Game Recommendations, Manufacturing & Firmware Progress, and CE Testing

by Christopher G

Hey Everyone,

Lots of exciting things to report. We’re fully funded - an amazing achievement!

Thanks again to everyone who has backed the project. Even though we are fully funded, there’s still room for more people, so I’d really appreciate if you could share the campaign page with all your friends.

We’ve got some great people backing the project - Stefan got in touch with some great stories about growing up with the Spectrum. He even published and sold a game back in 1985! You can see his game Moon-Cargo in this video.

I must apologies for the slightly dusty screen. If you are following me on BlueSky you’ll know that I’ve been tidying up my workspace and that always generates a lot of dust. I say tidying up - to be honest it seemed to mostly involve just moving things from one surface to another. But, here’s my workspace ready for action!

Ready for more testing!

Stefan also had a list of some great games that he remembers fondly:

All the Ultimate games (Underwurlde, Sabrewulf, Aticatac, Alien 8, Knightlore, Jetpac, Pssst)
Fred
Knot in 3D

Like Stefan, my games collection got lost a long time ago - thank goodness there are places like World of Spectrum that are archiving these classics.

Stefan also had some great stories about modding his hardware, breaking the power supply, and how much he doesn’t miss loading off cassette. Fortunately that is a thing of the past with Z80 snaphots and TZX files - much easier to use.

Progress on my side - here’s a photo of one of my prototype boards packed in a box to be sent off for testing at a CE compliance lab. I am slightly worried about the tests - they will be zapping the board to see how well it handles EMI - hopefully it will survive and carry on working.

Good luck to my little board!

I’ve got some minor cosmetic updates to the board, these shouldn’t impact the CE certifications. I’m going to hold off sending them off to PCBWay until I get the results back from the lab as I may need to add more ESD protection or make other modifications.

Other news - the amazing Larry Bank has offered to take a look at the firmware and make some performance improvements. If you don’t know who Larry is then please take a look at his GitHub repos. He is famous for producing highly optimised code for embedded devices.

I’ve also done a followup post with more details on loading from audio tapes - fun, but not recommended - Z80 files and TAP/TZX are definitely the way to go - but it proves it’s possible!