- Zilog Z80 CPU, 3.5 Mhz.
- Semi-custom graphics chip (off-the-shelf logic array with custom functionality).
- Spectrum 128 and Amstrad models: General Instruments AY-3-8912 sound chip.
ZX Spectrum
Britain's equivalent to the Apple II and Commodore 64.
And the polar opposite of the X68000 as well (in hardware specs).
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum, or "Speccy" to its fans, is a masterpiece of early 1980s computing Minimalism. Everything is as simple and cheap as possible. Because of this, it became famous in Britain and Spain in the 1980s, and eastern Europe and Russia in the 1990s, as a game-friendly home computer for people who otherwise couldn't afford one.
History
The Speccy is based on a couple of earlier computers, the ZX80 and ZX81. These were little more than a Z80 processor, an incomplete 4K version of BASIC, 1K of RAM, and a membrane keyboard — the first releases were sold as kits. The Z80 drew the text-only screen (when it wasn't busy), video output was to a TV set, and programs were stored on audio cassettes. The primitiveness was deliberate — the ZX80 was designed to be the cheapest computer on the market, and the ZX81 made the original design even cheaper. The ZX81 was only £70 (or $100) in 1981, and sold over a million units. The Speccy, designed to be the cheapest color computer on the market, improved on the ZX81 with a 16K almost-complete BASIC, 16K or 48K of RAM, a video chip, a beeper, and a rubber keyboard.
The Speccy was released in April 1982 at £125 for the 16K model and £175 for 48K, dropping as time went on. Sinclair was swamped with orders. It held its own against the Commodore 64, and British competitors such as the BBC Micro and Amstrad CPC. Sales figures went into the millions, mostly of the 48K model, and it brought Britain into the home computer age (and earned its inventor, Clive Sinclair, a knighthood [1]).
The Spectrum+, introduced in 1984, replaced the rubber keyboard with a plastic one, modeled after the failed Sinclair QL (an abortive attempt to create a business machine to compete with the IBM PC), and fixed some graphics bugs. The third and final Sinclair Spectrum was the 128, in 1986. This had 128K of RAM, an even better BASIC, MIDI, a monitor port, and three-channel sound.
Amstrad bought Sinclair in 1986 and continued improving the Speccy with a full-travel keyboard, an internal cassette drive, and finally with a disk drive in 1987. But these later models have backward-compatibility problems.
Play it Again, Sam
Speaking of backward-compatibility problems, the SAM Coupé was released in 1989 as a next-generation Speccy. Inspired by a terminated project at Sinclair Research and designed by former Sinclair employees at Miles Gordon Technology (MGT), the SAM had better specs than any Spectrum - but without the intellectual property that now belonged to Amstrad there was a limit to how compatible MGT could make it.
The SAM could be made to run most 48K software with a bit of hacking, and its games got regular slots in the big Spectrum magazines. However, despite having as much RAM as an Amiga 1000, it was still an 8-bit machine in an increasingly 16-bit market, and never made it commercially.
Clones & Emulators
The demise of the Speccy in the early 1990s isn't the end of the story. Because it's so simple, it's easy to clone. The first Speccy clone was an authorized version by Timex (yes, the wristwatch company) for the United States, Portugal and Poland. Unauthorized Speccy clones started appearing in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, followed by several countries in eastern Europe, along with India, Brazil and Argentina.
Then came the retro scene: Of the numerous Speccy clones listed on The Other Wiki, at least half a dozen were released in the '10s or '20s.
The fansite World of Spectrum, which is officially endorsed by Amstrad, offers various emulators for the system and most of the original games for free as memory dumps or tape images. [2] The site has gone all out to ask the original producers of the games for permission to distribute them freely (permission which has been granted in the majority of cases, the exceptions mostly being games published by companies that still exist who fear that they compromise the integrity of their current catalogs by allowing free download of something that ceased to be profitable to them in 1993). The site has about 90% of the computer's software library up for free legal download.
Specifications
Not very expandable, except kits were sold to convert the 16K model to 48K.
Output is to a TV set via a built-in UHF modulator. A composite signal is also available from the edge connector.
Connectors were kept to a minimum to control costs and speed up the initial launch. Other ports became available via add-ons.
Games
Thousands upon thousands; conservative estimates hover around the 11,000 mark [5], while the World Of Spectrum library contains around 9,000 of them.
The infamous colour system meant a lot of games on this rainbow-badged computer were rendered in monochrome to prevent "colour clash". This is especially true of 3D games, but a lot of cross-platform titles became monochrome on the Speccy just to make the conversion easier (and cheaper). Some games, like Trantor, are remembered for bucking this trend with big, colourful animation.
On the plus side, the shortage of video optimisations was partly compensated by the relatively fast processor, and gave developers a clean graphical slate. The result was a plethora of different visual styles. Isometric Projection became something of a staple, to the annoyance of joystick owners[6], and there are some impressive first-person 3D titles. At least one isometric game, Amaurote, was switched to a top-down view on the C64, presumably to make use of the latter's hardware sprites.
