A few years ago I dug out my old Sinclair Spectrum 48K from the loft where it had sat dormant for probably the best part of 30 years, and to my astonishment it booted up first time and even allowed me to feed in a couple of games from tape using my trusty WHSmith Data Recorder! Photos below are the initial boot up plugged into a modern 4K television, the second a more authentic set up with a portable analogue TV I found at my mum’s!
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The only worry though, was that given this thing was now so old, I was going to plug it in one time and it would go pffffft and I’d get a puff of white smoke from the circuit board. Fast forward to this year and I managed to get my hands on one of the first batch of The Spectrum from Retrogames. Technically I guess it’s more a fancy emulator (I have had the emulators Speccy and Spectaculator on my Android tablet for a while, see the Game Store) but it comes in a very convincing case complete with rubber keyboard and you plug it into your TV as per the original, albeit with a HDMI cable (or in my case a portable 16″ monitor for convenience).
First impressions are very favourable, in “classic mode” you get the same feel as the original for things like BASIC programming (I also installed the Sinclair 48K ROM via USB to use over the Retrogames version), in “carousel mode” you get 48 pre-installed games as well as the ability to load any files you can find on places like World of Spectrum via USB. Indeed, the first thing I did was to get all my old tapes (both original and *cough* acquired *cough) so that I could really relive my youth with my old collection of games. The only troublesome ones were the ones I really wanted, Ultimate Play The Game was bought up by Rare and then by Microsoft so for some inexplicable reason the game files are “distribution denied” which is a pain, but not insurmountable.
Looking forward to rediscovering the joys of a much simpler time over the Christmas break!
