Blimey, what a blast from the past. The turbo was made by RAM Electronics (Fleet) Limited, Fleet Road, Hampshire. They had a high street shopfront there, and we made various peripherals in a portakabin out the back of the shop. Production then moved down to Church Crookham with a larger premises. Thousands of those damned things must have passed through my hands. Quite pleased to see there are still a few floating around though.
As much as emulators allow you to enjoy the games, you just can't replace the experience of working with the original hardware, putting it together and getting the thing to work. Priceless!
Did you know? The common Anglo-Saxon "Z" is "zee". The French brought the "zed" when they took over the throne of England in 1066. So it has always been the commoner in England who used "zee" and the higher mucky-mucks who used "zed".
Wow, I was suprised to see how well this Sinclair has lasted throughout the years :D the game play is rather fluid, and it still looks like a fun high quality game!
I hate tape drives! It was annoying to go over to this one guy's house to play computer games and have to have an actual conversation with him for five minutes. I always put up with him until he said, "Try this game. It's worth the half-hour wait." . . . . . It was a blank tape.
At 1364 baud, a 48K game took slightly under five minutes to load. Most games were less. And booting the computer took all of two seconds. You can probably boot a modern PC and game in under that time, but not by much.
@@diederick76 Let's not discount the price difference, either. £1.99 vs £14.99 for the cheapest games of each format. I could buy a new game every week.
There were two reasons why the cartridges didn't catch on: the fact that only a small subset of spectrum owners had the zx interface 2 (or equivalent), as you say, but also that the cartridges were only 16k, whereas many tape games used the full 48k.
actually that 16K limitation was a huge failure. on the other hand someone broke this limitation and can produce ALL the cartridges on one ROM www.thingiverse.com/thing:1887326
I grew up in England, but I moved to the States eight years ago. My sister came to visit today, and she brought (at my eager request) my ZX81, ZX Spectrum and ZX Spectrum +. She also brought my Ram Turbo interface. Thanks to World of Spectrum, I was able to download and print the instruction manual, and thanks to one of my favorite yourubers, I got to watch this awesome review of it :) Thanks for another entertaining and educational video! The button on the side is a reset button according to WoS, but mine is the earlier model that doesn't have the button.
"Cassette Tapes are wonderful, it sure beat the heck out of punch cards." "Getting your hand jammed in a revolving door is wonderful, it sure beat the heck out of getting hit with a train"
Had the Sinclair ZX came out in the USA the same time it did in the UK and had good distribution and was sold much cheaper than Commodore, Apple, TI, Radio Shack etc it might have been a hit over here. It looks like a very basic and fun computer.
@@GameHammerCG What do you mean? It was extremely basic :) Although with a descent processor that made it possible to program pretty good games (despite practically no assistance *at all* from the unusually simplistic hardware).
Wow. This is sooo retro! That monitor is sooo CRT glowey! I remember playing all sorts of stuff on a friend's 48K Spectrum back in the day. Thanks for the retro ride man! :-D
I was really hoping you would show us the old tape cassette loading haha, I've never seen it done and I enjoy your videos. Oh well, this is nearly 4yrs. old now so it's probably out of the question to request that. Great video nonetheless! Jet Pac is awesome!
Loading a game back then was the fun part, the anticipation just made it worth while, i wish I could live that excitement just once more, they were happy times for me as a kid.
I'd completely forgotten about the Ram Turbo that I used to own, until seeing this one. So the completely forgetting wasn't completely completed ! Enjoyed the review :)
i had this back in 87 (from 83) and me and a mate wanted to do a newspaper for the flat we lived in.. needed a printer and that particular connector for it lol i still have the sinclair zx spectrum with all of 48KB of memory LOL and a ton of tapes with games on them. the best computer ever.
Ahhh Jet Pac the first Speccy game I ever played and still one of the best that I enjoy still to this day! ;) Awesome piece of kit shame as you said it was wasted. Have you ever heard of the Opus disk drive that's what we had and it doubled as a joystick interface, very tricky to get to work but when you finally did it was win biscuits! ;)
I owned the RAM turbo when it came out and I loved it. It was superb for multiple joysticks and the reset button was an excellent feature given that the only other way to reset the Speccy was to pull out the power lead which never was a good thing.
