The phenomenon vintage it affects us all. Young or veteran, most of us have grown up with computers or consoles that have marked our childhood or early youth. So it’s normal that as we get older, we want to return to them as a way of remembering those wonders we played with. And the ZX Spectrum are currently the subject of that nostalgic fever that surrounds us.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have tapes
Who else keeps their old ZX Spectrum at home but, unfortunately, there are few tapes that we still have intact. What’s more, even the old cassette doesn’t work anymore and getting it going and reviving it is a pain in the ass so is there a way to make something pungent but with a patina of modernity? Well yes, and its name is TZXDuino, or what is the same, your cassette player that reproduces the famous loading beeps from game files stored on a microSD card.
Thanks to this magical invention your old ZX Spectrum will be restored to all its glory because the possibility of playing with any title in TZX and TAP format that you download from the internet opens up before you and that, as you can surely imagine, there are tens of thousands. Releases from early 1982, late 1992, or Sinclair’s own golden age of the mid-’80s. Absolutely EVERYTHING you want to try will be available and at your fingertips.
Besides, the way to connect it to the ZX Spectrum is the same as an old cassette, through the 3.5mm minijack cable. and plugged into a USB port. With that you will only have to choose the game with the up and down arrows and press the button of the play after typing in your old microcomputer the magic words. That is to say:
- load «»
Original games and much more
As you can see in the video that you have right here below, its operation is very basic because we only have to navigate through the folders and files that we have copied to the microSD to, ultimately, click on the play when we want to load whatever title it is. What’s more, if an error occurs (the famous R Tape loading error, 0:1), there is nothing to rewind because pressing stop and again play, the beeps will return from the beginning of the tape. With complete immediacy.
And as we told you before, another of the advantages of this TZXDuino for ZX Spectrum is the world that opens to us homebrewsince the new developments that continue to be programmed, and the old ones from the last 30 years, you will be able to enjoy them on the hardware created by Sir Clive Sinclair, to verify the technical quality that current programmers have achieved with their old 8 bits .
This TZXDuino You can buy it through eBay or platforms like ETSY, where some users are able to manufacture and sell them for prices that are around 35-65 euros approximately. A peripheral that is a true wonder and that will give you back part of your youth. What times!