ZX Spectrum: Difference between revisions
→History: Expand MGT's name, add SAM.
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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, a next-generation Speccy, was released by Miles Gordon Technology (MGT) in 1989. Inspired by a terminated project at Sinclair Research (some of whose employees formed MGT), the SAM was faster, with better graphics and a lot more RAM than any Spectrum, but without Amstrad's intellectual property there was a limit to how compatible MGT could make it.
The SAM could be made to run most 48K games with a bit of hacking, and gained enough of a following to get regular SAM-specific game reviews in the big Speccy magazines of the early '90s. However, 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZX_Spectrum_clones#Unofficial Speccy clones] listed on [[The Other Wiki]], at least half a dozen were released in the '10s or '20s.
The fansite [http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ 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. <ref>(If you don't want to [[Gannon Banned|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.)</ref> The site has gone all out to ask the original producers of the games for permission to [[Abandonware|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.
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== Specifications ==
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