ZX Spectrum → Canada

Ah, the ZX Spectrum… so many hours of my youth wasted on this book-sized computer. Now anything with a display can emulate one in its spare processor cycles, the 30 year old hardware itself is a bit chunky:
That’s a lot of discrete components; all through-hole, too. I brought this one back from the UK earlier this year in the hope of getting it working.

First item that needed attention was the power supply. The original had a 230 V AC to 9 V DC, 1.4 A supply of some extremely dodgy regulation. I replace this with a Circuit-Test AC/DC Adapter – 9 V DC 2.2 A, which will have plenty of current. Since the adapter has a 2.1 mm centre positive DC barrel connector, and the Spectrum uses a centre negative connector, I used the soldering opportunity to wire in an inline switch. The Speccy’s famous lack of a power or reset switch really isn’t part of my retrocomputing experience.

Next up, bypass the UK PAL TV modulator. This required disassembling the computer, and disconnecting the legendarily fragile keyboard membrane edge connectors. It’s a very simple soldering job to re-route the composite video feed (dot crawl and all) from the PCB to the Video Out. Put it all back together, plug it into the TV, and:

… another partial success. My TV doesn’t talk 50 Hz PAL composite well, giving an oversized black and white display. I’ll either need to buy a PAL to NTSC converter box, or spring for a tiny monitor which supports both standards.