Another day, another ebay win (is it ebay or e-bay, or even EBay, eBay, Ebay?) After telling myself I had bought enough (4 Spectrums, plus a power supply and cable from the very nice man at DataServe), I couldn’t resist scanning eBaY just in case ‘anything nice came up’.
And of course it did. So I bid on, and eventually won a working Spectrum shown with both the Speccy and the screen (48k rubber key edition). It even has a box and everything (sides missing)! It comes with a few games as well. Of course, it could turn out to be a pup (maybe it’s got the fault where only 16K RAM shows up), or something else could be up with it, but it certainly looks decent in the pictures. That’s £17 plus £11 postage (including the games!)
That one has also shipped already, so should be here soon. The first one still hasn’t shipped and I haven’t had a response from the seller to my EBay query yet either, so starting to get a touch nervous about that. Paid for it on the 6th, no communication since then. I’m sure it’ll be okay.
The middle one is still en-route, posted on Friday so there’s a chance it’ll arrive in the next couple of days. Hopefully the new (old) power supply and lead (from DataServe-Retro) will be here by then and I can work out how many of them (if any!) still actually work.
After that, who knows? I may try the RF to Composite Video conversion on one of the cheaper ones that work, to try my hand at a bit of soldering.
Of course, then there’s a long discussion about how to actually play games? Do you buy a tape player and find tapes (or write out TAP files to tape), or do you buy something like the DivIDE so that you can write all your legitimate tape contents to a CF card and load games from that?
Am I even buying these things so I can play games? Probably not, frankly, who wants to spend 3 hours trying to play Atic Atac on a tiny keyboard or dodgy second hand joystick when it’s trivial to play with an emulator? But it’s not about that, it’s about having the kit again, physically in my hands, after all this time.