ZX Spectrum: Difference between revisions
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The Sinclair '''ZX Spectrum''', [[Fan Nickname|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.
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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.
=== 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. It's still made today in Russia.▼
▲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.
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;
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Thousands upon thousands; conservative estimates hover around the 11,000 mark <ref>and that's only the games which were commercially released; there were also countless thousands of homebrew games, magazine typeins, and many others</ref>, while the [http://www.worldofspectrum.org World Of Spectrum] library contains around 9,000 of them.
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* ''[[Elite]]''
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 into the back, and the burgeoning games market allowed several competing joystick adaptors to thrive.
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Attachments included:
* Various external ROMs, including one in...
* Romantic Robot's "Multiface". Allowed any running program to be frozen and inspected, using an internal 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.
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<ref>[http://www.fruitcake.plus.com/Sinclair/Interface2/Cartridges/Interface2_RC_Cartridges.htm List here.]</ref> 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.
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* 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.
* 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.
* ZX Interface 1 - released by Sinclair shortly after the first Spectrum. Provides an [[w:RS-232|RS232]] port and connectors for Microdrives<ref>A midget data tape produced by Sinclair</ref> and a proprietary network.
* Several mice and floppy drives, including...
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* Fuller Orator, a sound box using the AY-3-8912 (the same sound chip that was built into later Spectrums).
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Videogame Systems]]
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