Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer
loadzx.com61 points by elvis70 7 days ago
61 points by elvis70 7 days ago
I love vintage computers, have a vintage computer collection, and have enjoyed visiting computer museums, but does this computer museum website really need to send me desktop notifications?
I visited a couple years ago - it was lovely to finally touch an authentic Spectrum, 3 decades after spending my early life hacking around on various clones. Was well worth the 30 minute ride from Coimbra.
The ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum were interesting machines at the time, but man did they have crappy keyboards.
Perhaps with a decent keyboard, the ZX Spectrum could have stood a chance against the Commodore C64. The price of the ZX Spectrum was 175 £ ($306 at the time) and the Commodore cost $595. Of course, the C64 also had much better gfx and sound capabilities.
It was manufactured to be as cheap as possible. There were the plus editions that had much better keys.
> It was manufactured to be as cheap as possible.
Exactly. The membrane keyboards weren't aesthetic choices, they were one of a number of compromises that were necessary to achieve the price point set by Clive Sinclair. He intuited that a sub-£200 colour computer would sell in huge quantities, and he was right. My (middle class) parents couldn't countenance the cost of a Commodore 64, but they were prepared to buy me a ZX Spectrum.
The Spectrum did feel slightly better, but the most annoying thing of the ZX81 was the lack of autorepeat. Moving the cursor on a long line was real physical exercise :-)
> the ZX Spectrum could have stood a chance against the Commodore C64
Isn't it kind of the other way round? When both machines were current there wre about ten ZX Spectrums sold for every Commodore 64, at least in the UK and Europe.
The Commodore 64 like the Apple II was very much a North American thing.
The emphasis should be on "our" in the title: I think they mean Portugal's first involvement, which was around 1984. If you took "our" to mean Earth, then other PCs predate the ZX Spectrum and these.
Indeed, I was part of this generation, the first real computer I got, by opposition to build your own kits from electronic stores, was the Timex 2068 from that same factory.
Only recently I got to understand Timex spotlight in USA was long gone, while in the Iberian Penisula it was still all over the place, alongside ZX Spectrums and some MSX models.
I never knew anyone with a C64 back then.
Then the next computing wave was mostly Amiga, there were some people with Sam Coupe, until Windows 3.1 came to be, which is when I left my dear Timex 2068 into PC land, buying on credit, hardly anyone could afford paying on the spot.
Hi I also was part of this generation. My first was a Sinclair ZX81 with 1 kb ram :)
And a double deck tape player, also made into your collection?
That was eventually the next step, for the school trading ground activities.
Not that the Portuguese shops had any original stuff anyway, I bought several games with clear copied covers in black and white, without manuals.
For the ZX81 there was almost none programs! I could get a chess and a flight simulator (1kb Ram), the rest i used to get from printed magazines. But for later with the Spectrum the double deck tape player was a must! We would go to the local shop and buy one game, when home, duplicate it then return it saying that it didn't load well. want another and pick a different one and so on...
The iberian peninsula was all about the ZX because pirating tapes was the norm. Also, saving custom software in tapes was cheap and producing the games in tapes, the same; they could even fight piracy by selling the games in newspaper kiosks at a very cheap price.
Similar on how the Play Station spread about the country: burning CD's and modding the PSX was trivial.
Yeah, one reason why I grew up bilingual, besides having grandparents close to Badajoz, was the amount of Speccy stuff in games and magazines that we got from the other side of the border, because why bother with translations. :)
Microhobby, Micromania, Solo Programadores (this one came later in 32 bits days), are some I still remember the names.
La Abadía del Crimen, Sir Fred, Livingstone Supongo, Game Over, and such.
And Aventuras AD; but TBH most modern games written for the ZX in Spanish (especially text adventures) are many times better than "La edad de oro del software español" (The golden age of the Spanish software).
Have to check those, I don't play modern games measured in hundreds of GB and hours, thanks for the hint.
Of course there was the 'holy trinity' of the TRS-80, PET and Apple II in 1977. But even with Sinclair, the ZX80 / ZX81 came before the Spectrum.
https://cybernews.com/editorial/the-1977-trinity-and-other-e...
And before the Apple II, the Apple I and Kim-I. As a sokoban lover I'd love one for the Apple I or the Kim-I over serial, but the 1K RAM limit looks tiny. But you can always create several tapes/ROMs with different level sets...
Nice, I live in PT. Will visit. I have around 30 working speccy's and especially the rubber key ones give me great nostalgic joy even though I was an MSX child.
On minicomputers (or microcomputers, can't remember) I am always astounding that some people wrote some micro-text adventure for the Kim-1 (think of it like a reduced version of Apple I), played with a numeric keypad plus A-F keys.
https://bluerenga.blog/2025/02/10/kim-venture-1979/
https://github.com/markbush/KIM-Venture
Also, MicroChess. I tried to find a MIT licensed copy for the Kim-Uno in order to adapt it from the ACIA (serial) output to the simulator from https://t3x.org written in T3X, but I had no luck. But you can virtually use the C sources with the bundled MOS 6502 CPU emulator, so in the end it's the same outcome as running an emulator and the MicroChess code on it. Also, it's MIT licensed.
https://www.benlo.com/microchess/ForsterMicrochessC.zip
GCC/Clang will compile it staight under GNU/Linux, BSD and OSX. Windows users can just use MinC and compile it if they want to peek and improve the implentation.
https://www.benlo.com/microchess/index.html
Kim-Uno emu, Sim65 kit https://t3x.org/t3x/0/sim65kit.html
(use T3X's "tx0 -c" command against .t files):
tx0 -c sim65
As for the ZX, there's this gem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess and I'm pretty sure people ported MicroChess for the Z80 based computers.
And, well, as for gaming, The Hobbit surpasses the adventure of the Kim-1, but with far more resources. Still, before the ZX there was the ZX81 and people did crazy things on it, even Sokoban games. But Sokoban it's something playable even with a graph paper, pen and some tokens.