At Play Expo Blackpool on the weekend of the 3rd and 4th of October this year I had one objective in mind: the same objective as last year and that was to buy a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
During a quiet period I was scouting the Trader’s Hall and stumbled across this.
As soon as I saw this it was, “Shut up and take my money!”
It’s a composite modded version with an unusual case but it’s a genuine ZX Spectrum 48K model at a bargain price but did it work?
I was unable to test it on the TV in my hotel room because there was no way to change source but I was able to check it in my daughter/son’s room and…
…so now I have a working Spectrum at last. Only question left was loading and recording au
dio, for which I was expecting to have to purchase a contact microphone.
Well the immediate good news when I tested it on returning home was that the audio out is just perfect for the task of recording but the bad news was that I could not get anything loaded. I suspected the cause was that I was using stereo jacks and a bit of digging suggested that this would only work with a mono jack… so I ordered a stereo to mono adapter.
I tested it when it arrived and…
…success!
When I got the adapter I tested using laptop (wav), tablet (ZX Tape Player app) and main phone via the same app and each method works. Today I gave it a good workout and found an issue with the Google Pixel 9 Pro (and I suspect any Android 17+ phone) in that it will nanny the volume level and keep lowering it every few minutes, sometimes without notice and there’s no way to disable this “feature”. Of course this interrupts loading almost to the point of uselessness but I have got a perfectly working solution by using my old OnePlus 6T which doesn’t have this problem so it’s all good for a stream at some time!
I do intend to get a DIVMMC Future next March but for now I’m happy with what I have available to me. I also plan to get a KrakenZX board but that’s a different story entirely.
