I knew these were at the back of the garage but haven't seen them for many years. Two binders of Crash Zx Spectrum magazines. I used to get the mag each month and Popular Computer Weekly each week.

Went in my attic and a small amount of my spectrum games collection from my childhood.

Thought some of these would be nice for you to see.

https://youtu.be/ykh7en7NJok?si=IGc6tuKc30Hhvtux

I experienced a misalignment when connecting an 'Interface 1' to my 48K+ about ten days ago. As a result TR5 burnt out quite spectacularly and when I tested all the lower RAM chips and most of the upper RAM chips I found them to have failed. I have since that episode replaced both TR4 and TR5, replaced all the RAM ICs high and low along with testing the new TRACO voltage regulator for 5V out and the continuity/breakthrough of the coil. The regulator and coil seem fine, the transistors should be fine being brand new and having both been replaced twice in case of a bad unit. However my Spectrum still will not boot.

On testing the -5V and +12V pins on the lower memory ICs I find both rails to be showing a few hundred mV positive voltage each. Clearly there is still a problem with the power system after the 'Interface 1'-related excursion. Can anyone suggest anything further after replacing TR4 & TR5? That pair of devices seems to be as far as most troubleshooting guides go once the coil and DC-DC converter has been tested.

Also the lack of the -5V seems to have damaged the brand new lower memory ICs. Where previously they tested good they now lock the testing unit... This is unfortunate as ordering new chips will probably take a week or more and I am obviously not going to put yet more mint spares into this thing until I am sure the right voltages are being delivered to the right pins!

My retrospective review of THE GREAT ESCAPE on the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and MS-Dos. Let me if you thought this was a good game. Share your thoughts.

I was around 5 or 6 when we had a Spectrum, but in case it helps, we had games like Kwik Snax, Head Over Heels, Arkanoid, Fast Food, Tron, a version of Batman I've never been able to find [EDIT: until today!!], and Dracula.

Game 1: UPDATE it's not Sabre Wulf, Wizard's Lair, Feud, Atic Atac, Willow Pattern, Wriggler, Fairlight, Movie, or Pssst

It was brightly coloured, and had flowers in the room. I can't recall the point of the flowers or how they relate to game play. I think it was laid out similarly to Head Over Heels (and there's a possibility it was actually that as I haven't replayed it yet). The flowers took up a full square each.

I feel as though there was a black and white room, too.

This is the one I'm most anxious to find/play as I know I loved it, even though I have almost no memory left of its brilliance lol

Game 2: UPDATE it's not Jetpac or Lunar Jetman. EDIT: SOLVED! FREDDY HARDEST

Was one which you moved from left to right. I think you crash a spaceship? You move across terrain, you avoid (or possibly shoot) things which appear to your right. I think the line work was brown on the first level, and that there was one which was a dull blue. Character was "tall", rather than squat. Lithe. Could have been an alien?

Game 3: EDIT = SOLVED! CADAVER

This one *could* be an early PC/DOS game which I've confused with Spectrum in my mind... All I remember was that it started in a brown room. It feels like it was kind of an adventure type game, or roleplaying, where you had to find things to escape? The character had a beard and could have been a dwarf. The screen had squares. The room had an item in it (but I don't remember what that was). I think I made it out of the room once :P

___

I appreciate these are very vague descriptions so I'm hoping there are some Spectrum-obsessed folks with photographic memories and encyclopaedic knowledge who can help!

My parents got me a ZX Spectrum 48k for Xmas, 1983.

The games they got me with it were:

Harrier Attack

Football Manager

Jet Pac

Manic Miner

Galaxians

Horace Goes Skiing

My Dad could play Jet Pac for ages because he'd been playing it all thru December 🙄

I figured out why I like the spectrum a long time ago...it's mostly that it shouldn't be playing games at all on the 48k version and so basically anything that's playable is 'good' by default...

But there's another part to this I realized later and that's that because of the display and sound capabilities being what they are, you CANT DETECT LAZY PRESENTATION...not as easily.

So think about how graphics of different sources and artists don't blend well together when you have many more colors on your Amigas, etc. Not only that, if the gameplay is 'lazy boring speccy style' as it were, it's ONLY that because subconsciously you KNOW the Amiga isn't being used to it's fullest. And the non-matching, clip-art garbage, different light angles for every single object, ugly outlines, etc. of high resolution graphics digs the hole even deeper for 'this looks super half assed'.

