Spectral Analysis

Roughly, uh...

(counts on fingers, runs out of fingers)

...twelve years ago, I wrote a series of articles for the late, lamented 1UP web site featuring the ZX Spectrum. This budget priced home computer was a regional phenomenon, ubiquitous throughout its native Great Britain in the 1980s but a total mystery to budding tech nerds in the United States. It was one of those things "Yanks can't wank," to quote YouTube's "Guru" Larry Bundy.

After learning about the machine and taste-testing some of its software in an emulator, I took it upon myself to share that knowledge with 1UP's readers, in a regular feature titled "What the Hell is a Spectrum?" It was a crash course in Britain's best kept secret, a makeshift game console with thousands upon thousands of titles which had somehow escaped America's notice.

It had games from Donkey Kong to Street Fighter II with nearly everything in between, but in hindsight, it's not hard to understand why the Spectrum was ignored in this country. Where home computers were concerned, America was Commodore's turf, thanks to the aggressive pricing and superior hardware of the C64. While it wasn't much to look at on the outside, sharing the ugly breadbox design of the earlier VIC-20, the C64 was better suited to video games, with sprites that could move independently of the playfield, a custom sound chip, and a rich color palette. The Spectrum didn't have any of these things... hell, even a joystick port wasn't standard equipment on the earlier models, forcing players to buy a peripheral to add that functionality. (And probably some blue tack to keep it in place. Clive Sinclair's electronics weren't what you would call sturdily designed. Explodey, but not particularly robust.)

So the Spectrum never came to the United States in an official capacity... but its designer Sinclair Research and Timex did take a swing at the American market with several home computers, ending with the Timex-Sinclair 2068. The two companies must have realized that the Spectrum had no hope of competing with the Commodore 64 as a game system, because the 2068 is better equipped for that purpose, sporting an arcade-tested sound chip, more RAM, dual joystick ports, and extra graphics modes with more versatile color handling. Oh, and it looks a lot more stylish than the C64, too. Check out that clean, compact design and that silvery sheen! Truly, a magnificent specimen of early '80s speculative futurism!

The only problem is that there were tons of computers in the American market all hoping to topple the industry leader. Without brand recognition, software support, and the star power of Alan Alda, William Shatner, or Charlie Chaplin (quite dead, yet somehow motivated to shill consumer electronics), Timex-Sinclair had no chance of competing in the United States. The cruelest cut is that while the TS-2068 was objectively better than the ZX Spectrum, it could only run ten percent of that system's enormous software library, and zero percent of those titles could take advantage of its improved hardware. What kind of dope would even think of buying a computer like this?

Uh... me, actually. But I have reasons! The first is that someone had offered a Timex-Sinclair 2068 for the price of shipping on Reddit, and considering that prices for video games and home computers have rocketed into the stratosphere over the last two years, I just had to get in on that. The second is that while the TS-2068 isn't compatible with the ZX Spectrum by default, it can be persuaded to run nearly all of its games with the aid of a reasonably priced adapter. I'm also pretty sure someone's found a modern workaround for its reliance on cassette media... perhaps an app that would let me connect a smartphone to its mic port for lightning fast loads and almost infinite storage space. Look, I loaded games from cassette back in the 1980s with the VIC-20. I ain't going back to that again. 

Also, I did mention the silver finish, right? 

* Special thanks to Wikipedia for its assistance in researching this blog entry. Also, I know Texas Instruments had a celebrity spokesman too. He's dead to me now, and it's not just because of Leonard Part 6.