Sinclair Spectrum 128K Plus 2A - Sold as faulty - but was it? Not 100% if my fix is what fixed it!

[@MrClump]

40 years of Spectrum ownership and I never knew that about the loading bars! 🙄 Just goes to show there is always something to learn.

[@jonwheal]

It was news to me too!

[@brendonelton]

Always good to see a speccy saved from the scrap heap! superb stuff!

[@m4rgin4l]

I understand now why some people clean the PCBs before doing any kind of repair. NIce catch!

[@Retrohertz]

Also, why wouldn't someone clean it anyway? It makes no sense.

[@Mittac001]

Oh the memories, of the Speccy 128k. I used to have the 128k +3, whereas my step-brother had the CPC464. Those were the days.

[@britinindy4255]

Here's a tip that's worked for me for 40 years. When reseating ICs, use a Staedtler white eraser to lightly polish the pins. It's enough to remove that thin film of oxidization that accumulates over the years. Other brands of eraser might work but I swear by Staedtler because they will not scour the pins.

[@Chris2323518]

Anybody not wanting to make modification to the board but also not wanting to use old tapes (or having problems with the belts), just use a bluetooth cassette adapter. They fit into mechanical tape drives and you can use them just as you used audio cassettes after you paired them with your smartphone/tablet from where you can stream the TAP/TZX files with any Android TZX player.

[@B3tanTyronne]

I had literally no idea these were a thing, thanks for the heads-up.

[@tspawn35]

Not having an extension for the screw driver that fits into the deep sockets has been the biggest annoyance with the ifixit kit I have.

[@JVHShack]

Rather than extension bits, I think longer bits without an extension would be better overall. In my experience, some bit holders won't fit into recessed holes.

[@sertacpamukcu]

Thanks, It's nice to see an old friend. I had one of them in 1986, which someone brought me from UK. It was about £149 if I'm not wrong.

[@jameslangridge5878]

Looking forward to more Sinclair stuff! I’ve got my old 2A in the loft 😊

[@djwilduk]

Nice to get a quick win. I have a +2b , must get it out for a go this weekend.

[@thomas-i5o7h]

I wish these machines had been sold in shops here in the states. I gladly would have picked one up !!

[@kdrum90]

The music around @ 2:30 is perceived as plastic cracking when watching video using a smartphone with a built-in (tiny) speaker. All sounds of the melody are silent except those clicky instruments that are boosted by the tiny speaker. Combined with the video, this gives a spooky feeling of cracking but motionless plastic 😮

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

Giving a bath in distilled water is a good idea for dirty boards(without adjustable resistors) especially after putting new sockets. Debris from the de-soldering pump seemsto stuck everywhere causing all short of small issues. It have worked for me at least 3 times.

[@DanielReidTheEditor0]

That version of the spectrum was great when I had one. I used to load screens data into memory and recall it by LOAD !"screen" Screen$ and the screen image or picture would come up on the screen without reloading it and was nice and fast. Ideal for demos

[@fastbeta]

Spectrum Rulez! I made my own ZX Spectrum 128 with Beta Disk interface on Pi Pico board. Firmware is available

[@frankowalker4662]

I've put a CF Card in my +2B. In the kit are 2 replacememt ROMs and the IDE to CF Card adapter. Really easy to fit, setup and use. I have the card sticking out of the back of mine so it's easy to remove and put software on.

[@dave0smeg]

Wish I'd known the audio trick on my +2 when the IC on the tape deck failed. I butchered some external jack sockets on the back behind the tape deck so I could use an external deck.

[@Colin_Ames]

Always nice when the fix is easy. Enjoyable video, as always.

[@ClassicRetroByte]

Very nice and clear commentary on this one, Your channel has come along way since I 1st started watching you. 👍 Although You did get my hopes up when you started work on the Sound Output. As I wrongly thought you was going to do the Stereo ACB mod. 😮‍💨 Glad to hear that you will be doing more Spectrum related stuff as that is my Favorite computer from the 80`s. ☺

[@retrotechguy]

Nice fix! I recently got my first BBC Micro and have a ZX81 waiting for attention - love the colours on most other British computers though! Should really try to get my hands on a Spectrum…

[@FatNorthernBigot]

RGB on a Spectrum? Luxury!!! Back in my day, we had UHF channel 36 only... If we were lucky.

