ZX Spectrum Part 3 - Revisiting the machine at last!

It worked, the freeware ultra reflect is fine, it's fine, I don't have a joystick interface, it kinda sucks. I don't have an interface option, so the keyboard will have to do. I don't remember how to start this game, but that's my mistake. Alright, I think I figured out the tape charge. I reloaded Jet Set Willy after loading those other two games and sure enough I had to reset the volume control to the same position I had it the first time to get Jet Set Willy to load consistently. Clearly there is a bit of an issue with interference from my cell phone and also potentially with the volume levels of the different software packages that are in this program.

I really don't know if you have experience using this app. Let me know in the comments section. Here's how it works for you, so let's move on to the next thing we need to do with the

spectrum

. I want to fix this ugly metal cover here. Remember I removed it in my

last

video and I kind of doubled it and you can see the waves here from that plus. There are small specks where they are missing. I actually colored them with a marker but overall it has some scratches and dents and it just doesn't look that good, luckily the keys look good and the case itself is good for the most

part

, it's just that this cover is ugly, so after my

last

video on the

spectrum

, Peter from Zed I'll put a link in the description below, please check it out.

Sell ​​a bunch of Wraith Pieces to spice up your Wraith. and make it look like new again, so the box came like this in the mail and it says dust cover for the FX spectrum, which is cool. He didn't tell me exactly what he was sending, but let's open this up and take a look inside, well, right off the bat, here's the dust cover that he sent, which is quite nice, in fact, it fits the spectrum perfectly, it's actually perfect for me because I will display my spectrum on my little rack of cool computers. Peter, discreet but most exciting, sent me a new keyboard membrane.

This is fantastic since you guys remember my last video. I had to cut them off and try to get this to work again and now they are short and will probably die again. then lastly we have a shiny new keyboard cover and a single brand comes with 3m double sided adhesive okay let's separate the spectrum and I'll install these pieces so now I have the top cover here. I brought this down with some extra tape, but I didn't put that much in there so I'm guessing this will come off pretty easily. Oh no, look, it's Reese ticking again.

I just added this little piece of tape. Look at the black tape there a little bit. a little bit there and a little bit on the side there was enough sticky residue that it got stuck again. I'm going to have to clean all this before putting the new cover on. I can just pull this keyboard up here and then there's the old one. Keyboard membrane underneath so I'm going to peel this off, it's old and it actually works pretty well considering it's okay so I'm going to try to use Google to remove some of this adhesive and I really don't know how.

I'm going to take this off of mine, so first scrape this off with a screwdriver. I'm going to apply this with a cotton swab, I'm going to take this tool nice and soaked and we're just going to put this here and let it kind of soak it in a little bit, hopefully it can work a little bit with the adhesive. I have an old credit card here and I'm going to scratch it now. Okay, it's barely having an effect, but it's working well. The glue was removed. It was definitely quite a bit of work to get this out of the spectrum I was using, but it didn't work, so I had to resort to wd-40, which is a much stronger solvent, but in the end I got this completely clean, so Before I put the new keyboard cover, we need to test the keyboard membrane with EDX working keyboard just to make sure everything works perfectly and then I will remove the adhesive tape to stick it so that the keyboard membrane connects. these two connections on the Zed Aligns across all pins. just make sure it's seated correctly on all of them, the little plastic pegs go into the rubber

part

of the keyboard here, so here's my ZX spectrum.

I had to replace all of these RAM chips to get this to work properly. I have this slot cover glued here. and a little bit of heat sink in addition to these heat sinks glued to these two chips, plus they get very hot in here and all I have to do is plug these two ribbon cables into these two connectors, so with a computer on I tried them all the keys and everything worked absolutely perfectly so I took off the top of the spectrum again and made sure everything is lined up correctly and I think it's time to install this metal cover so you still have the tape covered.

