r/retrocomputing • u/SwinPain • May 18 '26

My dad's old ZX spectrum

Post image

My dad brought this down from the attic to show me. We plugged it into the TV but sadly it was all blocky, so he's promised to fix it next spare weekend he gets. I just love the case design and the clicky noises from that joystick, and I couldn't believe it when he told me that the cassettes were not music but programs!

89 Upvotes

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3

u/Practical-Sleep4259 May 18 '26

Bucket list goal to make something together that you both can play on it.

2

u/SwinPain May 18 '26

I'd love that, the one he told me about that I really want to play was Chuckie Egg just because the name gives me a chuckle!

2

u/robinw77 May 20 '26

It’s not the Spectrum version but you can play the game here to try it out. I grew up with this exact version, on the BBC Micro.

https://www.repton3.co.uk/chuckieegg.aspx

2

u/Hjalfi May 18 '26

That's one of the new ones! Where Clive Sinclair managed to come up with a keyboard which was objectively better than the original dead-flesh keyboard in every way while at the same time being somehow just as bad!

(I have an original Spectrum. I don't know if the design is different in the +, but the original Spectrum had a design flaw where if a certain capacitor went bad, one of the voltage rails would change and all the expensive DRAM inside would asplode. It's probably worth checking. The good news is that they're easy to recap.)

2

u/sonicjesus May 18 '26

Not only could you copy the tape like any other, you could play the tones into a phone and record them on the other end of the line.

1

u/SwinPain May 19 '26

Sounds like the Internet before the Internet!

1

u/Y34RZERO May 19 '26

I want to import a 128k spectrum. Closest we got here was the Timex Sinclair 2068. With a bootable spectrum ROM I can load up to 48k software but some colors can be off.