back to article Clive Sinclair Vega+ tin-rattle hits £300,000

Sir Clive Sinclair has tin-rattled his way to a wallet-bulging £300,000 towards production of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+, just three weeks after launching his Indiegogo fundraising campaign. The Vega+ is enthusiastically described as "the world's only hand-held LCD games console with 1,000 licensed games inside that can …

  1. Dave 126 Silver badge

    Upon seeing the screenshot...

    ...I thought the game being played was How to be a Complete Bastard, and thought it fitting for the Reg.

    Alas, on closer inspection it turned out not to be.

    If your graphics department (hahaha) wants to do a quick Photoshop on it, you can find screen shots here:

    http://www.mobygames.com/game/how-to-be-a-complete-bastard

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Upon seeing the screenshot...

      The screen is either Skool Daze or Back to Skool

      Great games both of them :)

      (Still want to get round to playing the 3rd similar game from the same author - Contact Sam Cruise ... one of these days perhaps....?)

      1. benjymous

        Re: Upon seeing the screenshot...

        Here you go, play it in your browser:

        https://archive.org/details/zx_Contact_Sam_Cruise_1986_Microsphere

        1. Yugguy

          Re: Upon seeing the screenshot...

          Which is why one doesnt need a Vega, shurely?

          1. Dave 126 Silver badge

            Re: Upon seeing the screenshot...

            Found a list of controls for Sam Cruise here:

            http://www.vincenzoscarpa.it/emulatori/spectrum/game-screenshot/manual.php?dir1=c&man=contactsamcruise_man

            I get stuck on the above browser version when I answer the in-game telephone. Oh well!

      2. david bates

        Re: Upon seeing the screenshot...

        Its Skool Daze

        The text at the bottom of the screen saying 'Skool Daze' is the clue ;)

  2. Duffy Moon

    I could order one

    But would it ever arrive? (My Spectrum never did - I gave up waiting and bought an Intellivision instead, thus scuppering any chance of becoming a coding genius).

    1. Peter X

      Re: I could order one

      If only you'd waited... you'd have waited (IIRC) about 3 _extra_ months, and when it arrived you would've also got a letter offering money off a roll of thermal paper for a ZX Printer. I never took them up on that offer!

      The Spectrum was great though... so maybe I can start to begin to consider thinking about maybe letting that incident from 30+ years ago... go. Maybe! :D

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It looks a little pricey

    Till you compare this to other handhelds require game carts at 20 to 40 quid a go. Having the games included makes this a more favourable offering.

    Not as cheap as a free emulator plus game ROMs, but that's not a fair comparison since its comparing copied/pirated with paid for/licenced

    1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

      Re: It looks a little pricey

      one of the sites holding the roms and emulators was maintaining an abandonware list - they contacted as many authors as poss and asked for permision , and most gave it...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It looks a little pricey

      carts ? who needs carts mate? take a look there GCW-Zero, Dingoo, Revo K101...

      I have a DSL with flashcard , mainly NES and GB roms also ZXDS (ZX emulator for DS) runs on both screens, keyboard on bottom -touch- screen.

  4. msknight

    I did order one, but then revoked my reservation when it was clear that it was coming with composite out. I believe it really needs a form of HDMI or DVI. Composite (and SCART) is getting harder to find on TV's these days.

    1. Martin an gof Silver badge

      Composite (and SCART) is getting harder to find on TV's these days.

      SCART I'll grant you - at the cheaper end of the spectrum (no pun intended) anyway, but I can't honestly say I've yet seen a telly for sale without a composite input. Monitors, yes, plenty, but not tellies.

      I suppose it depends how this thing works internally. If it physically recreates the video circuitry of the Spectrum (for ultimate compatibility), then maybe it has to output composite. Composite to HDMI conversion would be a large part of the cost of the device for no benefit at all.

      If on the other hand it is entirely emulation, then outputting to HDMI may not be so expensive, depending on the chip used.

      M.

      1. DrXym

        "I suppose it depends how this thing works internally."

        There is no reason to think they'd emulate anything about the ZX Spectrum's hardware.

