found an old computer!

hey guys, i dont got much time, but i got a great find and I just had to post! besides i got some questions and was wondering if people on the board could answer them.

so while doing our missionary work over here in Italy like we are always doing, we entered one person's house and we were talking to them and teaching them a little bit. Then as I was sitting on the couch I looked over to my left and saw a really really old computer, the type that still connected to a TV as the monitor (in fact there was a black and white tv sitting right behind it).

I asked them about it, and they said they were about to throw it away, so I asked if I could have it, and they said yes! So now I got a freaking old computer sitting under my bed, lol. Anyways, this is what it is.

It is a Sinclair 128k ZX Spectrum +2

with a cassette tape Datacorder!

It is all one unit (the keyboard is part of the computer...or the computer is part of the keyboard...whichever you like to say). In the back there are:

2 joystick ports, 1 TV out, 1 audio port, 1 RGB port, 1 keypad port, 1 RS232/MIDI port, 1 Expansion I/O port, and the 9V DC power port where you plug in the power cable.

ANyways, I dont have any cables or cords for it, so I cant really turn it on and test it, but it seems cool to me!!!! Anyone had any experience with a system like this and can anyone tell me anything about it? Thanks! Ciao tutti!

- Anziano Pruitt (DavidP)

P.S. people over here in Italy are going crazy about the Pope dying.

okay i found out a little more about it. it was built in 1985.

i found a place that sells tons of games on cassette tapes, so that is cool. i can buy them for like 5 to 10 bucks.

i would like to know if i could get like some operating system software for it or something like that somewhere...that would be cool if i could get like some version of DOS that works for it on a tape somewhere.

i also need to find the cables for the thing. i need a power cable and a video cable pretty much. anyways, gotta go. ciao!

It's a paper weight. Treat it as such.

Uh... you probably want to get rid of that thing before transfers... eh?

An early version of DOS should work for it. The earliest version I have is 5.0 I think.

linux would work :)

I used to have a Sinclair spectrum (48k), a precursor of that machine many years ago. The processor, if I recall correctly was a Z80A running at a blistering 75kHz (yes, kiloHertz); I'm unsure if any sort of 'modern' operating system could run on it, let alone be installed.

It should have it's own version of basic which you can program with once you get cables to plug it into a tv; if it's anything like the 48k version it should have a ROM chip with the basic interpreter/'device manager' (for want of a better description) built in. Other than its own flavour of basic, you can also program assembly for the chip itself but you'd obviously need to get a hold of an instruction set (I think you run your assembly code with RANDOMIZE USR address; but you'll probably have to write your own simple assembler or just POKE decimal values directly to memory).

I'm fairly certain that spectrum etc. emulators appeared for the pc a number of years ago.

I would think Salem would know more about it, although I suspect he was more into the BBC micro/6502 assembly? Fordy's another possibility who springs to mind.

I think google will very likely be of more help to you - almost certainly more useful than my whimsical recollections anyway.

Good luck with the 'paperweight' anyway. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Waldo2k2

linux would work :)

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It's good to know that Linux is useful for something. ;)

That's awesome, maybe functionwise it's as useful as a paper weight, but come on, that's neat.

My vocational center at my high school threw out a ton of old computer stuff, so my neighbor and I took a bunch of monitors and hard drives and shot them with rifles :) :) :)

never throw out old hard drives, me and a buddy just built a server with 12 old free hard drives in it (most were scsi, but we did have an extra pci ide card). It's only about 250gb total, but for free you can't beat that...but I like skeet shooting too so I guess I can't blame you ;)

Holy crap waldo, I guess this server didn't have a need for good performance. None the less, that is neat.

http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/comp...zxspectrum.htm

I used to have an old ZX81 which was earlier than ken's ( :p ) with a whole 1k of memory. Amazing what you could do with 1k of memory.

Oh, and @ Ober. You're a phillistine :)

The Sinclair is essentially where the modern CPU started. I think you might be able to code an OS in BASIC for the thing. I'm fairly sure that BASIC was first coded on the Sinclair by old Billy Bob.