After your reviews on DOS/old-school pc games these Oddware reviews are what I totally love, especially if it's hardware :D I'm thinking of starting collecting old pc hardware myself... I do have some parts laying around from years back when I was little (tried my best to not let my parents throw any old stuff way :P) but I want more! ^_^
We had the RAM Turbo interface for the Sinclair Speccy. It worked well. (Still got it somewhere, I suppose. We bought some of the cartridge games for it, too. Got them cheap.)
love these videos, it's incredible how far technology has come. Can't even imagine how incredibly obsolete the computers we use today will be 25 years from now
Timing is everything, I didn't know you did this till after I uploaded my Jetpac video, lol. That add on is very cool and were one step ahead of ol' Clive by having yet another extension in the back. Excellent review. = )
well, those cartridges were great invention. Unfortunately they had two major problems: -They were limited to 16K size. Because of that more complex games did not fit, although the loading time was the longest with THOSE. A huge game's loading time VS cartrige's instant start (ELITE? anyone?) would make it a real offer. Also, no business SW may fit into 16K, so it was OK purely just for simple games. The plastics, PCB and electronics are the expensive part, the bigger EPROM would not increase the price of HW significantly). -Very very expensive. not only now, but back to the 80s it cost 3x more than the tape version. I saw recently, that some smart guys made this with bigger ROM, programmable, even applied loader screen+ SW selecting menu. Too bad, that this nice HW did not show the full potentials, especially a good business SW or some big multiloading games would make people buy more adapters.
The 16K from the cartridge paged into the lower 16K of the Speccys memory, which was the Speccy ROM, so basically it replaced the speccy ROM with the games ROM. This limited the usability since you couldn't make any calls to the Speccy's own ROM, so any program that relied on a call to the Speccy ROM wouldn't work on cartridge without major rewrite.
Now that is a cool addon, the lack of joystick has always been a deterrent for me actively seeking out a ZX Spectrum above other systems. How sweet it is, cartridges may be costly but vastly more reliable than tape. I guess you could call it the ZX Condom Cover. ^_^ Great episode. :D
Had one as a kid and got one again recently, and neither had the yellow button. It came as quite a surprise to see one. Also with my quickshot pro 2, and my whsmith data recorder, I spent many a happy hour gaming on the speccy
If I'm not mistaken I seem to remember the yellow button being for the purpose of rescaning the expansion bus. That way you could plug different things in that didn't have a pass through and hit the button to rescan the bus to use the new device. It was a long time ago that I used a Sinclair so I'd check into it further before you try it. As you said, the machine can be seriously damaged by plugging or unplugging things while it's on.
On my one the button was red. Acted as reset, but I wasn't aware of other functions. I also remember tearing the red skirt off the cartridges because I thought that's what you were supposed to do. Never got it re-attached.
So in JETPAC you land on a planet, repair your ship, take off, land on another planet and repair your ship again. Over and over. Didn't know No Man's Sky was already released in 1983.
About the yellow button: I do recall a "TURBO" cartridge for my atari 800xe had similar button on it as well, and it did something else when held while powering the computer up. Now I can't recall exactly what it was, it was more than 20yrs ago... But it loaded two distinct programs I believe...
ROM cartridge slot that took the Sinclair cartridge games such as Jetpac, Cookie and Horace.The twin joystick ports could support Kempston (the rightmost one), Protek(Cursor) (the leftmost one, after programming) or Sinclair (both).Hold down the Joystick's fire button on boot to activate Protek(Cursor) mode.A small reset button on the side was available on units produced from Christmas '85 onward.
Just looked up JetPac on Ebay, in this format it sells for £150... I own a copy and it's been sat in a box for years in the original packaging :D I'm sure someone else will get more fun out of it than I will! That's going up on eBay! :D
That’s insane! Jetpac was always a bit of a simple repetitive, boring game even back in the day.. only reason I ever played or was my older brother convinced me there was a level on mars later on
I grew up on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and never new those cartridges existed. Man! That would have been so much better than tapes! I still have the Spectrum from my childhood, and will be shortly firing it up again (loading games by playing the sounds into the mic, not from tape anymore, although I still have all the original tapes too)
The Turbo RAM was an awesome add-on. I remember back in the day thinking how 'sexy' this Joystick/ROM Interface looked. Another awesome hardware review. Thanks for sharing.
I remember my uncle telling me about a custom ZX Spectrum he built with an actual, real, non-rubber key keyboard. Apparently he found a cheap keyboard that used internals that were super small, and he just put the innards of the ZX Spectrum in that, because they fit.
+Linksbro It's easier just to buy a Spectrum 128K version. It has a normal (hard) keyboard. Although the keys seem to be on springs or something like that. They don't click so much as squish down. Also, it has a built in tape deck! SUCH TECHNOLOGY.
Ah yes, that brings back memories. Once you got a decent tape recorder they tended to go away. The one good thing in the Amstrad Spectrums was they had a built in cassette player and you hardly ever had loading issues with it.