        It will work same way as other handheld devices like smart phones - a SoC (system on a chip consisting of CPU, GPU, VRAM, RAM, hardware decoders, IO bus etc.), flash to hold the system image and a write partition. The system image will be a kernel which boots into a launcher app which kicks off the emulator.

        Something analogous to a Pi Zero would be more than adequate for this purpose and it should give you an idea of the costs required to pull it off too.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "There is no reason to think they'd emulate anything about the ZX Spectrum's hardware.

          ...kernel which boots into a launcher app which kicks off the emulator."

          So you think that they would be emulating the hardware then.

          1. DrXym

            "So you think that they would be emulating the hardware then."

            No they won't. They'll present a menu of games to the user and fire up an emulator with the appropriate snapshot and button bindings. All the hardware including Kempston or Interface 1 will be emulated in software. There are dozens of complete emulators out there that can emulate ZX Spectrums in all their incarnations 16K, 48K, 128, +2, + 3 and the hardware. See worldofspectrum.org if you want to try them out.

            The hardware itself will probably be some cheap ARM SoC (again dozens to choose from). A Pi Zero could handle the demands of the device, but any kind of SoC destined for a low-end smart phone would do. If I were doing the project I'd probably throw a linux kernel, a minimal fs with busybox, uclibc and then a hook up a simple game picking app to FBZX or similar. If HDMI output were a requirement I'd just tell the SoC to mirror the output on the screen to the HDMI out.

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        "I can't honestly say I've yet seen a telly for sale without a composite input. Monitors, yes, plenty, but not tellies."

        Mine (a tesco cheapie about 10 years old) doesn't.

        On the other hand, scart includes a composite port and it's active, so a dongle does the trick.

        1. Martin an gof Silver badge

          Mine (a tesco cheapie about 10 years old) doesn't.

          On the other hand, scart includes a composite port

          I count SCART. The SCART minimal specification requires a composite and audio input, so if you have SCART then the TV has composite, whether or not it also has a little RCA (phono) socket too.

          To re-iterate then, I can't honestly say I've yet seen a telly for sale without a composite input.

          M.

      3. cheveron

        If on the other hand it is entirely emulation, then outputting to HDMI may not be so expensive, depending on the chip used.

        The biggest expense with HDMI is licensing the thing. The original Vega is an ARM SoC, 16 meg of RAM and 64 meg of flash storage. There's no kernel. It's a bare-metal emulator, and it's using almost all of the capacity of the SoC. Vega+ may take a different approach though.

  5. The Mighty Spang

    needs native dev kit

    Speccy games are nice and such, but to really win a native games dev kit would be nice so new higher specced (see what i did there) games could be made for it. best of both worlds and in effect, harking back to the good old days of homebrew which IMO the speccy did so much to encourage 30 years ago

    if it puts a native kit in i'll buy it.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: needs native dev kit

      You'd have to launch it as a proper console with all that entails. As it is, I'm not sure of the need for this either given that a Nintendo DS with an emulator will do the job.

      IIRC there was some talk of something something called a Vega after the QL to rescue Sinclair Research but he ran out of time and had to sell to Amstrad.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The most cloned home computer?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZX_Spectrum_clones

    Perhaps more international marketing would be a good idea since the fan base seems to cover the world

  7. Stevie

    Bah!

    I suppose it's their money. It just feels like the mighty have been brought a bit low by this thing.

  8. DrXym

    Can't wait to play The Hobbit

    You are in a comfortable tunnel like hole. To the east there is the round green door.

    You see:

    the wooden chest.

    Gandalf. Gandalf is carrying a curious map.

    Thorin.

    Gandalf gives the curious map to you.

    Thorin says "Hurry Up".

    > FS1212FFSSS

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  9. Stryker007

    Wish they'd do this for something worthwhile like the Commodore 64 :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Linky

      http://www.retrocollect.com/News/portable-laptop-commodore-64-c64p-arrives-on-ebay.html

  10. Indolent Wretch

    FS12? WTF? QAOP more like!

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