Category: ZX Spectrum

ZX Spectrum handheld campaign already gets twice of the initial target

The purists didn’t have time to rant about the Vega Plus and how it diminishes the ZX Spectrum legacy with a lesser machine. Actually, a lot of people don’t agree with that statement and already helped the crowd-funded campaign to reach more than 200% of the initial goal. At this point, with still 30 days to go, the campaign has…

ZX Spectrum Vega goes fully portable with new model Vega+

Even for those who didn’t like the ZX Spectrum Vega for its lack of a full keyboard cannot deny that the game console is a commercial success, and one of the big “retro” releases of 2015. For 2016, Retro Computers Ltd announce the launch of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+ accompanied of an IndieGoGo crowd-funding campaign. This new model is a…

How the ZX Spectrum Helped the 1980s Become Video Gaming’s Most Creative Decade

VICE.COM has published an excerpt from the book Electronic Dreams – How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer by Tom Lean. The book was recently published by Bloomsbury Publishing and tells the story of how computers invaded British homes for the first time turning it into a user-friendly domestic technology. It also covers the other side of the history with the…

Another clone of the 'Battle City' on the ZX Spectrum

Battle City is a multi-directional shooter video game originally developed for the Family Computer produced and published in 1985 by Namco. There is also versions for the NES, Gameboy and many other platforms…but not for the ZX Spectrum. The active Speccy community didn’t sweat because of that and many clones were made throughout the years. Since there is never enough…

Usborne Books releases old computer books catalog for free

For most of us, if not all of us, getting books from the 80s in PDF form is nothing really new, as we are used getting them from several different sources, including Internet Archive, Bombjack.org and many others. Nonetheless, it is newsworthy when a publishing house decided to post his 1980s catalog for free. The books are mostly targetted to…

Game 'Dingo' v1.3 for ZX Spectrum released for download.

A new and improved version of Dingo for the Spectrum is available for download The changes in the 2015 version (version 1.3) are; A much improved control method. This was the bug-bear for many people with the original release, but it’s now MUCH better. Enemy pre-spawn warning – so you can see where the Dingos are about to appear and…

Retrochallenge 2016 – Apple II Lo-Res Library – Part 1

Usually retro computer enthusiasts have a “thing” for pixelated graphics. This is so true that you can see the myriad of modern games mimicking 8 or 16 bits graphics being released all the time. I have to confess that I am one of those, but I sometimes go further and graphics like the TRS-80 and ZX81 just makes me happy….

ZX Enhanced Compo 2016 – Only 'pimped out' ZX Speccy allowed!

This compo is really interesting. While most compos would not allow anything other than standard machines, ZX Enhanced takes the opposite approach. Only ZX Spectrum compatible machines that have some enhancement can participate. The compo rules state that “target platforms must be equipped with various extensions like graphic modes other than ‘6912’, RAM above 128kB, CPU clock frequency above 3.5MHz…

New version of Z88dk v1.99A – Cross-platform development environment for Z80 based computers

A new version of the Z88dk development environment for Z80 based computer like the Amstrad CPC, Cambridge Z88, MSX, Sinclair ZX 81, Sinclair ZX Spectrum was just released. The release is a transition release on the way to v2.0 which aims on using the SDCC compiler instead of the Small-C compiler, which was used before. This leads to much faster…

The Infocom Cabinet: Binders and Folders of Infocom

Infocom was the text adventure main publisher in the 80s, being Zork  the best-known among the company’s many successful games. A collection of digitized scans from a large cache of documents related to the game publisher Infocom, assembled by Steven Meretzky of Infocom was recently released and made available through Internet Archive. During his time at Infocom, Steve Meretzky meticulously…