See how this works if I put it on top, so I notice that when I hold it down on the sides, if I push on the middle here, the metal bends so it sticks out a little bit, on both ends, the top and the bottom, So I guess I'm going to go for it. I'm going to remove all of this 3m adhesive and stick this on. I was going to do it only on the sides, but because it falls off at the top and bottom. here I'm going to do the four sides, so here you go, what do you think?

All the keys are pressed correctly and yes, I mean, this looks very good, very, very good. The adhesive worked well on the top and bottom because it sticks well. down all the way without it falling out at all, it's a very tight fit, especially because of the RF modulator, so I want to make sure that this ribbon cable doesn't get pinched, so I'm going to pull it forward like this and then I'm going to to put the screws on this thing, now the spectrum is all embellished and put back together. I was going to play some games, but I had a little problem connecting it to my scan converter.

Seems rubbish, what's all this horrible interference? I've seen it, I hope you can see this in the video, but there is a lot of high frequency noise in the image. I currently have this connected to my Scart scan converter. This thing does a pretty good job with a friend. signal, but this same problem occurs on the retro tank and also on my Sony pvm, so if you have a problem similar to this, you might be led to believe that there is something wrong with the computer, it wouldn't be out of the question to try to fix it either .

Blame it on the cheap switching power supply I put here. The previous power supply was linear and probably kept much cleaner than this one when it came to high frequency noise, but the real problem is not the power supply, nor the computer, nor the video interface box. What I'm using is this here, it's the video cable, this cable has two RCA connectors and a very thin black cable that connects these two connectors, but they are yellow in color, which would normally indicate that this is good for video, but Actually, this cable is shit. Here's another RCA cable.

Let's try this one and see what happens. Would you notice that all that high frequency interference has completely disappeared? These

machine

s just aren't known for having the clearest video output out there, but all that. The high frequency noise I was getting before is unusual even for a problem, but all of those problems were caused by this RCA cable and you know, I've actually had problems with these before, this is probably totally fine for audio, but any high frequency. An app like this just picks up a ton of noise and I get those same interference patterns on other computers too, not just on the ZX spectrum, so I spent about 45 minutes trying to load a game on the spectrum, all kinds of different games from that application. different volume levels connected to the phone and connected directly to the amplifier, nothing works at all so I don't know if I'm dealing with a glitch in the spectrum or if my inputs aren't loud enough, sometimes it tries to load.

I'm trying to load Bionic Commando as you see, it says Bionic there, but I always get a tape error, there must be something wrong with this spectrum. I mean, it can't be that bad, so I'll leave it for now. I can't spend anything. More time on this computer at least it looks good now and I have a nice dust cover. I don't think I've shown this before on the channel, but in the basement I have a man cave that's on this wall here. I have a nice little screen of some of my nice 8-bit computers and I think I'm going to put the spectrum here next to the found field 64.

We have a trs-80 pocket computer and we have an Atari wallet, so I'll put this here well and the spectrum will have its new home, so that will be it for this video about the ZX spectrum. I want to send a huge thank you to Peter at ZX Renew for sending me those parts to make my The ZX Spectrum looks its best, it looks great on the shelf in the room over there with all those other 8-bit computers. The ZX has been an interesting

machine

for me because I always wanted to play with one, but always.

I'm going to use that thing, it's so frustrating for me that the keyboard itself is frustrating to use just the key combinations, although I guess you get very used to that and you get pretty fast, but the fact that I just can't load in a way reliable. In fact, I couldn't play any software tonight. I don't know what's going on there and if it's my machine or all the number twos, but at this point I don't think I'm going to try to play on that thing anymore. I prefer to just use an emulator now. I know many of my viewers have very fond memories of the ZX Spectrum and I don't want to take anything away from that, but from my point of view, I have never used one or never owned one.

It's a very hard machine to love, especially when I compare it to a Commodore 64, a peer of its era. Still, there's a huge usability gap between those two machines. I'd love to hear your comments on what I'm talking about. the comments section below, so leave your stories there. You can give me a thumbs up if you liked this video or knew what to do. A thumbs down, you can subscribe for more videos and thank you very much for watching. Bye bye.