Collaborate Disseminate
The more accomplished 8-bit microcomputers of the late 1970s and early 1980s had a dedicated display chip, a CRT controller. This took care of all the jobs associated with driving …read more Continue reading How to Chase the Beam With a Z80
Sir Clive Sinclair’s ZX81 was a phenomenal sales success as one of the cheapest machines available in the early 1980s, but even its most fervent admirers will admit that it …read more Continue reading It’s Never Too Late To Upgrade Your ZX81 Keyboard
As the supply of genuine retrocomputers dwindles and their prices skyrocket, enthusiasts are turning their eyes in other directions to satisfy their need for 8-bit pixelated goodness. Some take the …read more Continue reading Building a Sinclair ZX81 in 2022 With All New Parts
For British kids of a certain age, their first experience of a computer was very likely to have been in front of a Sinclair ZX81. The lesser-known predecessor to the …read more Continue reading One Of The Worst Keyboards Ever, Now An Arduino Peripheral
The golden age of 8-bit computing brought us pixelated graphics in bright colours, accompanied of course by chiptune music. This aesthetic is strong enough to define a collective image of …read more Continue reading A Sinclair ZX81 Clone Still Has The Power To Fascinate
It is with sadness that we note the passing of the British writer, engineer, home computer pioneer, and entrepreneur, Sir Clive Sinclair, who died this morning at the age of …read more Continue reading Farewell Sir Clive Sinclair; Inspired a Generation of Engineers
At the beginning of the home computer revolution, the humble compact cassette was far and away the most popular choice for microcomputer data storage, especially on the European continent. As …read more Continue reading The Labor of Love That Is Recovering Lost Software
If you follow retrcomputing — or you are simply old enough to remember those days — you hear the same names over and over. Commodore, Apple, Radio Shack, and Sinclair, for example. But what about the Lambda 8300? Most people haven’t heard of these but [Mike] has and he has …read more
Have you ever upgraded your computer’s memory sixteen-fold, with a single chip? Tynemouth Software did for a classic Sinclair micro.
For owners of home computers in the early 1980s, one of the most important selling points was how much RAM their device would have. Sometimes though there just wasn’t much choice but to live with what you could afford, so buyers of Sinclair’s budget ZX81 computer had to put up with only 1 kiB of memory. The system bytes took up (by this writer’s memory) around 300 bytes, so user programs were left with only around 700 bytes for their …read more
[Victor Trucco] makes us wish we spoke Portuguese. He’s done a lot of retrocomputing projects including connecting a ZX81 to the Internet to load programs. The project uses –what else–an ESP8266 to get the WiFi communications. You can see a video below if you want to exercise your high school Portuguese.
It is somewhat ironic that the ZX81’s CPU–kept busy driving the video, reading the keyboard, and doing every other task that would save external ICs–is an 8-bit part running about just over 3 MHz (and that does not translate into 3 MIPS on that processor). Meanwhile, the “servant” …read more
