The phenomenon retro it affects us all. Young or veterans, most of us grew up with computers or consoles that marked our childhood or early youth. So it’s normal that as we get older we want to go back to them as a way to remember those wonders we’ve played with. And the ZX Spectrums are currently the subject of this 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. Also even the old cassette no longer works and getting it to work and replaying it is a pain in the ass so is there a way to do something spunky but with a patina of modernity? Well yes, and its name is TZXDuino, or what is similar, your cassette player which reproduces the famous beeps of loading game files stored on a microSD card.
Thanks to this magical invention your old ZX Spectrum will regain all its splendor because the possibility of playing with any title in TZX and TAP format that you download from the Internet opens before you and that, as you can surely imagine, there are tens of thousands of them. Releases from early 1982, late 1992, or Sinclair’s heyday in the mid-80s. Absolutely ANYTHING 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
Original games and much more
As you can see in the video you have just 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, finally, click on the play when we want to load any title. Moreover, if an error occurs (the famous R Tape load error, 0:1), there is nothing to rewind because pressing stop and even play, the beeps will return from the beginning of the tape. Immediately.
And as we have already told you, another of the advantages of this TZXDuino for ZX Spectrum is the world that opens up to us homebrewfrom the new developments that continue to be programmed, and the old ones of the last 30 years, you can enjoy them on the hardware created by Sir Clive Sinclair, to check 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 them and sell them at prices around 35-65 dollars approximately. A device that is a real marvel and that will give you back a part of your youth. What time!