Nah you're thinking of the Multiface, and it's variants. Came out a little bit later, but did just what you say. Well useful, for example if you had a disk drive or microdrives. You could back up all your tape games to load from it in seconds. Copying games was pretty easy once twin tape deck stereo systems came out.
Really look like s neat little game device with a lot substance to it, that Spectrum.. Seems fully loaded with hard core hardwares, phat chips and circuits.. Has a nice sound to it..
Aw,man! I totally forgot how splendid JetPac is. Imagine did some of the all-time best Speccy games. And that laser sound effect is just so goddam satisfying.
I had this interface back in the day. I think we had one of the Horace cartridges for it. The interface must have come slightly unplugged one day as it killed our first Speccy. Fortunately the store (may have been a Dixon's or WH Smiths) replaced the computer for free! That was a scary couple of days. Even so we never had the interface unplugged on the new machine it was essential for using a joystick. Great times.
Ah the memories, the Spectrum was way before my time but I had an emulator on my Atari ST, it came on one of the Pompey Pirates cracking groups menu disks with a handful of games, including Jetpack. I played it a lot.
wow...such memories ! Given your fondness for the UK retro computer scene, i would highly recommend checking out the "Bedroom to Billions" film. It is on Netflix (here in the UK) and I would imagine you would get a lot of pleasure from watching it.
Just to get something straight about the original Speccy: the keyboard was a pig to type on but we had no trouble playing games using the keys for several years. Many games needed only a handful of keys, generally Left, Right, and Jump, sometimes with Up and Down and Fire. At the most five or six, with many games and very easy to manage. Joysticks are essential for flight games, such as Elite, but we still managed. The problem with ROM cartridges was the relative price of the interface and the price of the cartridges, plus the lack of games available for it.
Well except for the fact that the two actually work with each other, unlike an Apple Retina on PC... Also a lot of Brits and Aussies I know had both the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, but only a Commodore monitor. Which was fine apparently. Also two old stand alone 8 bit computers I want again.
As you said, the Interface-2 was a bit of a commercial failure. Most people bought a Kempston interface and just got their games on cassette. Later Spectrums had the joystick ports built in but lacked the cartridge port.
This ram adaptor is just simply the best expansion module not onlydoes it add more ram to the system but also adds 2 joysticks port and a cartride input, but the best part is that you can still use other addons to it via it’s passtrough input suck as a printer, lightpen or an sd card addon etc,,,, and with it’s ‘reset’ switch you can reboot the system without having to pull off the plug, theres even a hole for that ac plug,so it's an awesome must have gedjet for zx spectrum users!!!
it MIGHT be one of those adcons that allowed you to dump what wax in the spectrums ram on to a blank programmable cartridge, that would be what the button is for
Hey I know it's an old video but still enjoyed it! That red rubber boot around the connector on the ROM cartridge is 'probably' an electrostatic discharge protector. You might want to take your DVOM and measure resistance of the actual red rubber. It may be resistive (conductive) to drain away any static shocks that might otherwise hit the terminals of the ROM cartridge. This would prevent any one terminal from getting individually zapped and damaging the ROM chip.
The ZX Spectrum was really small, for some reason i thought it was about the same size as the first generation master system, i don't know how i missed out on this, i guess i was too young when it came out, but my cousin had an atari lynx, which was lost at some point during my childhood.
I had thesee!!! there was a Radio Club that had all sorts of "oddware" and i was blessed with testing all this weird old stuff! They had a huge box with games on tape, Flinstones was my fav The Romanians that work now at Microsoft actually trained on Sinclair and Z Spectrum pc
man I really wanted JetPac on a rom pak back in the day. All I got was a flaky Atic Atac which would glitch out after a couple of secs. JetPac was the BEST. So nice to see it again.
Yes! Jet Pac by Ultimate play the game (turned in to Rare) is RAD! one of the best games EVER ! simple yet awesome. even my 11 year old son loves it. And you're using the best joystick for the speccy, the competition pro, this Englishman approves :)
Yeah, there is a way to convert a ZX Sinclair from PAL to NTSC, I've done it myself, although I'm not that sure there are many tutorials on hit. However, it is possible!
Oh and after the red/black Kempston Competition Pro I bought a Powerplay Cruiser which was an improved version, with suction feet; a flatter base and a adjustable ring around the stick with three levels of stiffness. For waggling games I set it to the stiffest setting and used the palm of my hand across the top of the stick. For everything else I used the more slack setting. Best joystick ever and I still have it; more tough than an army general!
I had one of these. It was mostly great, but I believe that it used up a small amount of memory. So if you had a game that needed all the available memory (I assume) it would reset when the game loaded. If you unplugged the interface the game would load fine. I think it only happened on 1 or 2 titles.
