Chaos was decent too. 8 player battle wizard. J ""code

Nostalgia overload. Time to blow the dust off’ my spectrums

i had ZX81 with a ram pack. Then got a speccy and later spectrum plus. good times.

"back in the day it was cheap" I mean not really at least in Portugal me and my brother had to save a lot so we could finally get one XD

I saw cassette cover art on 80s games much like record cover art, it was a way to hook you in obviously but also it sparked your imagination so your brain would start imagining things about the music and in this case the games. Lots of people liked to moan about cover art on games but you knew the graphics would be par for the era but the art got you excited for the game. I would love to tell my 10 year old self back in 1980 that in 40 years time we'd almost be on the brink of games looking exactly like these cassette covers! Even in my 50s I play modern games from Steam and people are always whinging about the graphics not being as good as they should be, without wishing to sound like and old fart, kids today don't have a clue what we had 40 years ago. One of the reasons I guess I don't care much for graphics fidelity, so long as it's consistent in games whether from 40 years ago or last month. I watch us move from ZX81 right up tri-SLI DLSS Nvidia 24TB video monsters we have today! ha ha!

I brought this on Friday and loved it. I like that I can play my other spectrum games on a usb stick and some include the loading screens with that lovely sound. I like the fact you can change the tape speed from the normal ie what we all love or hate or speed it up but still get the loading screen. Brilliant

Me in 1984 : "Dad, please can we get a ZX Spectrum?" My dad : "No! We're getting a proper computer, not a bloody toy!". Cue me spending 2 years trying to find the 6 other kids in the entire UK with an Amstrad CPC! Ha ha! We actualy had Dragon32 prior to that in 1982, again "proper computer with a proper keyboard" and again almost zero games! So sorry Dad, 40 years later I'm finally going to buy myself a Speccy and this one will also keep my wife happy as I won't hear, "You're not plugging that old thing in and burning the house down!". Retro gaming is a hard life...

No downsides? Hmmm... Is there any WiFi or Bluetooth support? How about you cannot add you own games to the carousel? It doesn't have a SD card slot to extend the internal storage? (the USB key is meh...) Where is the DB9 joystick port? Why the keyboard membrane is not compatible with the classic one so you can't replace it if needed? Or replace it with a micro-switches one like 48K-KLDX or MechBoardZX? The emulator doesn't support any virtual Spectrum add-ons like the Interface 1 and micro-drives. You cannot use other ROMs, like Spanish, French or Looking Glass. It doesn't support the +3 (with the .DSK disk images), the Pentagon (with the .TRD disk images) or the Spectrum NEXT. I bet that the Spectrum NEXT will never be supported! You can achieve all this much cheaper on your computer with the Retro Virtual Machine emulator and a DB9-to-USB adapter. There are lots of much more viable alternatives to this spectrum. I think that retro games are simply surfing on the nostalgia wave knowing the Speccy community being the biggest and the most loyal.

Purists could wait for the toastrack 128K ZX Spectrum reimagined.

Ha. Exactly that. My friend had one. I had a Commodore 16.

Fantasic how your subscriber count has grown Andrew. Hitting some solid numbers these days. Well done!

Bought my original Spectrum in 1985 by then it had evolved into the Spectrum Plus , and i still own in and it works. I was 20 years old back then and maybe i should have been getting out more but that little machine gave me endless hours of joy. With my Kempston interface we completed many digital adventures together, completing Rod Bowkets wonderful " Dynamite Dan" was a highlight (: I have " The Spectrum on order from Amazon and its a present from my wife for Christmas and i am looking forward to further adventures(:

Never had one but used to look at the Timex Sinclair in computer magazines at $99 CAD and dreamed of having one. Preordered the Retro Spectrum and its on the way to Canada. I appreciate your video and looking forward to see if any of my TV/Monitors that output 50 Hz as these games were originally made for PAL.

I didn't get my ZX Spectrum 48k until 1983. I did a paper round and with help from my Mum saved up a £130 to purchase one 2nd hand (It came with quite a few games so this explains the price). I loved it. My biggest regret was never purchasing The Quill to write text adventures, as I was lost in an imaginary world most of the time and I'm sure I could have written at least one half decent text adventure

im getting me one of these christmas - well my brother is gonna get me one :D - ive downloaded all the games i had on the spectrom and all of the files comes to 13.2 mb yes they are very small files lol

"... then get back without being killed to death" that made me smile :-) Nice video and keep up the awesome work!

The irony that the Arm processor which was designed by Steve Furber & Roger Wilson (now Sophie) for Acorn Computers now powers THE Spectrum isn't lost on me ;-) Great video and thanks for sharing!

I think you did a really good job on this video. Real short documentary tv quality! I didn't own a Spectrum back then either. I was older, less interested in games but more into programming. I had a BBC Micro and a Commodore 64. The Acorn machines were unquestionably the best for a non games orientated programmer. However, I think I have been living under a rock because I only just found out about Retro Games and their products. I bought a THEC64 two months ago and I love it. I do still have my 1983 original but this new version is great. The best thing about the full size replica machines with their functioning keyboards is that all the original keys are there, correctly placed. It makes a real difference for my type of use and is much better in my opinion, than running VICE on a PC. I hope Retro Games do a BBC replica. After all Acorn gave us Elite and ARM everything!

