I chose to purchase one such ZX Spectrum clone made by Zaxon (Piotr Bugaj), going by the name of ‘Just Speccy 128’ after seing his posts regarding it in various Sinclair Facebook groups. The list of new peripherals is almost endless but some have gone further still, producing Spectrum clones that fill the gaps in functionality that Sir Clive left in the originals. Some very clever people are developing new hardware, enabling those compromised machines we once knew to do all the things we always wanted them to do and often exceed it. So what is the Just Speccy 128?įast forward 34 years and the ZX Spectrum scene is very much alive and well. We knew that and embraced its many flaws. A compromise machine made to a low price point. In truth, that was what the rubber keyed Spectrum was. If we wanted to use a joystick with our 16/48K, a joystick interface had to be added, the list of compromises goes on…

We had to wait until the 128 hit the shelves to get AY chip sound effects in our games. Sound was another issue, with early rubber key Spectrums only having a beeper – the brunt of many a Commodore 64 owner’s joke.

Yes, there were various disk drives, microdrives and wafadrives available but those of us that were bought ZX Spectrums because of financial constraints (and I’m guessing that was a lot of us) were never going have those expensive peripherals hooked up to our humble micros. Loading times were another bugbear – being able to make yourself a cuppa whilst waiting for your favourite game to load sounds useful, but I didn’t drink that much tea when I was 11 to be honest. What is RGC? What is Retro Games Collector and who is behind it?Īs anyone who ever owned a ZX Spectrum will testify, loading from tape could sometimes be a frustrating affair, what with misaligned heads, dropouts and all manner of other things causing the dreaded ‘ R Tape loading error, 0:1‘.

Speccy psu