Chairman Meow yep, there was absolutely thousands of games on tape for all different home computers - believe me that gaming didn't start with Nintendo no matter what some might tell you on TH-cam at times...
Awesomeness You should check out Micro Men, it's a one off BBC comedy/drama about the rise and fall of Acorn/Sinclair, and everything in between. Well worth a watch, probably uploaded to TH-cam by now :)
Back in the late 80s, we just wiggled cables around and hoped it would load from the tape. Back then we didn't have beer to kill time with. This video is the first time I'm seen a cartridge for a 48K rubber key Speccy.! Now if you could find a SAM Coupe...
I remember seeing these in magazines, but no one I knew had one and you didn't see the cartridges for sale much either. That price sticker explains that £14.95! Im sure games on tape were only £2-3. 75% off does seem like a bargain though :)
Blimey, what a blast from the past. The turbo was made by RAM Electronics (Fleet) Limited, Fleet Road, Hampshire. They had a high street shopfront there, and we made various peripherals in a portakabin out the back of the shop. Production then moved down to Church Crookham with a larger premises. Thousands of those damned things must have passed through my hands. Quite pleased to see there are still a few floating around though.
But do you know the secrets of the Yellow Button?
greggv8 : it’s a non Maskable interrupt.. nmi.. useful for hacking, or making copies of whatever is in ram
@@greggv8 its a reset
@@Simon-ui6db Guess you just guessed what it was.
I had this interface and loved it
As much as emulators allow you to enjoy the games, you just can't replace the experience of working with the original hardware, putting it together and getting the thing to work. Priceless!
Did you know? The common Anglo-Saxon "Z" is "zee". The French brought the "zed" when they took over the throne of England in 1066. So it has always been the commoner in England who used "zee" and the higher mucky-mucks who used "zed".
Damn 8 years ago, the thinkpad T420 sitting next to me was brand new when this video came out, amazing how far you've come
I spent many hours of my childhood loading games from tape. Still got my Spectrum. Love your videos man. From a fellow geek in the UK.
Wow, I was suprised to see how well this Sinclair has lasted throughout the years :D the game play is rather fluid, and it still looks like a fun high quality game!
There was a pretty high amount of dross on the system but Jetpack is one of THE games for it.
Most of the best games were very simple concepts like JetPac, I put hours into this game when I was a kid!
I hate tape drives! It was annoying to go over to this one guy's house to play computer games and have to have an actual conversation with him for five minutes.
I always put up with him until he said, "Try this game. It's worth the half-hour wait."
.
.
.
.
.
It was a blank tape.
That is why i never played on my spectrum again, despite nostalgia. But on the other hand you had accsesible illegal games way before the internet.
At 1364 baud, a 48K game took slightly under five minutes to load. Most games were less. And booting the computer took all of two seconds. You can probably boot a modern PC and game in under that time, but not by much.
@@diederick76 Let's not discount the price difference, either. £1.99 vs £14.99 for the cheapest games of each format. I could buy a new game every week.
There were two reasons why the cartridges didn't catch on: the fact that only a small subset of spectrum owners had the zx interface 2 (or equivalent), as you say, but also that the cartridges were only 16k, whereas many tape games used the full 48k.
Well, it was 48K minus 7K for screen memory and systemvariables.
actually that 16K limitation was a huge failure. on the other hand someone broke this limitation and can produce ALL the cartridges on one ROM
www.thingiverse.com/thing:1887326
I’d say it’s more to do with the fact that offering convenience to Spectrum users was like offering healing balm to a masochist.
I grew up in England, but I moved to the States eight years ago.
My sister came to visit today, and she brought (at my eager request) my ZX81, ZX Spectrum and ZX Spectrum +.
She also brought my Ram Turbo interface.
Thanks to World of Spectrum, I was able to download and print the instruction manual, and thanks to one of my favorite yourubers, I got to watch this awesome review of it :)
Thanks for another entertaining and educational video!
The button on the side is a reset button according to WoS, but mine is the earlier model that doesn't have the button.
Kids -- Don't circumcise your Jet Pac. It cannot be undone! Listen to the man.
ok you make reviews of THIS kind of hardware... Subscribed
Cassette Tapes are wonderful, it sure beat the heck out of punch cards.
Until the tape chewed...
"Cassette Tapes are wonderful, it sure beat the heck out of punch cards."
"Getting your hand jammed in a revolving door is wonderful, it sure beat the heck out of getting hit with a train"
Had the Sinclair ZX came out in the USA the same time it did in the UK and had good distribution and was sold much cheaper than Commodore, Apple, TI, Radio Shack etc it might have been a hit over here. It looks like a very basic and fun computer.
