And I also STR that it wasn't going to
have microdrives: the flat screen was seen as quite enough nonsense to
be getting on with, thank you very much Clive. 

But the circuit never got further than a collection of breadboards,
and the models were there to test the optics and screen details.
People were understandably nervous about things like the EHT supply to
the overdriven tube, and even more nervous about whether the whole
thing would either work or be manufacturable. 

And of course, it got canned when Sugar stepped in. Guy Kewney asked
him at the time whether he'd bought the rights to Pandora. "Have you
seen it?" asked Sugar. "Yes" said Guy. "Well then." said Sugar. I did
get asked whether I wanted to go to Cambridge Computer and work on
what was to become the Z88, but I felt at the time that everyone had
been sold down the river and didn't want to work on Clive's farm no
more...

Now, where's me pipe and slippers. And is that a Jaffa cake I see over
there?

R




>
>E Out of DATA, 1340:2 

rupert goodwins
---------------
rupertg at cix dot co dot uk