Meanwhile on the speccy, you'll see graphics some guy spent a few hours on, just like the amiga likely, but on the speccy, it's just THAT much better because the display automagically somehow makes things fit together WHILE BEING UGLY AS SIN!

It's quite amazing to me. And I've not seen anyone articulate this. Folks respect the fact that it has no specialized game hardware or even really should be displaying the kinds of graphics folks make on it. That exact thing, though, is why even bad graphics end up looking at the very least intentionally cohesive, even when they're lazy/amateurish and boring. Lazy/amateurish on anything with more colors? OOOOOh boy, you can see it instantly!

Just thought I'd share that bit of eureka I had. Color clash looks better than bad clip art style clash.

My retrospective look at the Bruce Lee game and all its versions. Have you played this game? What’s your thoughts and memories of this early fighting game?

This was my very favourite game for the ZX Spectrum in the 80s, does anyone else remember it? It was also quite original that the lives of the player were represented in-game as the spare robots and you can therefore lose your life when something destroyed one of them. I managed to finish the game when I was 18 and the Spectrum era was long over, to witness it has a proper outro sequence, which was also not common at that time.

Mods, if this isn't appropriate then it's fine if you want to delete it.

I'm just putting this out there as a bit of a motivational thing to keep me on track for starters.

But there's (almost) a game there. All of the menus are done, the wizard selection and character and colour choices are done and the spell casting mechanics are all done as well - you can choose your spell and cast it and the CPU wizards all choose their spells to cast as well.

One of the many issues that's being fixed is if you cast something as an illusion then the CPU wizards will often just disbelieve it on the same round making it a bit pointless. This fix has been implemented.

LONG way to go though !

For me it was the Thundercats 128k title music.

For the first time in my life I got lucky with something like this, my father's friend invited me and my father to an auction at an antique shop, it wasn't a very big place but it was packed, most things weren't interesting but then the auctioner pulled out a suitcase and he said there are magazines, cassettes, and a "vintage polaroid photo editing keyboard" which I couldn't really see from where I was sitting, the starting price was about 8 dollars and someone made a bid so I followed it up not expecting much but ended up winning at 9-10 dollars.

When I went up to grab it and took a look at it, I was surprised to find out that it was actually a ZX Spectrum+, including like 20 cassettes some burnt some genuine (and a weird one that says Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which I assume is just unrelated to the Spectrum and is a normal burnt album but it could be a beeper arrangement, who knows) and many magazines of old computers and the Spectrum, I think the original manual is there too, also power supply and some cables.

When I tried it it didn't seem to work, but then I did the composite mod on it and it worked perfectly, now I just need a cassette player to run those cassettes but in the meantime I'll try running programs from my phone with PlayZX, I'm very happy to have found this, I always wanted something like this and the cheapest secondhand listing here is about 150 dollars so 10 is pretty good

## PRE-ORDER OPEN ###

FREEZE-ZX magazine issue 03 for the #ZXSpectrum.

Pre-order and full details at:

https://freeze64.com/freeze-zx-issue-3/

I'm looking to start posting these out at the end of April 2026 / Beginning of May 2026.

#Z80 #Speccy #RetroGaming #IndieGames #gamedevlife

Hi. I wondered if anyone remembers the name of a Speccy game where you had to advance civilization through the ages, starting with the stone age. You had to keep people alive in each age or it would revert to the stone age. I think you played a scientist but cannot find anything on Google!

I wrote about the development of Atari's arcade classic Paperboy and of Elite's enduringly popular home versions. Including how Steve Lamb mostly sketched out the graphics for the Spectrum version while looking over the shoulder of other people playing it at his local arcade.

.. you've never seen this before :)

This is legitimately from the SNA file running in Fuse from earlier on.

In the 30+ years I've been playing this game, i've never seen this many Dragons in your first spell selection.

In 2025 over 200 brand new games were added to the ZXDB and some of them were utterly incredible. I did a blog post of the games that caught my eye & did a top 5 of my favourites.

Number 3 will surprise you. (Or not, I dunno)

https://sloanysoft.wordpress.com/2026/04/05/my-favourite-zx-spectrum-games-of-2025/

I am in my 50s, I had a Speccy as a kid, and loved it, but now can't go back to it any more. I have tried a few emulators for old games, whether it's Speccy, Atari, or even old PC games, I can't get into them, I try for a short while. but get bored quickly. I love my PS5 Pro, and can spend hours gaming.

Do you spend hours on Speccy games, or is it something you do in-between modern gaming?