Maybe... I feel like the US market was already a little too full for it to edge its way in.
the problem is they licensed Timex to distribute clone systems for them in the US, it was no handled well
For the time, it wasn’t basic. It was compact but feature-rich, which helped it blow away the competition.
I have several TS-2068's that I still use today and a few Spectrums - I've always been a fan of the Sinclair machines.
@@GameHammerCG What do you mean? It was extremely basic :) Although with a descent processor that made it possible to program pretty good games (despite practically no assistance *at all* from the unusually simplistic hardware).
Thanks for all of your hard work Clint. I really enjoy these videos. I’m really glad you kept on keepin on
Connector condom! :D Hurray for safe gaming!
its Durexs attempt at computers XD
After your floppy becomes a hard drive, protect each other before you RAM
@@jakebodnar2797 hehe, good one :)
LOL @ 1:07
Mark is a legend, such a generous guy. We need an Everdrive type cart for the interface containing every Speccy game! That'd be cool :)
Wow. This is sooo retro! That monitor is sooo CRT glowey! I remember playing all sorts of stuff on a friend's 48K Spectrum back in the day. Thanks for the retro ride man! :-D
I was really hoping you would show us the old tape cassette loading haha, I've never seen it done and I enjoy your videos. Oh well, this is nearly 4yrs. old now so it's probably out of the question to request that. Great video nonetheless! Jet Pac is awesome!
Loading a game back then was the fun part, the anticipation just made it worth while, i wish I could live that excitement just once more, they were happy times for me as a kid.
I'd completely forgotten about the Ram Turbo that I used to own, until seeing this one.
So the completely forgetting wasn't completely completed !
Enjoyed the review :)
i had this back in 87 (from 83) and me and a mate wanted to do a newspaper for the flat we lived in.. needed a printer and that particular connector for it lol i still have the sinclair zx spectrum with all of 48KB of memory LOL and a ton of tapes with games on them. the best computer ever.
It's impressive how it looks so modern and actual. I mean it looks like a wireless keyboard you would use hooked up to your Television.
I love the way the rocket has an old marine diesel engine.
Ahhh Jet Pac the first Speccy game I ever played and still one of the best that I enjoy still to this day! ;) Awesome piece of kit shame as you said it was wasted. Have you ever heard of the Opus disk drive that's what we had and it doubled as a joystick interface, very tricky to get to work but when you finally did it was win biscuits! ;)
that was begining of gaming so THANKS whoever made this stuff ))) lgr u are NOT geek u are man with good hobby )))
I love the loop that protects the Speccy from being powered on when you plug in the Ram Turbo, but nothing protects it when plugging in a Rom Cart.
Well done for getting hold of the rom cartridge, I've never seen them in the wild
That's the fastest boot I've ever seen. Holy crap.
I owned the RAM turbo when it came out and I loved it. It was superb for multiple joysticks and the reset button was an excellent feature given that the only other way to reset the Speccy was to pull out the power lead which never was a good thing.
After your reviews on DOS/old-school pc games these Oddware reviews are what I totally love, especially if it's hardware :D
I'm thinking of starting collecting old pc hardware myself... I do have some parts laying around from years back when I was little (tried my best to not let my parents throw any old stuff way :P) but I want more! ^_^
Spectrum is such a beautiful system. Probably the prettiest 8-bit home computer in terms of design.
still better than any game rare has put out in the last 10 years
We had the RAM Turbo interface for the Sinclair Speccy. It worked well. (Still got it somewhere, I suppose. We bought some of the cartridge games for it, too. Got them cheap.)
That's so cool. I had a Spectrum but never heard of this thing. Those carts are so cute and little. Just like the Spectrum itself.
You should run that industrial fan in the background on all your more recent gameplay videos Clint.
love these videos, it's incredible how far technology has come. Can't even imagine how incredibly obsolete the computers we use today will be 25 years from now
From 12 years in the future, it’s lit.
Timing is everything, I didn't know you did this till after I uploaded my Jetpac video, lol.
That add on is very cool and were one step ahead of ol' Clive by having yet another extension in the back. Excellent review. = )
didnt know about that, but Im happy enough with your channel, mate. keep up the good work!
well, those cartridges were great invention.
Unfortunately they had two major problems:
-They were limited to 16K size. Because of that more complex games did not fit, although the loading time was the longest with THOSE. A huge game's loading time VS cartrige's instant start (ELITE? anyone?) would make it a real offer. Also, no business SW may fit into 16K, so it was OK purely just for simple games. The plastics, PCB and electronics are the expensive part, the bigger EPROM would not increase the price of HW significantly).
