{"id":8558,"date":"2013-06-17T08:02:53","date_gmt":"2013-06-17T12:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=8558"},"modified":"2024-05-18T14:37:45","modified_gmt":"2024-05-18T18:37:45","slug":"zx-spectrum-%e2%86%92-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/17\/zx-spectrum-%e2%86%92-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"ZX Spectrum \u2192 Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ah, the ZX Spectrum\u2026<\/a> 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:
\n\"IMG_0623\"<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, which will have plenty of current. Since the adapter has a 2.1 mm centre positive<\/strong> DC barrel connector, and the Spectrum uses a centre negative<\/strong> connector, I used the soldering opportunity to wire in an inline switch<\/a>. The Speccy’s famous lack of a power or reset switch really isn’t part of my retrocomputing experience.<\/p>\n

Next up, bypass the UK PAL TV modulator<\/a>. 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<\/a> and all) from the PCB to the Video Out. Put it all back together, plug it into the TV, and:<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0971\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2026 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<\/a> monitor<\/a> which supports both standards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ah, the ZX Spectrum\u2026 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[2268,93],"class_list":["post-8558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-solder","tag-zx_spectrum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-2e2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8558"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17562,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8558\/revisions\/17562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}