Update to the (free) Opcodes app has added details of everyone’s favourite support chips (SID, VIC) and contemporary memory chips. Hopefully a useful resource when you’re retro-hacking.
apps.apple.com/us/app/opcod...
What was in your tape box? Alphabetically sorted with handwritten labels? One massive tangled pile? Chronologically ordered by the date you recorded over the previous thing? There were no wrong answers, but some of you are lying.
What a haul!
It was more varied than that. On the ZX80 they ran out of token space so one used RANDOMISE and then the letters U S R which was never tokenised. They ran out of ROM space on the ZX81 so the token was just RAND. On the ZX Spectrum plenty of space so they used the international spelling RANDOMIZE.
Sinclair BASIC was developed by Nine Tiles Ltd, not Sinclair! And to call machine code you used RANDOMIZE USR - a brilliant hack because the language forced you to use the return value somehow.
https://sinclair.wiki.zxnet.co.uk/wiki/Sinclair_BASIC
That would have been a syntax error. Demonstrably the west can’t lecture anyone on supremacy.
And there's still a small Spectrum scene in the former Eastern bloc releasing stuff cause of how much it got cloned. I mean just look at the Yandex Retro Game Battle. yrgb.org
Fun fact: The ZX Spectrum was banned from several Soviet-era countries before being enthusiastically cloned in all of them. The Pentagon 128 was a Russian Spectrum clone with better hardware. Nobody at Sinclair Research was sure whether to be flattered or annoyed.
The XBerry Pi puts a fully compatible ZX Spectrum Next into a Raspberry Pi form factor - smaller, cheaper, and perfect for tinkering. Great review covering how it stacks up against MiSTer, emulators, and the official Next. retrogamecoders.com/xberry-pi-review/
The Spectrum's keyword entry system meant you typed PRINT by pressing P. One key, one keyword. It was either a stroke of genius or an admission that the keyboard was too awful to type whole words on. Possibly both.
🫡
🎁 Break Space Issue 5 is here. They look at 38 brand new titles for the ZX Spectrum from Q1 2026 & more...
Check: breakspace.itch.io/break-space-...
#magazine #zxs #zxspectrum #breakspace #retro #free
Warning!
TGIF
Sinclair Research Technical Advisory:
If your ZX81 displays a screen full of random characters upon startup, this may indicate a hardware fault. Alternatively, it may indicate that your program is working exactly as designed. We cannot tell the difference. Neither can you.
Found a great Z80 and 8080 instruction set reference on 8bit-era.cz - every opcode mapped out with flags, timing, and Intel cross-references. Perfect for anyone hacking on Spectrum or ZX81 assembly projects.
The ZX Spectrum manual contained a chapter on floating-point arithmetic. It was written for an audience of eleven-year-olds. Half of them understood it. The other half grew up to work in marketing.
The BIFROST* Engine solves the ZX Spectrum's colour clash problem with clever 8x1 multicolour rendering - and it's open source. Games like Knights and Demons DX were built with it. sinclair.wiki.zxnet.co.uk/wiki/BIFROST*_Engine
What’s the best music to listen to while typing in listings from a magazine?
Sir Clive Sinclair received a knighthood in 1983 for services to British industry. He celebrated by releasing the Sinclair QL, which crashed on live television. The timing was, as they say, unfortunate.
#ZX81 And now we can fly 🚀, and crash into stuff. All coming along nicely.
The ULAplus spec is one of those brilliant community efforts - it gives the ZX Spectrum access to 256 colours by replacing the standard FLASH and BRIGHT attribute bits with a 4-palette lookup system. Backwards compatible and elegant. Love it. https://sinclair.wiki.zxnet.co.uk/wiki/ULAplus
Who else owned a magazine with a cassette taped to the front cover? And who else carefully peeled it off, played it into their Spectrum, got a loading error, flipped it over, tried again, and then went outside?
Oh yes. And then colour overlaid on top
Steve Vickers (l) and Richard Altwasser (r) in front of Trinity College when they founded Rainbow Computing, later renamed Jupiter Cantab.
Go blaming Richard Altwasser (right) 🙂
Not much more than 200 vertical lines for compatibility with *all* TV sets and 192=3*64 so I guess that it was tempting. Maybe it helped simplifying the display of the 8 by 8 pixel characters.
The Spectrum's screen memory layout was not arranged in sequential order. Rows went 0, 8, 16, 1, 9, 17... It was like someone shuffled a deck of cards and said "this is fine, ship it." And they did. And it was.
He can’t let any slight go. He’s psychotic.
One of my favs
Cassette inlay for a ZX81 game called QS Defenda. A space ship flies over an airbrushed planet.
Are you this young?