Action Adventure
- Ant Attack
- Head Over Heels
- The Sabre Man series
- Star Control (unofficial port, very inferior to the original)
- Turrican
- Amaurote
Adventure Game
- Cylu
- Most of the Dizzy series
- Skool Daze
- Sweevo's World
- Sweevo's Whirled, an extended 128K version of the same game.
- Hydrofool, the only sequel.
- All of the Wally Week series except Automania (below).
- Pyjamarama
- Everyone's a Wally
- Herbert's Dummy Run
- Three Weeks in Paradise
First Person Shooter
- Combat Zone
- Starion
- Tau Ceti
Interactive Fiction
Maze Game
- Eric and the Floaters
- Gyron
- Gyron Arena
Platform Game
- Chuckie Egg
- Manic Miner - which was the first game to include in-game music and sound effects using only the beeper, a feat many had considered impossible.
- Jet Set Willy
- Jet Set Willy 2
- Jet Set Willy
- Jetpac
- Technician Ted
- Automania
Simulation Game
- Flight Simulation (1982, Psion)
- Dark Star (1984, Design Design)
- Just Imagine
Strategy Game
- Some RTS which most certainly isn't Stonkers.[7]
- Anything by Julian Gollop.
- Rebelstar Raiders
- Rebelstar
- Rebelstar 2
- Chaos: The Battle of Wizards
- Lords of Chaos
- Laser Squad
- Rebelstar Raiders
Third-Person Shooter
Wide Open Sandbox
Add-ons
Sinclair released several add-ons to extend the Spectrum's functionality, and numerous other companies got in on the action. The ZX printer, already released for use with the ZX81, could plug straight in, and the burgeoning games market allowed several competing joystick adaptors to thrive.
All Spectrum add-ons are plugged in to the "edge connector" or "expansion bus". Some devices include a duplicated edge connector for daisy-chaining, and for the rest, "expansion doublers" could be bought.
Attachments included:
Hacker/debugging tools
- Various external ROMs, including one in...
- Romantic Robot's "Multiface". Allowed any running program to be frozen and inspected, using its own buffer memory to run user code. Magazines frequently published "Multiface cheats", which were mostly memory addresses to be zeroed to get infinite lives in various games.
Joystick interfaces
Some of the earlier joystick interfaces included ROM cartridge slots, but the cartridges never caught on. Sinclair tried to start the ball rolling with 10 official cartridges[8] but they were all discontinued within months. Later interfaces sometimes shipped with empty spaces on their circuit boards for the cartridge slot.
- ZX Interface 2 - The official one, sporting two joystick ports and the original ROM cartridge connector. The joystick part was built in to the Spectrum +2. Joystick movements simulate number key presses (1-5 for the left stick, 6-0 for the right) to make life easier for game developers.
- Kempston - the most popular, launched before the Interface 2.
- Cursor - which emulates arrow key presses instead of number keys[9].
- Protek.
- Fuller.
- RAM Turbo - one of several attempts to combine multiple joystick protocols in one unit. At least two of the protocols worked, and it had a reset button - a feature that was missing from rubber-key Spectrums.
Printers
- ZX Printer - Sinclair's spark-gap printer, printing on 100mm-wide rolls of aluminium-coated paper.
- At least one electrically-compatible clone of the ZX printer was spotted in the wild, printing on larger, more ordinary-looking thermal paper.
- Other printers could be attached via the Interface 1.
Others
- ZX Interface 1 - released by Sinclair shortly after the first Spectrum. Provides an RS232 port and connectors for Microdrives[10] and a proprietary network.
- Several mice and floppy drive controllers, including...
- MGT's Disciple: a floppy drive controller that, unlike the Spectrum +3, used common disk sizes. Included a printer port and the ability to snapshot the Speccy's state.
- +D, a cheaper successor to Disciple.
- Fuller Orator, a sound box using the AY-3-8912 (the same sound chip that was built into later Spectrums).
- Mikro-Plus: Puts 16K external RAM in place of the ROM, so it would also count as a hacker tool - but this was marketed by games publisher Mikro-Gen to allow bigger games to be loaded.
- ↑ {well, except for the little fact that Uncle Clive had nothing to do with the design of any of his company computer products; Speccy hardware was designed by Sinclair Research's Richard Altwasser, and Steve Vickers of the Nine Tiles wrote the system software, including Basic 48}
- ↑ (If you don't want to get flamed by the Spectrum community, never refer to any Spectrum game as a "ROM"...unless you're referring to an Interface 2 cartridge, of which only a handful were released. Arcade and console game images are called "ROMs" because that's literally what they are; Speccy games, on the other hand, were almost exclusively released on tape or disk.)
- ↑ An experienced user can tell how good the tone is on their tape player by watching the border
- ↑ according to the original Spectrum BASIC manual
- ↑ and that's only the games which were commercially released; there were also countless thousands of homebrew games, magazine typeins, and many others
- ↑ Moving diagonally with any common Spectrum joystick meant activating two microswitches at once, which was just awkward enough to be irritating when all the game's directions are diagonal. Some games got round this by rotating the cardinal directions by 45°, which didn't feel a whole lot better.
- ↑ follow the link for this in-joke if you don't get it.
- ↑ List here.
- ↑ Although the arrow keys are technically shifted number keys
- ↑ A midget data tape produced by Sinclair