Indo Speccy
MemoirHardwareA £10 "untested" rubber-keyed Speccy bought sight unseen in East Java, a government import ban standing between me and a bag of axial capacitors, and a £36 chip for a £10 computer.
Articles
Technical deep dives, programming tricks, ROM lore and other long-form pieces about the ZX Spectrum and how it really works.
Asking AI for 2026 box art
AI AIDesignFan artFour AI-generated 'remaster' covers and a ten-second trailer for classic Spectrum games, none of them real. A look at what an image model gets right, what it invents, and where it quietly mixes its own history up.
Small chip, huge legacy: the story of the Zilog Z80
AI HistoryHardwareZ80The chip inside your Spectrum also ran Pac-Man, half the arcades of the 1980s, the Sega Genesis's sound, and — through a direct descendant — is still inside graphing calculators being sold today. A plain-English guide to the Z80's 48-year career.
Why Spectrum colours "bleed": attribute clash explained
AI HardwareULAExplainerThat smudgy, wrong-colour halo around old Spectrum sprites has a name, and a very simple cause: the machine can't remember a separate colour for every pixel. A tiny program below proves it, live, on screen.
The port that lies about its own number
AI Z80Deep diveULAMachine codeEvery Spectrum program you've ever typed says OUT 254 or IN 254. The ULA doesn't actually check for 254 — it barely checks anything at all. A tiny program proves it, live, on screen.
Tetris in Real ZX BASIC
AI BASICGameOriginalEvery other program on this site is hand-written Z80 machine code. This one is the opposite extreme: a full, playable Tetris in the Spectrum's own interpreted BASIC — seven-piece rotation, line clears, scoring, the lot — plus the real ROM quirks it took to make it fast enough to play.
The Spectrum that outlived Sinclair
AI HistoryClonesDemosceneSinclair stopped making the Spectrum in 1992. Nobody told the Soviet Union. Amateur clones built from smuggled schematics spread across the USSR by the hundreds of thousands — and the newest one was designed in 2025.
The printer that burned the page
AI HistoryHardwareZX PrinterNo ink, no ribbon, no thermal head. The Sinclair ZX Printer wrote by burning a layer of metal off the page with 50 volts — and it talks to the computer through an I/O port nobody remembers, because nothing else on the machine ever used it.
The worst-reviewed game the Spectrum ever got
AI HistoryGamesReviewsTwo different UK magazines reviewed Kosmik Pirate a month apart in 1984, working independently, using different scoring systems. Both landed on exactly 3%.
The 15-megabyte game that fit on a 1-kilobyte computer
AI HistoryZX81RecordsThe ZX81 shipped in 1981 with 1KB of RAM. In 2015, someone ported the full laser-disc arcade game Dragon's Lair to it — 15,824,610 bytes of data — and Guinness World Records confirmed it as an official record. It didn't fit. It never had to.
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