The Spectrum launch

[dilwyn]

No USB stick in my delivery, alas. They do look really cool, don’t they?

Also you do not get a printed manual, just a set up pamphlet. The full manual is however available as a PDF download from their website.

It's not really a "full manual" in the sense that it doesn't teach you how to program in BASIC like the original ZX manual did. I guess having substantial printed manuals would have added to the cost and there are plenty of online guides to ZX BASIC anyway.

Same everywhere now. You probably have to go back some time to find a QL hardware which came with full printed manual.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

I watched the Crash video, I must thank them for the muffled mention of the Q68, which is not a competitor. It is actually a different machine running SMSQ/E with more colours, higher resolution modes.

That said, if the Next KS2 was on sale, I would buy one.

[Sparrowhawk]

@derek: In that QL core for Spectrum Next video on another thread, they pretty much said that a KS3 would be coming along, so maybe you can get one that way. Hopefully more quickly than the KS2s took to arrive (through no fault of the SpecNext team, I hasten to add)

[XorA]

Interesting...Amazon.co.uk has it for £74.96 and claims that it can ship to the US for £15.07 for a January 17th arrival...that would make the system £100 even. I wonder if I can use my Amazon.com login for the UK site (ebay.com and ebay.co.uk share the same login). That would be a great deal. Anyone in the US try that? I may wait until after the holidays to see if availability gets better.

Btw, did anyone get those awesome Microdrive shaped USBs?

Your amazon account is global, you can order from any countries Amazon normally! If you have prime even that works in other countries too!

[bwinkel67]

So the listing on Amazon.co.uk has changed to now say "This item cannot be dispatched to your selected delivery location" for US. I had changed by destination to US when I was first looking at it, so I bet some other poor soul in the US tried what I was thinking but follow through, ordering it with their US account.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/PLAION-GmbH-Th ... B0DCZLFHB1

Interestingly, searching for it in the Amazon.co.uk search bar doesn't even find it for me. Hopefully it will eventually make its way across the pond. Not in a hurry to get it since the last time I was eager to jump on something was the RaPi 4.0 Computer that my wife got me for Christmas a few years back, and after initially playing with it, it's sitting on a shelf.

[pjw]

<>
the last time I was eager to jump on something was the RaPi 4.0 Computer that my wife got me for Christmas a few years back, and after initially playing with it, it's sitting on a shelf.

Your loss then, as it makes for a perfect little headless web server, drawing less current than the standby on your (old) TV. Id do it if I had a fixed IP address, but my ISP charge $10 a month for the "service", which is more than its worth.

[bwinkel67]

Btw, there's a bit of irony in their product description:

Multi region 720 HD output via HDMI, with PAL (50Hz) and NTSC (60Hz) compatibility.

For a computer that likely never sold in most (if not all) NTSC places (United States, Canada, Japan, parts of Central and South America) they tout NTSC compatibility, a standard developed by the US.

[bwinkel67]

Your loss then, as it makes for a perfect little headless web server, drawing less current than the standby on your (old) TV. Id do it if I had a fixed IP address, but my ISP charge $10 a month for the "service", which is more than its worth.

I definitely need to break it out again...and you are absolutely right as one thing I'm trying to do at school, for one of my research projects, is replace a set of older DELL 1-unit rack servers with a rack of 20/per unit RaPi-based servers. There was a kickstarter a couple of years ago for a board that took a RaPi, SD drive, fan, etc, with 20 of them fitting into a rack and take much less power. Just haven't gotten far enough with finding funding, even though power consumption would make up for that in no time, but that's bureaucracy for you :-/

[Mark Swift]

So my "The Spectrum" arrived this week.
It's a present so I will have to wait before I can use it properly.
I've used Spectrum emulators but somehow this all-in box is more exciting.
I'm glad it arrived before Christmas.

Also, I was fortunate in finding the old Spectrum project that I was hoping to resurrect.
At some point, somehow I had transferred the binaries onto a QL disk.
I also found the Z80 source code as a print-out so will be comparing binaries and sources once I OCR the listing.
The project lets you embed an image of circles, lines, fills, and different fonts in a string that can output via LPRINT.

A screenshot... it doesn't feel like 39 years ago.

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