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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The 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.
Sinclair 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.
No 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.
Two different UK magazines reviewed Kosmik Pirate a month apart in 1984, working independently, using different scoring systems. Both landed on exactly 3%.
The 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.
In 1984 a journalist dialled a ZX Spectrum into Prince Philip's private mailbox, read his mail, deleted it to cover his tracks — and told Prestel exactly what he'd done. The court case that followed is the reason Britain has a computer hacking law at all.
Why 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.