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Nostalgic For the ZX Spectrum? Soon You Can Play With a New One
An anonymous reader writes "There is a very interesting project underway to recreate the ZX Spectrum and more. The Bluetooth ZX Spectrum has been successfully crowdfunded, and it is due to go on sale in September 2014. If you want to go back to the 1980s — to the wonderful era of 8-bit gaming, you can instead try one of the many ZX Spectrum emulators." I remember being excited at the new Sinclair when my dad brought it home, but my strongest memory now is of what might be the worst keyboard I've ever had the chance to use.
The article doesn't even appear to mention the official page of the crowdfunding campaign, which is this Kickstarter campaign. It turns out not to be a hardware recreation of the Spectrum's logic, just a rubber keyboard for use with emulators.
If you think the ZX Spectrum has the worst keyboard, then you've clearly never used a ZX81 ...
The keyboard wasn't that bad. Sort of like many Apple keyboards. Ok, both are really bad.
How about an emulation of the CBM 5190 calculator?
It was my mainstay for years, until its battery failed (after CBM went under).
The people behind the Kickstarter seem to be defaulting on agreements to pay royalties to the developers of the games they're bundling, and not really responding well to questions asking them why, which isn't a great start.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
Don't count on it.
Those behind the Kickstarter have already failed to pay the developers of games they used in their iOS emulators (despite signing contracts etc.). The company has liabilities almost as big as the Kickstarter and few assets. They still haven't demonstrated a real prototype (it wouldn't have been that hard for them to show an actual rubber key Spectrum case driving a Bluetooth HID module, but all that's been shown is a retail POS keyboard driving some emulated games).
I hope I'm wrong but I seriously doubt this will ever see the light of day.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I remember getting one of those when I was 10 or 11. First generation. All excited to finally have a computer. But I couldn't leave it on for more than an hour or two before it would just crash because it had overheated. Too frustrating to use. We sent it back before the necessary 10 days had passed.
I was sad.
Later (within the year? I don't remember) I got a Vic-20; a couple of years later, a Commodore 64. Then, in college, a Commodore 128. Those guys worked much better for me than the Sinclair ZX ever did.
You never used an Atari 400 keyboard then.
If you want to build a modern recreation of the Speccy (absolutely timing perfect too) there's a clone called the Harlequin which was designed by a guy who recently reverse engineered the ZX Spectrum's Ferranti ULA and wrote a book about it. The book's great:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-ZX...
There's a thread on World of Spectrum Forums - a German member has arranged to get the components and PCBs to make a kit. He may still have a few going if you jump in soon:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org... (go to near the end of the very long thread)
Also there is a Verilog HDL description of the ZX ULA on OpenCores (based on Chris Smith's reverse engineering work) if you like to play with FPGAs.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Don't modern IDEs with tab completion have a similar effect?
It was a much more capable computer, and equally ahead of its time if not moreso. It also had a better keyboard than the ZX. I've regretted selling mine off to a coworker in 1993.
There is a very interesting project underway to recreate the ZX Spectrum and more.
No, there isn't. Certainly not "more" - I don't know where that's come from.
This is the link you're looking for. The one that tells you that, actually, what's been kickstarted is a bluetooth keyboard in the style of a ZX spectrum.
Speaking of that link, though, what's with the shitty JPEG details page? Don't we has text on the internets now?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Either do your job properly or don't fucking bother.
1. This KEYBOARD has already been covered by slashdot several weeks ago.
2. There is so much wrong in the summary that it's easier to point out what the fuck is right with it.
What? The ZX Spectrum keyboard was years ahead of the competition with its square, flat, chiclet keys. It took decades before the PC industry realized its potential instead of emulating old typewriter keys. These days even Apple's Macbook Pro has flat and square keys, a clear tribute to the ZX "Speccy" chiclet keyboard.
On a more serious note, while the ZX Spectrum keyboard wasn't for touch typists, it had its advantages too: all the BASIC commands was printed on or above or below the keys, so it worked as a BASIC "cheat sheet". You only had to press "G" to print the command "GOTO" so it saved key presses and removed typos in the commands and functions etc.