5:20 El Stompo and Snake Escape don't use the extended colour palette, they use a game engine (Nirvana) which changes the way the Spectrum handles colours (rather than two colours per 8x8 block, it uses two colours per 8x2 rectangle).

I still have my Spectrum 128 with the cassette loader in the loft, used to love playing Elite, Battlefield Germany and Theatre Europe to name a few

Things have moved on...

i had a genuine 48k spectrum back in the day and i enjoyed many years on the ol speccy before entering the world of the commodore amiga500...i will always have a soft spot for the ol speccy.

Ah this takes me back, thank you!

5:05 no it's not, it's a +2A

I try to watch this video but when I press Play button I get message on the screen ''Tape loading error.'''.

Can you imagine if you put a M3 cpu in one of those Spectrums?

You didn’t mention it, so I’m not sure if you are aware that you can make your own insta-load snapshots on the ZXPico, so you only ever have to go through the pain of tape loading once for each game 👍🏻

6:40 - the Spectrum didn’t have to redefine characters on the fly to simulate line (vector) graphics. The display was a 256x192 1-bit bitmap with each pixel individually addressable. Color was handled using 2 addressable attributes (ink and paper) in each 8x8 pixel block. Your description sounds more like the tile-based renderer in the NES.

This was my first computer back in the day. Although then I just played games. Yesterday I bought an original for £50 and plan on finally learning Basic.

For just about double the price you can rather just get a Next, then you have so much more.

3 absolute classic games , try Daley Thompsons decatherlon , and good luck oh and show folks chucky egg please.

you think that box hmdi is bad , the og Cheetah speech box was 😂😂

Playing jetpack on a friend's specks made me save a year to buy my 16k spec. £99.99 if memory serves me. What a game. Watching this video makes me want to find my old specky out the loft. I wonder if it still works. I wrote a few basic games on it. Ahhhh the memory's. :)

Lack of mode 7 killed it. It made lots of BBC programs incompatible. They would be worried schools would buy it instead of the model B. Most educational software ran in mode 7

interesting

Do yourself a favour and play Gluf, El Stompo, Dreamwalker - Alter ego 2 and Old Tower. Will blow your socks off as they are all multicolour no-clash games using the Nirvana/Bifrost engines. Best games ever.

I needed this 40 years ago, not now :D

Great video, however, I do not understand why not to include links to products in video...

I had the zx81 16k expansion pack and a vox box speech synth. Games came in text you had to type them in and save then load. Scramble took ages to write but played great.

I have an Atari 65xe but this gave me the ability to play some games that required a 130xe. So I really like it.

Word to the wise. I destroyed our spectrum by hot plugging the joystick adapter into the expansion port while it was powered on. I was probably about 12 at the time.

Amazing hardware , designed by the father of Amiga and his team, Jay Miner. The first home computer to come with a custom graphics co processor and an actual blitter , hardware sprites ,scroll and scaling, PCM capabilities on two out of four sound channels, Svideo output, build in self test interface , a screen saver and.....a Reset button(most of the above became a standard for the industry for many years). Most homebrew ports of the system look and play better even compared to the C64's ports. (like Stunt car racer, Prince of Persia, Space Harrier, Trax(chaos engine), Total eclipse, Yoomp!, Bomb jack, Pang, Assembloids, Bosconian, Electra glide, PacMan arcade).

Very Nice overview of the Atari 400 by Retro Games. I have quite a few 400,800 and 130xe machines, but this serves a purpose also. As you point out, no magic smoke from 40 year old capacitors when you decide to go Berzerk for a bit.

OMG this is awesome - my Speccy is up in the attic somewhere, I've not seen it in years, I might have to look at all this

My computer: ZX Spectrum 48K * ZX Spectrum 128K +3 * Sam Coupé

I put together one of those too even if I am an Atari 8bit user (for decades) and even if I now have 5 ZX spectrums of different models and issues. I didn't have a speccy back then so this board in an original case is a good way to have a legit experience of the system while effortlessly browsing the vast library and without wearing off your original machines! I was unlucky with the pi pico board though. It was faulty and the emulator kept freezing, denying to work properly with a usb keyboard etc . I inspected my work and found nothing wrong so I re-flashed it repeatedly and it finally bricked. I took it off the board along with 80% of the pads and traces lol, so I had to restore all that area on the board with thin wire and green nail varnish and soldered the new pi pico in place. It worked (and still does) like a charm! I use it almost every day, I load 128k games with tunes to listen to while repairing other systems in my collection. Great video btw!

Wow🎉🎉

If only it had 128K instead of 48KB.

Got a 16K for Christmas 1982, upped to 48K for my birthday in August. Best thing ever 🤩 Today I'm using a "Recreated ZX Spectrum" bluetooth keyboard which links perfectly to my android tablet running a very versatile emulator. Indistinguishable from using my original, the emulator can be set to a variety of different Spectrum models, clones, and even the ZX81 if that's your thing 👍

If only it had 512KB of RAM it would have been the best system out.