[@TheTurnipKing]

It was a feature ever since the Sinclair 128k, though it turns to to be fairly trivial to bypass the modulator and get composite video out instead, allowing you to bypass all the tuning. Not that I knew that at the time, of course. I used RF well into my ownership of an Amiga 600, because most of my TVs were hand me downs and it was an ariel socket or nothing.

[@chainq68k]

I'm a fan of "other systems", but this is why I'm here - to watch and learn something about systems I don't have. And that criteria in my case covers basically the entire Spectrum range. To me these videos are far more interesting than anything C64 related for example - that system I know quite well, and have half a dozen of them in various shape and form. (And lets not mention Amiga which is my No.1 love, and honestly some Amiga stuff on YT even from "big names" is just pure cringe and a pain to watch.) So yeah. More Spectrum stuff on this channel? Bring it on!

[@chainq68k]

Whoops, I just realized your previous video was about the Amiga... Just to clarify - I did not mean that one above. :) I did not watch that video yet, to be fully honest (but I'm going to). See, it was less interesting to me, while I immediately clicked on this one, when the notification dropped.

[@miikasuominen3845]

The first thing, that came to my mind was... You lucky bastard! 😜 Always nice to see an old Spectrum saved! Love those machines!

[@techkev140]

I bought one of these. My first 128K game i load crashed immediately the moment it finished loading (or when i first started the game? Longtime ago). Those load times were not short. It was Spellbound. 48K games ran fine, any 128K game crashed. Returned it to the shop they checked it and swappedthe next day with another. I got a call a week later from a friend who had a problem with his new 128K+2. Strangely enough, experiencing the same problem i had. When the shop swapped it they literally swapped just the system itself, i still had the original box. We compared the serial numbers, his system and my box were the same! Tested my... Eric in Skool Daze could have done better.

[@CitroenGS]

I just got another +2a, British keyboard this time. I still have to open the package and test it. Don't know if it is a short board like this one or a long board like the +3...

[@1107ml]

Great guide im going to do this to a plus 2 I recently purchased What did you use to clean it the case it looks shiny ty

[@kaitlyn__L]

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those fibres were polymer-based and full of static! These chips and circuits were often rather sensitive to stray capacitance... and that fluff had it all over all the legs! Seems to have pushed it over the edge and it failed to init reset or something.

[@JxH]

When cleaning detritus off of a circuit card, the technique used should actually *remove* the detritus. Your brush and alcohol technique would seem to get it wet and move it around, but I didn't see where the detritus actually went. Perhaps there was some aspect of the technique that was not included in the video, such as wiping the dirty brush onto a paper tissue, or perhaps rinsing the whole thing with enough alcohol that the gunk was washed away down to a paper towel. Personally, I'm not above rinsing a filthy circuit card under a tap with warm water, then rinsing with distilled (or R.O.) water, or alcohol, to get the hard water minerals out, then very carefully blow drying. The gunk ends up down the drain of course. One needs to use common sense of course, as some components don't like being wet.

[@AgentHeX_0007]

Must get my 128k (toast rack) out of the loft and get it fixed up. It's been up there for 30 years.

[@Retrohertz]

That should not be in a loft. They sell for hundreds now.

[@TheTurnipKing]

@@Retrohertz "last of the V8's. I mean Sinclar Spectrums"

[@bazza5699]

love the sinclair stuff, i bet that original owner is kicking himself.

[@Rick_Todd]

Hero Quest is pretty good on the ZX Spectrum . Just make sure you play the Disk Version as its the usual Multi Load Knightmare if you play it from cassette.