-Very very expensive. not only now, but back to the 80s it cost 3x more than the tape version.
I saw recently, that some smart guys made this with bigger ROM, programmable, even applied loader screen+ SW selecting menu. Too bad, that this nice HW did not show the full potentials, especially a good business SW or some big multiloading games would make people buy more adapters.
The 16K from the cartridge paged into the lower 16K of the Speccys memory, which was the Speccy ROM, so basically it replaced the speccy ROM with the games ROM. This limited the usability since you couldn't make any calls to the Speccy's own ROM, so any program that relied on a call to the Speccy ROM wouldn't work on cartridge without major rewrite.
@@hex2bin I do wonder if it would have been possible to actually load into the higher ram from the rom, much like a tape does but faster?
@@smartroadbiker no need. developers could've easily implemented bank switching. even atari 2600 cartridges did it.
Now that is a cool addon, the lack of joystick has always been a deterrent for me actively seeking out a ZX Spectrum above other systems. How sweet it is, cartridges may be costly but vastly more reliable than tape. I guess you could call it the ZX Condom Cover. ^_^ Great episode. :D
Awesome, I was hooked watching you play that first level of JetPack. Those cartridges must be quite rare now. I never saw one here in the UK.
Your videos are strangely addicting. I'm not sure why, but keep up the good work 👍
Happy to hear it, thanks!
I'm here tonight as I've just set up my old spectrum and couldn't remember which joystick port on my ram turbo to use, Thank you.
Dec 2022.
Brings back memories of my old Cheetah 125+ joystick
+Michael Parker Mine took one hell of a battering during Hyper Sports competitions with my brother. Good suction cups lol.
TheWomble001 It was Daley Thompson's decathlon putting mine through Hell, but still survived close to a decade of abuse.
Nice to see some retro LGR, good looking cartridges!
Sometimes I watch your videos just to hear your voice, I love it lol.
Had one as a kid and got one again recently, and neither had the yellow button. It came as quite a surprise to see one. Also with my quickshot pro 2, and my whsmith data recorder, I spent many a happy hour gaming on the speccy
This video is already great and I love your content Clint but just imagine if Ashens had made this with you, instant humor and facts
you gotta luv the cartridge design! It looks so small and have the redrubber contact protection... innovation.
If I'm not mistaken I seem to remember the yellow button being for the purpose of rescaning the expansion bus. That way you could plug different things in that didn't have a pass through and hit the button to rescan the bus to use the new device. It was a long time ago that I used a Sinclair so I'd check into it further before you try it. As you said, the machine can be seriously damaged by plugging or unplugging things while it's on.
On my one the button was red. Acted as reset, but I wasn't aware of other functions. I also remember tearing the red skirt off the cartridges because I thought that's what you were supposed to do. Never got it re-attached.
So in JETPAC you land on a planet, repair your ship, take off, land on another planet and repair your ship again. Over and over.
Didn't know No Man's Sky was already released in 1983.
You are on fire, uploading alot of videos.
Good job, you are the best subs i have here.
About the yellow button: I do recall a "TURBO" cartridge for my atari 800xe had similar button on it as well, and it did something else when held while powering the computer up. Now I can't recall exactly what it was, it was more than 20yrs ago... But it loaded two distinct programs I believe...
ROM cartridge slot that took the Sinclair cartridge games such as Jetpac, Cookie and Horace.The twin joystick ports could support Kempston (the rightmost one), Protek(Cursor) (the leftmost one, after programming) or Sinclair (both).Hold down the Joystick's fire button on boot to activate Protek(Cursor) mode.A small reset button on the side was available on units produced from Christmas '85 onward.
This dual-interface was correctly used by Robotron giving the oportunity to play with 2 Joysticks as it means
Do you suppose that the game robotron may have inspired, if not fully then have a hand in the idea behind the creation of the Terminator series?
just a theoretic question
I guess is correct your theory
Just looked up JetPac on Ebay, in this format it sells for £150... I own a copy and it's been sat in a box for years in the original packaging :D I'm sure someone else will get more fun out of it than I will! That's going up on eBay! :D
That’s insane! Jetpac was always a bit of a simple repetitive, boring game even back in the day.. only reason I ever played or was my older brother convinced me there was a level on mars later on
Great to see appreciation for the Speccy over in the US!
I grew up on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and never new those cartridges existed. Man! That would have been so much better than tapes!
I still have the Spectrum from my childhood, and will be shortly firing it up again (loading games by playing the sounds into the mic, not from tape anymore, although I still have all the original tapes too)
Why don't you use TAP files?
