So what have I been doing recently you never wondered as you haven’t even given me a thought in the last few weeks. Well I’ll tell you anyway, I’ve been doing very little apart from making excuses not to do any of the stuff I should be doing. But recently that changed when my wife found a huge bundle of Sinclair ZX Spectrum stuff being given away on a local Facebook page, and the angel she is, she went and collected it for me. There was a huge bundle too, including 2 Spectrums which had been taken apart, two mainboards and some peripherals to stick in the expansion port (Cartridge and joystick ports).
Having tested the Speccys, one actually worked but had a naff keyboard, so I ordered a new membrane and sets of screws from Dataserve in Tamworth and today it got fitted as per the pictures below…
I took off the top to expose the ribbon cables which had to be unplugged from the board. Note the dark traces which seems to be a common cause of failure I seem to recall from my early Spectrum tinkerings.
Next we have to remove all the screws from the rear of the keyboard pad
Then we align and fit the nice new membrane (supplied by Dataserve remember)
And refit the plastic bit which holds it all in place firmly and the two ribbon clamps.
After slipping the keyboard ribbons back into their prospective slots it’s time to put the whole lot back together with the new screw kit
And we’re done
In other news, namely Raspberry pi related, I recently bought the pre loaded Aeros on a SD card for the Raspberry. The Aeros is a Linux based O/S for the Pi which includes an Amiga bias and a pre-built emulator. It’s a nice little setup but has little in the way of instructions so it took a while to get Amiga emulation running on UAE4All which is included on the setup. After finding where to put my (legally paid for via 2 or 3 lots of buying Amiga Forever and owning several actual Amigas) Kick roms to make it work, I found it played A500 games quite nicely, tested with Turrican, SWIV and Golden Axe ADF files. It looked pretty good on a big HD screen too until my wife came home and made me stop.
Final note, Debian is still rock solid on my PC. Windows 8.1, however, is still very flaky on my wifes laptop even losing the drivers for the wi-fi network adapter recently and causing plenty of headaches, I can tell you. Now to go test my Spectrum out on some nice fast loading cartridge games…