The ZX Spectrum worked very well as an entry level PC with an emphasis on learning BASIC programming. I know several people who made a career in the IT business because of what they learned from programming the ZX Spectrum.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
1. It's not a Bluetooth ZX Spectrum, but a Bluetooth ZX Spectrum *keyboard*;
2. It's not even a generic keyboard, but a keyboard that is only guaranteed to work with "Elite official applications";
3. Most of these "Elite official applications" have been removed from AppStore, some of them due to unpaid royalties, others for copyright infringment - thus there's a change owners of the keyboard may not have any applications to use after all;
4. Unpaid game developers are currently trying to cancel this Kickstarter campaign, since the premise of a Spectrum-like keyboard to play licensed games is false - several games that Elite released on mobile were never licensed at all, others were licensed but never paid;
5. This "news" is about 3 weeks old, as you can see from the following links:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2014/feb/13/zx-spectrum-kickstarter-over-unpaid-developer-bills
http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber/2014/01/the-elite-bluetooth-keyboard-breaking-down-the-problems/
http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber/2014/02/bluetooth-zx-spectrum-elitewatch-update/
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/447934/zx-spectrum-kickstarter-company-faces-allegations-of-non-payment/
http://www.vg247.com/2014/01/31/zx-spectrum-game-developers-concerned-over-elite-systems-kickstarter/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-02-03-controversy-over-bluetooth-zx-spectrum-keyboard
http://torrentfreak.com/successful-kickstarter-campaign-hit-by-game-piracy-claims-140131/
http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/31/5364436/emulator-keyboard-kickstarter-under-fire-for-using-licensed-material
http://stevewetherill.com/2014/01/30/public-statement-on-elite-bluetooth-spectrum-kickstarter/
what's with the shitty JPEG details page?
It wouldn't be to hide the details from Kickstarter's keyword scanner, would it? I know an eBay seller who used to use an image-of-text to hide its terms of sale from eBay's keyword scanner so that the use of the word "check" in "before you bid, check with your country's customs department to see what duty you'll need to pay" didn't trip the prohibited payment option filter. Officially, according to a representative of the seller, the image-of-text was so that terms could be revised on 50,000 store items at once without having to push 50,000 individual listing revisions, but I found the real reason once the seller hired me as a contractor.
I've got a Commodore 64 DTV at home, i'm just waiting for the parts to make it an (almost) fully functional C64. Single-board retro computers are not new. The miggy has done it, the C64 has done it, i suppose it was about time the brits caught up.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
http://www.mike-stirling.com/retro-fpga/zx-spectrum-on-an-fpga/
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I never had a ZX Spectrum, but I remember looking at them in the shops.
My dad bought a Compucolor II and it was awesome. It looks like there is an emulator out now for it too @ http://www.compucolor.org/emu.html
Sadly I don't think I'll ever get my kids to get into the computing platforms that was my early teenage years.
My old one works just fine, thank you.
Having had both a zx-spectrum and a before that the Sinclair zx-81, I can tell you that the spectrum keyboard was a designed improvement. The 81 had this flexible plastic sheet with raised, rounded bumps for all the keys. You would press down until to bump flattened and you hit hard plastic to know that you had typed.
Other than that, the keyboard entry was much the same as the spectrum. Each letter on the keyboard mapped a command, a symbol, and a graphic character as well as a letter. Programming in basic was reasonably fast as every command needed only a single keystroke. Learning to program on the speccy was a great grounding for later on. I still remember one of the greatest things about the spectrum compared to say the C64 was that the spectrum handbook came with a list of all the memory addresses and their functions, as well as the Z80 registers, so right out of the box you had a little encouragement to start dabbling in machine code as well as BASIC.
On the other hand, the great thing about the ZX81 was that if you had the optional 16K (yep 16 whole kilobytes people) expansion pack, there was a semi-official cooling hack. Freeze a tetra pack of UHT milk and sit it up against the module. You just don't see milk cooled computers these days.....
The rubberised keyboard on the spectrum was not that bad to use. The main issue was that the rubber got chipped or started to perish under the oils from your fingers. I ended up wiring my spectrum into the case and keyboard of a broken Texas Instruments TI99/4a and never looked back.
My original one from 1982 is still working.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
At least I could use it with my NedoPC ZX Evo. http://nedopc.com/zxevo/zxevo.php ;-)
Which is pretty cool, Mini-ITX format ZX Spectrum compatible motherboard