By the sounds of things this isn't a recreation. I mean, they've painstakingly recreated the outside. But the innards are complete different.

True, this is just a Bluetooth keyboard, designed to be used with an emulator app, to download (paid) game packs, on a phone/tablet device.

It's not a standalone computer in itself, although there has been a lot of publicity for this keyboard recently, perhaps partly because a true standalone machine known as the 'ZX Spectrum Vega' is about to be released by another company.

Although ironically the one thing that the all-in-one Vega does not have, is the full keyboard! (Only a four-way joypad and a couple of function buttons - just enough to play games, but not to use BASIC or write programs with.)

yeah, I was disappointed. I would consider a full recreation (with adapters for output etc), but even then we have plenty of emulators.

The keyboard itself was cheap and bad.

true, but you can run Sinclair BASIC on the iOS app. so you could easily find old programmes (sic) online and run them.

of course we already have emulators for that.

I still can't believe my mum lost my zx81.

I've still got mine. Occurred to me today that I should be buried with it.

Most 8-bit coders are very sceptical of Elite Systems. Like many others I was approached to port Spectrum games to an iPhone-emulatable format at effectively piecework rates. Like many others I refused. It's good to see the Spectrum recreated, but I would be anxious anout backing this.

You can use it as a Bluetooth keyboard for your real computer. Man that sure is some nostalgia masochism right there.

Yes. Horrible keyboard. As in really bad.

Having used my cousin's ZX, I was glad I was brought up on Acorn kit..

Well, it was better than the Atari 400 I learned to program on. I dearly wish I could have bought a replacement keyboard like the Sinclair folks could.

It didn't think it was all that bad, and you could easily wipe it down. Given the ease of cartridge loading games, it was a great machine for toddlers..... ;-)

I wish I could claim to be a toddler when it came out. :(

Me too, but my son was born in 1985 ;-)

You could. There was a keyboard kit for the 400 and I remember it being decent. But the kit may not have been very well known.

If it wasn't advertised in Antic, Byte, Creative Computing, or Dr. Dobbs then I wouldn't of heard about it.

I just googled one of those and my word that's a mile more horrible!

I'd rather have used a typewriter than one of those ones.

It was cheap and had Jay Miner's chips in it. It was my road to programming, but I do agree, typing was a major hassle. I later had some problems with my fingertips.

They should have put the Bluetooth dongle in a fake memory expansion cartridge that wiggled loose over time, and have their iOS app restart when it loses connection with the keyboard. That would be masochism :-)

This looks beautiful. I learned BASIC and assembler programming on the Spectrum and it occupies a special place in my heart.

My mother told me recently that I used to ask her to read out the code from magazines while I would type them in to the spectrum.

I have a vivid memory of typing in long strings of hex from magazines to create graphics programs - kind of proto-photoshop things. The programmer had split them into strings of 256 characters each and when you first ran the program it would tell you which string was incorrect - which made it a hell of a lot easier to correct!

I remember creating a picture of Madonna from a poster on my wall that I thought was really great!

Ah, the 1980's :)

One of the joys of emulation is not having to use the lousy keyboards some machines came with. Might as well just use the real thing.

What is it? Is it a fancy keyboard? Does it have a 6502 except with additional fanciness for I/O?

The Spectrum had a Z80, not a 6502, and it's got neither of those. It's just a bluetooth keyboard.

Yeah, its a bluetooth keyboard with some apps. I was a bit concerned someone would buy one thinking they had a new computer and not a very odd keyboard choice.

Their website doesn't exactly go out of its way to be clear about what it is, that's for sure.

It's just a bluetooth keyboard. And if it has, say, an ARM controller, then it likely has about 10 times more processing power than the 4Mhz Z80 ZX-Spectrum had.

It's comical that you need an additional iOS/Android device with about 1000 times the computing power of the Spectrum to run games with a keyboard that's (likely) 10 times more powerful than the original thing.

Makes you wonder why it doesn't have an emulator built-in.

Hardware on a spectrum is very simple, one Z80 at 4Mhz, and a single asic doing video output. Sound is one bit, either on or off (cpu has to generate the waveforms). Super simple to emulate.

Screen layout was crazy though... 6kb monochrome framebuffer, split into 256x256 pixel 3rds (top, middle, bottom - 2kb each). Each horizontal line is 32 bytes one bit per pixel, first line is top of screen, second line in memory is line 8 on the screen, next is line 16, once you get to line 256 you are back up to row 1 on the screen...) Colour was an additional 768 byte block of memory, one byte per 8x8 screen pixels. One nibble for the foreground colour, one for background.

Makes me cry thinking about the time I wasted trying to write sprite functions in assembly.

Anyways once you have power, bluetooth, modest arm processor and a keyboard all you needs is your hdmi output hardware (and your emulator/loader software).

> One nibble for the foreground colour, one for background.

No, 3 bits for foreground, 3 bits for background, 1 bit for extra brightness and 1 bit for blink (swaps bg/fg every second).

Oops sorry, I remembered the brightness bit but forgot it was for both colors at the same time. Ahhh yes and the flash bit :) thanks. The final piece of the video output was the border color (on one of the out ports of the z80). By syncing with the vertical retrace you could 'draw' into the border (most tape loading routines changed the border color as bits were read from the tape to give the familiar border stripes when games loaded from tape).