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.
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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 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.
Built to a price: designing the ZX Spectrum
AI HistoryHardwareULAWhy a Z80, why a rubber keyboard, why your telly instead of a monitor — the ZX Spectrum wasn't designed around what would be best. It was designed around what Sinclair could get away with cutting, and one single custom chip that did the cutting for them.