The Turbo RAM was an awesome add-on. I remember back in the day thinking how 'sexy' this Joystick/ROM Interface looked. Another awesome hardware review. Thanks for sharing.
I remember my uncle telling me about a custom ZX Spectrum he built with an actual, real, non-rubber key keyboard.
Apparently he found a cheap keyboard that used internals that were super small, and he just put the innards of the ZX Spectrum in that, because they fit.
Linksbro I did the same with a Dragon 32 shell and a Spectrum :)
+Linksbro It's easier just to buy a Spectrum 128K version. It has a normal (hard) keyboard. Although the keys seem to be on springs or something like that. They don't click so much as squish down.
Also, it has a built in tape deck! SUCH TECHNOLOGY.
+DGneoseeker1 but they have certain compability issuses
Dekki Gaming
Really? What kinds of problems arise?
with certain software and games due to different hardware being used in 128k
R Tape loading error, 0:1
+1973Washu A rare sight in all those years I used tapes on my ZX Spectrums ;-)
Oh,No!!! Cheap Radio Shack tape recorder! LOL!
Agree. It worked extremely well.
A fortunately rare occurrence, usually because the volume was set incorrectly on the cassette deck.
Ah yes, that brings back memories. Once you got a decent tape recorder they tended to go away. The one good thing in the Amstrad Spectrums was they had a built in cassette player and you hardly ever had loading issues with it.
Wasn't the yellow button to POKE code into memory (the way to enter cheat codes on the Speccy) because you don't have access to the LOAD "" function.
If I'm not mistaken the yellow button is used to save the RAM content to tape, aka copying games.
Nah you're thinking of the Multiface, and it's variants. Came out a little bit later, but did just what you say. Well useful, for example if you had a disk drive or microdrives. You could back up all your tape games to load from it in seconds.
Copying games was pretty easy once twin tape deck stereo systems came out.
Quickshot Joystick! I remember those. God, I am old.
That red one is actually a Quickshot Turbo. What crappy switches, mine broke in a month.
I did my first programming on the Sinclair. It feels like seeing an old flame again :D
Really look like s neat little game device with a lot substance to it, that Spectrum.. Seems fully loaded with hard core hardwares, phat chips and circuits.. Has a nice sound to it..
omg those joysticks! the memories. I had a ZX Spectrum+ and my friend had a C64 and we used those joysticks.
Aw,man! I totally forgot how splendid JetPac is. Imagine did some of the all-time best Speccy games. And that laser sound effect is just so goddam satisfying.
Thank you for another great hardware review.
Your channel is one of a kind.
I had this interface back in the day. I think we had one of the Horace cartridges for it. The interface must have come slightly unplugged one day as it killed our first Speccy. Fortunately the store (may have been a Dixon's or WH Smiths) replaced the computer for free! That was a scary couple of days. Even so we never had the interface unplugged on the new machine it was essential for using a joystick. Great times.
Is that a PAL monitor or were you using a PAL to NTSC converter?
Ah the memories, the Spectrum was way before my time but I had an emulator on my Atari ST, it came on one of the Pompey Pirates cracking groups menu disks with a handful of games, including Jetpack. I played it a lot.
wow...such memories !
Given your fondness for the UK retro computer scene, i would highly recommend checking out the "Bedroom to Billions" film. It is on Netflix (here in the UK) and I would imagine you would get a lot of pleasure from watching it.
look up kim justice here on youtube. you'll love it
Cory, thank you so much for that....LOADS to watch now. Much appreciated. Some really talented and dedicated people out there !
Just to get something straight about the original Speccy: the keyboard was a pig to type on but we had no trouble playing games using the keys for several years. Many games needed only a handful of keys, generally Left, Right, and Jump, sometimes with Up and Down and Fire. At the most five or six, with many games and very easy to manage. Joysticks are essential for flight games, such as Elite, but we still managed.
The problem with ROM cartridges was the relative price of the interface and the price of the cartridges, plus the lack of games available for it.
Have never seen a Spectrum game load that fast in my life!! =O
Speccy connected to a Commodore monitor? That's like the 1980s equivalent to connecting a Windows PC to an Apple Retina display!
Well except for the fact that the two actually work with each other, unlike an Apple Retina on PC... Also a lot of Brits and Aussies I know had both the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, but only a Commodore monitor. Which was fine apparently. Also two old stand alone 8 bit computers I want again.
ehhh more like plugging a mac mouse into my pc
As you said, the Interface-2 was a bit of a commercial failure. Most people bought a Kempston interface and just got their games on cassette. Later Spectrums had the joystick ports built in but lacked the cartridge port.
