Put a touch screen android in a Psion 5 chassis and I'll be impressed.
Otherwise nice idea but for £40 it's got to be more than a pretty yet poor keyboard.
Sinclair's ZX Spectrum to LIVE AGAIN!
Iconic British microcomputer the ZX Spectrum will live again, after a Kickstarter appeal for funds to reincarnate it as a Bluetooth Keyboard succeeded. Mobile games outfit Elite Systems floated the idea of using the Spectrum's chassis and infamous dead flesh keys to house Bluetooth keyboard back in December 2013, after …
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Wednesday 29th January 2014 12:01 GMT Wize
There was an Atari 2600 emulator on sale
It plugged in to the TV and contained several games preloaded. All housed in an old style joystick.
What if someone made a full spectrum emulator in the old style box. Throw in a TV adaptor (could be the old style tuner one or maybe composite video or push the boat out with HDMI) maybe even 9 pin joystick ports (and chuck in a joystick or two) and emulate a kempston or cursor interface. USB slot for copying across the .TAP files and a button on the back to bring up an internal menu (one for copying to/from USB, loading .TAP files, etc)
I would suggest it could also be used as a media centre (as the emulator would probably be running on something like a Raspberry Pi) but then you'd want to put all the gubbins in a fixed box near the TV and have the Spectrum keyboard as a wireless remote control to that unit.
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Wednesday 29th January 2014 11:01 GMT DrXym
Mixed feelings about the keyboard
I have about 3 or 4 Spectrums and while the rubbery keyboard wasn't great I don't recall it being *that* bad in operation. That's partly because it was heavily mnemonic. You wouldn't type the letters of LOAD, you'd just hit J and it would appear (and the space that followed). So typing was minimal once you learned the shortcuts. The Spectrum also used to make a nice little click through the speaker which helped a lot. Compared to the chiclet keyboard in the Oric, or the dead membrane of the ZX81 it was much nicer.
I thought the Spectrum+ / Spectrum 128 keyboard was worse, partly because it looked like a real keyboard but was dead rubber underneath. The +2 came with a decent keyboard but Amstrad "helpfully" omitted to print most of keyboard shortcuts.
Anyway EBay is filled with silicon rubber "waterproof" PC keyboards so it shouldn't be hard to reproduce the Spectrum keyboard though I wonder who the market is for it. Maybe it would work if it was battery operated and bundled up with a bunch of games in flash.
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Wednesday 29th January 2014 11:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Mixed feelings about the keyboard
" Amstrad "helpfully" omitted to print most of keyboard shortcuts."
Unless you switched it to 48k mode (which you'd only need if a game refused to load in 128k mode) you didn't need them. 128K BASIC had direct key entry with no shortcuts.
And the one key you'd need in 48 mode (to load aforementioned game that refused to work in 128k mode) was indeed marked.
If you are going to criticise Amstrad, you'd be much better off looking at the +3 sound problems (that plagued 2 separate main board revisions) + the non standard joystick wiring.
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Wednesday 29th January 2014 16:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Mixed feelings about the keyboard
Retaining the "mnemonic" Keyword system you refer to on the Spectrum was a design flaw.
It was a good (and simple) idea on the original 4K ZX80 because that only had a few BASIC commands and hence had one keyword (and/or SHIFT symbol) per key.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/ZX80.jpg
It got more complicated on the ZX81, and by the time the Spectrum came out there were so many BASIC keywords that many keys had several keywords and symbols allocated to them. Some required pressing Caps and Symbol Shift keys together to enter Extended Mode and *then* Symbol Shift plus the relevant letter/number key.
It made the machine look more complicated, and didn't save typing over the abbreviations most other BASICs supported. Even at the time, its retention was seen as a mistake:-
"The one-touch entry system, retained from the ZX-81, is not suitable for the Spectrum and leads to complicated multi-shift operations when keying some functions. It should have been discarded. "
(Your Computer, June 1982:- http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/speccy/ )
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Wednesday 29th January 2014 12:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Compatibility outside of Elite's own apps?
“Optionally, the Bluetooth ZX Spectrum will also be a Bluetooth keyboard for other apps available from the iTunes App Store and subsequently from the Google Play, Amazon App Store and Windows Store and also applications running on PCs and Macs, making it possible to, say, type a letter on a PC using a Spectrum! Both the default and the optional functionality of the Bluetooth ZX Spectrum will be available at the time of the device’s launch. Details of how the optional functionality may be enabled will be revealed at a later date."
Sorry, not good enough. How is it 'available' if details of how to 'enable' it are being withheld? And for how long? Will it work like any other keyboard, or must the application be built to include support?
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Wednesday 29th January 2014 12:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
oh joy
I can now hook up my PC to a keyboard that is virtually impossible to type on, and which had a habit of coming apart within a year.
Can they make their next product a USB drive based on audio cassettes?
Some things are just better left to the memory, or for those lucky enough to own the real thing.
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Wednesday 29th January 2014 14:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Brilliant idea...
Or, you type it into a full-function PC editor ('BASIN'), check it works in the attached emulator, then port it to the real thing via TAP2WAV and an audio lead or a CF card. If you want to try assembly instead, PASMO will build Z80 assembly directly into an emulator-compatible .TAP format.
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Wednesday 29th January 2014 15:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Short Life ?
They make reference to having obtained the rights from the current holder on their page.
Sugar sold Amstrad to Sky.
So one would assume that Elite have licenced it from Sky.
Meanwhile questions have been raised regarding if Elite have permission to include Atic Atac on the App store:
http://www.livewiredesign.co.uk/post/2013/07/22/Those-other-apps.aspx#
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Wednesday 29th January 2014 16:59 GMT Pahhh
Retro badness
There are lots of things in the early days that really no-one should be trying to Retro.
Some of the worse items were:
- ZX Spectrum expansions - Ram / Joysticks / printer attachment at the back were machine killers. I killed many Spectrums by repositioning them slightly and causing the expansion pack to shorten tracks and kill the machine.
- Original Atari Joystick - This iconic joystick available for the likes of Spectrum and C64 was so flimsy. The amount of them I saw which had been snapped or the bubble contacts completely crushed. When track'n'field came out, it was pretty much the death of them within a day.
- C64 Official Cassette Player - This was a stupendous piece of junk. The heads used to be out of alignment out of the factory and were just awful.
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Friday 31st January 2014 10:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
If you've already pledged a donation for this, then check out the World of Spectrum forum very quickly.
It appears some well known Spectrum Software developers of titles Elite are selling, have many doubts about the integrity of the project.
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showthread.php?t=46365
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
