Plus many more components: an empty electrical board, all other chip, transistors, capacitors, resistors, etc…Īfter some time and a combination of new ideas, documentation, hardware and labour, the one ended up with something like this: Go to several flea markets to first find a CPU, which was a quite rare find: The one had to “get” a ZX-Spectrum full circuit schema: The process to build ZX-Spectrum’s clone’s hybrid was “a bit” involved, and included many days/weeks of hacking poor, incomplete electrical circuit documentation and sleepless nights of manual calibration of the hardware. But to cut cost even further, people who knew “how to solder” created hybrids of the clones at home, which came out to be very cheap. There were over 50(!) semi-official clones that came out by the end of 1980s, beginning of 1990s.

The official ZX-Spectrum that was sold by “Sinclair Research Ltd” at that time was a bit pricey for middle class families, and therefore many cities across Europe and USSR started to come up with their own “ clones“. It was 1989, the book was in Russian, and I was 10…īack then, in USSR, to own a 8086 compatible PC was somewhat mystical, and therefore people, who knew a thing or two about microelectronics, were putting together Speccy(s) ( ZX Spectrums), which were based on Zilog Z80 8-bit microprocessor and ran at 3.5 MHz. My first computer book was “Basic for Children with Arturo”.

Speccy download for ubuntu