This ram adaptor is just simply the best expansion module not onlydoes it add more ram to the system but also adds 2 joysticks port and a cartride input, but the best part is that you can still use other addons to it via it’s passtrough input suck as a printer, lightpen or an sd card addon etc,,,, and with it’s ‘reset’ switch you can reboot the system without having to pull off the plug, theres even a hole for that ac plug,so it's an awesome must have gedjet for zx spectrum users!!!
"it's freakin jetpack; and jetpack is rad"
--LGRism
That LGR comment had me nodding in agreement so enthusiastically that I hurt my neck. Rad indeed, good sir!
it MIGHT be one of those adcons that allowed you to dump what wax in the spectrums ram on to a blank programmable cartridge, that would be what the button is for
@matawin2 Sounds like an external mic on the table.
Hey I know it's an old video but still enjoyed it!
That red rubber boot around the connector on the ROM cartridge is 'probably' an electrostatic discharge protector. You might want to take your DVOM and measure resistance of the actual red rubber. It may be resistive (conductive) to drain away any static shocks that might otherwise hit the terminals of the ROM cartridge. This would prevent any one terminal from getting individually zapped and damaging the ROM chip.
Jetpack is a great game, but you could get so good you’d never be able to die.
The ZX Spectrum was really small, for some reason i thought it was about the same size as the first generation master system, i don't know how i missed out on this, i guess i was too young when it came out, but my cousin had an atari lynx, which was lost at some point during my childhood.
game looked crisper than expected. nice
I had thesee!!! there was a Radio Club that had all sorts of "oddware" and i was blessed with testing all this weird old stuff!
They had a huge box with games on tape, Flinstones was my fav
The Romanians that work now at Microsoft actually trained on Sinclair and Z Spectrum pc
man I really wanted JetPac on a rom pak back in the day. All I got was a flaky Atic Atac which would glitch out after a couple of secs. JetPac was the BEST. So nice to see it again.
Yes! Jet Pac by Ultimate play the game (turned in to Rare) is RAD! one of the best games EVER ! simple yet awesome. even my 11 year old son loves it.
And you're using the best joystick for the speccy, the competition pro, this Englishman approves :)
IS that a PAL monitor? Is there a way to make these NTSC?
It's an NTSC display, but you can use a converter to get color and then adjust the 50hz signal via vertical hold knob on the display to accept PAL
Lazy Game farts why do you sound so different
Lazy Game Reviews your older self
9393zach radio shack sell adapters for HDMI
Yeah, there is a way to convert a ZX Sinclair from PAL to NTSC, I've done it myself, although I'm not that sure there are many tutorials on hit. However, it is possible!
I used soectrums from the start right up till the 128k floppy drive model,i never knew about the catridges.very interesting.
That's a slick little computer, especially for 1982! Is there any way to hook one up to an NTSC display?
love these kind of videos, pity ukretrogamer channels was closed!
Oh and after the red/black Kempston Competition Pro I bought a Powerplay Cruiser which was an improved version, with suction feet; a flatter base and a adjustable ring around the stick with three levels of stiffness. For waggling games I set it to the stiffest setting and used the palm of my hand across the top of the stick. For everything else I used the more slack setting. Best joystick ever and I still have it; more tough than an army general!
I had one of these. It was mostly great, but I believe that it used up a small amount of memory. So if you had a game that needed all the available memory (I assume) it would reset when the game loaded. If you unplugged the interface the game would load fine. I think it only happened on 1 or 2 titles.
Ive seen it 20+ times now and I still cant believe games came on cassette tapes
Chairman Meow yep, there was absolutely thousands of games on tape for all different home computers - believe me that gaming didn't start with Nintendo no matter what some might tell you on TH-cam at times...
The Zx and the A600, i think are the definition of "eye candy" on computers..
Your sinclair is in great condition :O
Awesomeness
You should check out Micro Men, it's a one off BBC comedy/drama about the rise and fall of Acorn/Sinclair, and everything in between. Well worth a watch, probably uploaded to TH-cam by now :)
Back in the late 80s, we just wiggled cables around and hoped it would load from the tape. Back then we didn't have beer to kill time with. This video is the first time I'm seen a cartridge for a 48K rubber key Speccy.! Now if you could find a SAM Coupe...
I remember seeing these in magazines, but no one I knew had one and you didn't see the cartridges for sale much either.
That price sticker explains that £14.95! Im sure games on tape were only £2-3.
75% off does seem like a bargain though :)
Had one of these in the day, good stuff. Even had some 16k cartridges, wafadrive, microdrives...