News Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega microcomputer seeks crowd funds

Well, I'm going to struggle to play Elite on this bad boy, aren't I? Or a text adventure, for that matter!

 

Would have thought they would have at least had the q a o p keys along with the space bar

 

I'm actually very tempted. The Spectrum (16k) was the first computer that I ever took apart and upgraded components on - well, till it eventually went up in smoke and I moved on to a BBC micro.

The thought of being able to play Jetpac, manic miner, jet set willy, Frankie Goes To Hollywood (the game) , etc on the actual machine again....

 

never mind chaos reborn, you might be able to play the original (Chaos, Battle of the Wizards) on this, w00t!

 

Going to struggle to play anything on it. Where's the Q.A.O.P and space bar keys?

 

QAOP & Space? Are you mad? QAOPM is where it's at. Space on an oldschool Speccy was far too far to the right to be usable (and could barely be described as a space bar, it was a space key!)

And don't get me started on those weird games that used QWPLM rather than QAOPM. Just wrong!

 

Aye, I'd rather get a real Speccy and not be restricted in terms of what I could play. The Vega is a nice idea, but too limited for me - no games with semi-complex control schemes, no two player gaming, and by the looks of things no joystick support. Seems slightly disingenous to claim (as the website does) that the Vega is capable of running all Spectrum games when it's going to be limited to a subset of games with simple control schemes.

I'm just slightly surprised that they've gone down the cut-down control scheme route - if the Vega had a full rubber keyboard then it'd be far more versatile, but I suppose that might increase the price. Then again, it's £100 anyway, so another thirty percent on top (as a number I've plucked out of thin air) wouldn't be unreasonable.

 

or i could emulate on a pi and save me some money. not sure how this isnt aiding copyright infringement though as unless it has a tape drive attachment it can only be used for emulated games.

 

They should have added bluetooth keyboard support and also had the option of using a 'looky-likey' wireless spectrum keyboard for sofa gaming.

But...

Doing that would have increased the build component cost for this £100 console from £12.50 to something closer to what is normal for devices like this.

Yeah, I'm guessing at how much the components will cost, but given that it's real easy to emulate a spectrum I can't imagine the hardware costs are going to be high, and it looks like they are definitely going down the software emulation rather than hardware duplication route (nothing wrong with that IMHO).

Surely this device could be built on a basic ras pi with a flash card and give you change from £20 retail?

 

To be fair, they do say that if they go to retail, the Vega will be considerably cheaper than £100. The £100 isn't representative of the cost of production but rather includes other costs that presumably aren't passed on to any future retail product.

 

My point exactly. £100 is asking a lot for a low-cost micro-controller and a flash card with emulated games on.

 

Then you may have missed:

In any case most of the product cost won't be in the bits on the board: it'll be in the R&D, prototypes, engineering time, injection moulds (those things are EXPENSIVE), etc. An engineer who can redesign/rewrite the ULA and keep it compatible with the original probably doesn't come for free either. Producing hardware is hard, and expensive.

It's a shame that the Speccy2010 died off before the crowdfunding boom. It has SD card, VGA output, PS2 connectors, etc - lots of nice modern goodies. I've seen a few sparse reports of updated versions being available but not from anywhere that looks in any way reliable.

EDIT: Or you can assemble a Speccy2010 board yourself.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmIdTSHU2dY. It's a shame they didn't write up the BOM in English; I'd be half tempted to give that a go, if I didn't have to try and translate everything from Russian... Although I don't fancy soldering that FPGA!