[@mettie1982]

I remember getting one of these with the light gun as part of the James Bond pack and my own 14" TV for Christmas. Anyone else used to get Your sinclair with the tapes with them?😂😂😂😂😂

[@Torbjorn.Lindgren]

That's a PLCC puller, it's not intended to be used for pulling regular DIP chips! You're usually much better off with "bent U" ones with wider hooks intended for DIP chips (google Jonard EX-1 for example, but you can get a cheap one for almost nothing). There's also more specialized DIP pullers that does more of the work for you like the Jonard EX-2 and the chinese clones of THAT, but here even the clones are more expensive so only make sense if you do it a lot.

[@medes5597]

I found it a tad amusing that he was talking about being careful and not bending the pins while using the wrong kind of puller that might bend the pins.

[@Censik]

Pretty cool piece of hardware, but what is annoying - there is no beeper and no proper stereo sound output from the AY chip by default. They probably saved a ton of money on a tiny embedded speaker.

[@RobertLock1978]

Heheh- that mobo looks like a set of stairs..... i think i can almost here Sugar: "Yeah, make it a zigzag like that i want that ha'penny per mobo savings for my kollection"

[@giulianomarco]

7:50 Bite my shiny metal heatsink! 😋👍

[@stevezm100]

hey nice video, any ideas on an issue I have with a speccy +2A/B it plays many games fine but some which are compatible with +2A like Magicland Dizzy do not play and just crash after starting the game. I suspect RAM (although they passed the ram tests) may be an issue so Ive ordered some new RAM chips to try. Any ideas what it could be? thanks

[@MaggieKeizai]

I'd love one of these, shame they're nonexistent here in the US.

[@neozeed8139]

I had to go to the uk to get one. nobody will ship anything on the cheap. actually so many ebay auctions are local delivery only, which is super annoying. I should also add the build quality on the old Sinclair stuff is *terrible*... Expect a lot of problems, they sourced known bad components, along with just aweful memory, that plagues 128's and ql's. Too bad amstrad never made a ql.

[@AlwaysStaringSkyward]

This made for a very pleasant lunch hour watch, thank you! I am wondering if you have an ultrasonic cleaner would you opt to clean the whole thing?

[@TheRetroShack]

I would indeed!

[@thediscoman2001]

I BOUGHT THE PLUS3 HATED THE plus2a cassette was unreliable as owt constant loading problems and chewing cassettes up even mates had same issues so we went back to +3, worst thing that happened to Sinclair was Amstrad buying them out went down hill after that and i think us spectrum nerds would agree, sugar wanted to turn the spectrum into an Amstrad and failed. Look at the things sir clive invented the first electric car and everybody though he was crazy and looks now

[@TheTurnipKing]

It was initially a nightmare, but a change to the line was almost always a compatibility minefield. The Amstrad boards are well documented and understood now, so they're fairly trivial to get up to spec. One of the best things you can do for a +2A is to restore the use of external tape decks via the sound port. One of my favorite mods of years gone by was the "sawn off +2" oldmachinery.blogspot.com/2012/09/sinclair-spectrum-128k-2-mini.html

[@dom1310df]

My +2A has... something wrong with it. It'll load games with custom loaders fine but normal tapes won't load at all. Refurbished the tape drive so I think it's an issue on the electronics side of things.

[@TheRetroShack]

I hope you get it working!

[@nickosinit]

retoshack for ever

[@3dhYT]

The keyboard is still dirty.

[@piconano]

These computers came about after I was 21. As a result, I never played video games on them. I went the Apple then the IBM way. I did buy a kit form of ZX81, but lost interest as it was too slow and limiting for my taste. I still find these videos nostalgic because I studied the architecture of the Z80A, 6502, 6809 and 68000 CPUs in university and fixed arcade games and computers part-time while going to school.

[@jinxterx]

How do you know it's an old girl and not an old boy?🤔

[@TheRetroShack]

I looked ;)

[@headcrab4090]

Are you a dentist by profession? ;)

[@TheRetroShack]

I can see why you’d think that from this video :) :) But, no - I’m not :)

[@TheRetroShack]

I can see why you’d think that from this video :) :) But, no - I’m not :)