“The buttons are absolutely awful, You have to press so hard and they intermittently stop working unless you apply so much pressure.”įrom where we’re sitting, remembering the dubious quality of some of the keyboards on original Spectrum products, we think that it might have more in common with the original than anyone is willing to admit. In an unexpected twist though they are reported to have shipped a few Vegas to backers in recent days, and we’ll leave the final word to the BBC’s quote from, one of those recipients. But it’s a fitting follow-up to our previous reporting, and unless something unexpected happens in the Retro Computers boardroom it’s probably the last we’ll hear of the product. This is a general news story as much as a hardware story as there is little by way of a hack to be found beyond the realisation that you could almost certainly roll your own with a Raspberry Pi, a copy of FUSE, and a 3D-printed case. They famously passed to Amstrad in the 1980s, a move that gave us the Spectrum +2 and +3 with decent keyboards and built-in tape and disk drives, but long after the last Spectrum had rolled off the production line they passed with Amstrad’s set-top-box business to the satellite broadcaster Sky, who are now responsible for pulling the plug. The sorry tale of its mishandling will probably in time provide enough information for a fascinating book or documentary in itself, but one thing that has come to light in the BBC’s reporting is the fate of those Sinclair brands. The Vega itself should have been a reasonable proposition, a slick handheld running the FUSE Spectrum emulator rather than Z80 hardware, and from Retro Computers Limited, a company that boasted a 25% ownership from Sinclair Research and thus Sir Clive himself.
After raising a record sum on Indiegogo, a long series of broken promises and missed dates, and a final loss of patience from the crowdfunding site, it has emerged that the owner of the Sinclair and ZX brands is to withdraw the right to use them from the console. It will need to raise the remaining £93,000 within the next sixty days.Ī ten percent royalty of Vega sales will go to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.It’s not a good time to be a backer of the crowdfunded Sinclair ZX Vega retro console. Some 21 hours since the project launched, Retro Computers has raised about £6,800 of total funding.
Sinclair Research, the company responsible for the 1982 original, is a shareholder in Retro Computers. Its creators, a UK firm called Retro Computers, seek £100,000 from the crowdfunding site Indiegogo to help commercialise the project and build the first 1,000 units. Once hooked to television sets, the device is capable of running more than the 14,000 games developed during the Spectrum era.
Resplendent with a familiar aesthetic, the Vega is a miniaturised version of the ZX Spectrum that is both a games controller and console in one. His team's new invention is the Sinclair Spectrum Vega a microconsole that comes with more than 1,000 ZX Spectrum games pre-installed. Sir Clive Sinclair, the revered inventor and entrepreneur who launched a range of seminal home computers in the 1980s, has backed a new project to revive the ZX Spectrum brand.