Ah, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. A popular computer in Britain and beyond, but now rather thin on the ground. If you can’t find one, fear not, for now—you can apparently build a new one with new parts! [TME Retro] is here to demonstrate how.
Before you get excited, no—Sinclair has not risen from the dead. Instead, it’s simply down to the state of the retrocomputing community. There are enough reproduction parts and components out there for the ZX Spectrum that it’s now possible to assemble the whole computer from new bits. You can get new cases and new mechanical keyboards, and a 100% compatible motherboard in the form of the Harlequin board. The latter even reproduces the unobtainable Spectrum ULA glue logic chip in raw logic!
It’s neat to see the ZX Spectrum live on decades after the production lines ground to a halt. We’ve seen similar feats achieved with the legendary Commodore 64; you’d think we had enough of them given they were the best-selling computer of all time. Video after the break.
Heh, well, won’t be “all new” for much longer considering the Z80 is unfortunately finally out of production.
Soon you’ll need an adapter for an eZ80 (maybe, timing may not allow the substitution) or a microcontroller pretending to be a Z80.
But none of that distracts from this being a cool project!
I’m pretty sure that in a couple of decades ordering chips made using an outdated process will be as easy as ordering PCBs nowadays. Just send a .zip file with all the masks, wait 1-2 weeks and you get your freshly baked Z80s or ULA or 6502 or SID or Amiga OCS or…
There will be new old stock for many years. And there are plenty of used chips, as Z80 was quite common, not only in home computers. And there are all those clones and variants. And if one doesn’t care for hardware, there is always a FPGA implementation for chip itself, or for the entire computer…
“Heh, well, won’t be “all new” for much longer considering the Z80 is unfortunately finally out of production.”
Zilogs version, yes. In DIP format, yes.
How about other manufacturers? There wasn’t just one Z80, after all.
Then there was the SInclair QL. Much more lucky with the processor and the upgrade boards. But unforunate in the market compared to the ZX.
Why use all that discrete logic? I understand that the original ASIC is not available anymore but why not just put all that logic into a nice programmable chip of ourself? Or is that part of the charm?