ZX Spectrum - Brought Back to Life

December 2nd, 2014, 14:02

Perhaps not really RPG news, but it is capable of playing quite a bit of RPGs. If you are old enough to have known and used the ZX Spectrum, this might be an opportunity to play some of the 14.000 games again, that were created in the time, by participating in the Indiegogo campaign, which has been started featuring the ZX Spectrum Vega.

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The Vega has been developed by Chris Smith, a former ZX Spectrum games developer who is the world's leading expert on Sinclair Spectrum technology and author of the definitive technical book "The ZX Spectrum ULA: How to design a microcomputer".

Retro Computers Ltd is making arrangements with the owners of the software rights to Spectrum games to donate a combined software royalty to a charity – Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. The company’s Chairman, Dr David Levy, had his life saved by the hospital when he was diagnosed with meningitis as a 3-year-old.

The development of the Sinclair Spectrum Vega is complete, and we have a fully working prototype waiting to go into production within the UK. We are making contact with thousands of the original Spectrum game developers in order to secure their permission to use their games on the Vega, for which a combined software royalty will be donated to charity ‒ Great Ormond Street Hospital for children.

Once the first 1,000 Limited Edition Vegas have been manufactured and shipped, and we move on to the next 3,000 units and thereafter to batches of 10,000 or more, the retail price of the Vega will reduce. But even at &pound;100 the cost of the limited edition Vega, with its 1,000 games built-in, represents a huge saving over the cost of the original product plus the cost of 1,000 of the original Spectrum games. What cost thousands of pounds back in the 1980s is now available for around 1 per cent of that amount.

-- "Mystery is important. To know everything, to know the whole truth, is dull. There is no magic in that. Magic is not knowing, magic is wondering about what and how and where." ~ Cortez, from The Longest Journey

Originally Posted by Arhu
Count yourselves lucky, at the time I didn't even know RPGs existed.

If I recall properly, I don't think they really did; certainly not in the form they do today. It wasn't until I got a Commodore Amiga and played titles like Eye of the Beholder and the first Elder Scrolls game that everything changed.

Originally Posted by Kyrer
If I recall properly, I don't think they really did; certainly not in the form they do today. It wasn't until I got a Commodore Amiga and played titles like Eye of the Beholder and the first Elder Scrolls game that everything changed.

In the early days of ZX Spectrum they didn't, but by the mid 80s SSI strarted to launch a series of AD&D games. I wouldn't call them really RPGs, but they were adaptations of pen & paper games, so…

Originally Posted by MigRib
In the early days of ZX Spectrum they didn't, but by the mid 80s SSI strarted to launch a series of AD&D games. I wouldn't call them really RPGs, but they were adaptations of pen & paper games, so…

The Bard's Tale was on the Speccy. That was a pretty fully fledged RPG.