Finally, a Computer for the Modern gamer Who Still Uses Cassette Tapes!
we need to talk about nostalgia. It’s a powerful drug, isn’t it? It’s why we pay over the odds for a handful of rubber keys and the lingering memory of waiting twelve minutes for Manic Miner to load while the tape deck sounds like a strangled robotic badger. And Retro Games? They know it. They’ve given us a new ZX Spectrum and slapped a few modern features on it, which is the technological equivalent of giving your granddad an Instagram account: It’s charming, but fundamentally confusing.
The New Features: A Nod to the Future… Or Just a Resigned Sigh?
You boot it up, and instead of the glorious, minimalist, black-and-white ‘Copyright Sinclair Research Ltd’ screen—that pure, unadulterated blank slate of computing—what do you get? A carousel! A lovely, full-colour, modern-looking carousel of games, complete with little screenshots. Screenshots! When I was a kid, you had to base your purchase entirely on a heavily airbrushed picture on the cassette inlay, or a rumour whispered in the playground that ‘you could see the girl’s face’ in Saboteur!. Now, you get a preview? It’s practically cheating!
And what else have they done, these retro-engineers? They’ve added HDMI output. HDMI! So now you can play games that were designed for a 14-inch cathode ray tube TV, displaying all their glorious, flickering attribute clash in stunning, crisp, digital 720p resolution on your massive, flatscreen, 60-inch telly. It’s like watching a puppet show in an IMAX theatre—it just highlights the very deliberate, wonderful limitations of the original! And for the purists, they’ve even got a CRT filter so you can smear the picture yourself. Because apparently, we’re not allowed to enjoy the past unless we can also perfectly replicate the eye strain that came with it.
The Quality of Life Upgrades: Is This Allowed?
Now, here’s where they really stick the knife into my beautifully tragic childhood: Save States and Rewind.
- Save States: You can save your progress at any time. Any time! Do you remember the original version of Elite? You had to complete a successful docking manoeuvre and then, only then, could you save your game. It was a moment of genuine, sweaty-palmed achievement! Now you can be halfway through a level of Chuckie Egg, press the ‘Home’ button, and come back to it later. It removes the delicious, frantic tension of knowing that if you mess up this one jump, you’re back to the start! What happened to the moral fibre that comes from knowing failure is absolute? It’s gone, people!
- Rewind: And the Rewind function? This is just witchcraft. You make a mistake, you press a button, and you go back 30 seconds. That’s not gaming! That’s just editing the past! In my day, when you fell down a pit in Manic Miner, you sat there, looked at the screen, and considered all your poor life choices up to that point! You accepted your fate! Now it’s, “Oh, sorry, I’m just going to un-fall down that pit, thank you very much.”
They’ve even put USB ports on the back for modern gamepads. USB! On a machine that was built by Sir Clive Sinclair—a man whose entire design philosophy seemed to be, “The fewest and cheapest components available in the known universe!” It’s a beautiful, authentic rubber-keyed replica on the outside, but underneath, it’s a terrifyingly competent little emulation engine.
So, should you buy it? Of course you should! It’s an absolute triumph of engineering that perfectly recreates the experience of a 1980s computer, while simultaneously mitigating every single frustrating aspect of owning a 1980s computer. It’s a wonderful, contradictory mess that is entirely, gloriously, what we asked for.
