The World Of Spectrum has more technical information and detail than you can shake a very large stick at - far more than I could ever hope to fit onto these pages! As it is, I'm going to give a brief overview of the stuff I had to play with when I was a kid, back when games came on tape and mobile phones used car batteries. These days, my watch has more processing power than a Spectrum and where once I used C90s to store games and data, I can now buy a chunk of silicon smaller than a postage stamp with 8gb (or more) of memory on it - double that of a DVD, ten times that of a CD, nine thousand times that of an Amiga floppy and twenty-two thousand times that of an old C15 (in terms of data storage). The machine The first Spectrum (the first computer!) I ever saw was a 16k model running Frogger at someone's birthday party, probably somewhere around 1985 or so. Computers were still very much a novelty at the time, and apart from occasional trips to the arcades at Pontins and the BBC computers used at Primary School for word processing, I didn't really see much else of them until I received a grey ZX Spectrum +2 for Christmas in 1987. And so started a long procession of technology which led to this point, 20 years later... The +2 was actually the first Spectrum released by Amstrad, who bought the rights to the system when Sinclair Research went down the drain. Modelled along similar lines to Amstrad's own computer design, it gave the humble Speccy extra memory, a sound chip and built-in tape deck and joystick ports. While this reduced the number of cables (and plug sockets) needed, this did lead to some frustration, as the tape-deck didn't have a counter on it: when searching for games on a compilation, you had to continually fast-forward and rewind while hoping to hit silence or a leader signal. On the plus side, the tape deck used the TV's speaker for output, meaning that you could have real music while playing! The main rival to the Spectrum was the Commodore 64, and flame wars continue to this day as to which was better. It's also interesting to see how far we've come in the 25 years since the original Spectrum was released! Spectrum +2 Commodore 64 Nintendo DS Playstation 3 Processor Zilog Z80 at 3.5mhz MOS 6510 at 1mhz ARM946E-S at 67Mhz ARM7TDMI at 33Mhz Cell CPU at 3.2Ghz 1 PPE 7 SPEs Memory 128kb[0] 64kb [1] 4MB 512MB [2] Sound Beeper and AY-3-8912 3-channel sound SID chip 3-channel sound w/programmable filter 16-channel stereo sound Dolby 5.1 surround sound Graphics Custom ULA w/256*192 resolution and 16 colours [3] VIC-II with 16 colours, hardware sprites and resolutions up to 320*200 Custom 3D/2D hardware; 16-bit colour, 2 screens each with 256*192 resolution [4] Nvidia GPU Up to 1080p (1920*1080) w/32-bit colour Data Storage Cassette - approx. 24kb/min Microdrive - 85kb [5] 3" disk - 180kb Cassette - approx 18kb/min 5.25 disk - 165k/330k (single/double-sided) DS carts: 4mb-256mb GBA carts: 4mb-32mb 20-80gb HDD[6] Optical media - Blu-ray supports up to 50gb per disk [0] 80kb of the 128kb could only be accessed via bank-switching (i.e. five 16kb banks) [1] 36kb available to BASIC. Programmers using assembly could utilise practically the entire 64kb of ram [2] Ish. It's split into two 256mb blocks and there's various other bits of memory scattered around to support the PPEs [3] Actually 15 colours - BLACK and BRIGHT BLACK were identical. Also, the Spectrum displayed colour via an "overlay": each 8*8 block of pixels could have a foreground and a background colour set, making colour available in a 32*24 grid and leading to the infamous colour-clash problems... [4] Tech specs for the DS are surprisingly scarce! [5] The microdrive was tape-based, and re-formatting the drive would stretch the tape and increase the capacity... [6] Sony allows users to install their own HDDs, so the PS3 can use any sized drive (with 500gb being the largest currently commercially available) The joysticks The +2 came with the ill-famed SJS-1: a cheap, grey joystick with leaf-switches and a single button on top of the stick. Unresponsive and uncomfortable, replacing it proved somewhat tricky, as the +2 used the "Interface II" pinout, rather than the standard Atari pinout (generally known as Kempston in the Sinclair world): you therefore needed an adapter (which I've never seen) or a dual-cable joystick: these generally had a grey plug hanging by the side of the standard black-plug. At some point however, I finally received one of the finest joysticks ever made: the Cheetah Mach I+. A microswitched stick, with two microswitched buttons on the base, two contact-switch buttons in the stick and even an autofire mode, this proved to be a highly hardy piece of kit, far better than the Quickshots and Atari joysticks most people used. Give or take the occasional need to clean the microswitch contacts, this joystick lasted for the entire duration of my time with the Spectrum, and I was delighted when I managed to pick up a replacement at a car boot sale (it's since been combined with a Mach 125, as while I love the I+ for it's microswitches, the 125 featured an fighter-plane style "cobra head", which made it look far funkier). The lightguns There were a few efforts at lightguns on the Spectrum - the Magnum released by Sinclair, and the Defender released by Cheetah. Of the two, the Cheetah one was far superior: it was a nicely detailed and unique design which used heavy duty plastic to make for a far better tactile experience. The Sinclair one was heavily modelled after the Sega Master System lightgun (itself modelled on a design from an anime TV show) and generally looked and felt like a cheap plastic toy. Sadly, while there is emulation support for the Magnum (via ZX Spin), as far as I'm aware, noone's reverse engineered the Defender yet - given there's only six games available, it's not too surprising! Sadly, neither got much support past the initial batch of games which came with them - and things were made worse by the fact that the guns used slightly different technology: games for one wouldn't work with the other... Still, I had fun with both back in the day!