The Sinclair ZX Spectrum (Pronounced: "Zed Ecks Spec-trum" from its original British English branding) is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd. Referred to during development as the ZX81 Colour and ZX82, the machine was launched as the ZX Spectrum by Sinclair to highlight the machine's colour display, compared with the black-and-white of its predecessor, the Sinclair ZX81. The Spectrum was released in eight different models, ranging from the entry level model with 16 KB RAM released in 1982 to the ZX Spectrum +3 with 128 KB RAM and built in floppy disk drive in 1987.
The Spectrum was among the first mainstream audience home computers in the UK, similar in significance to the Commodore 64 in the USA. The introduction of the ZX Spectrum led to a boom in companies producing software and hardware for the machine, the effects of which are still seen; some credit it as the machine which launched the UK IT industry. Licensing deals and clones followed, and earned Clive Sinclair a knighthood for "services to British industry".
The C64 was a major rival to the Spectrum in the UK market during the early 1980s. The BBC Microcomputer and later the Amstrad CPC-range were other major competitors.
The Spectrum is based on a Zilog Z80A CPU running at 3.5 MHz (or NEC D780C-1 clone). The original model Spectrum has 16 KB (16×1024 bytes) of ROM and either 16 KB or 48 KB of RAM. Hardware design was by Richard Altwasser of Sinclair Research, and the machine's outward appearance was designed by Sinclair's industrial designer Rick Dickinson.
Video output is through an RF modulator and was designed for use with contemporary portable television sets, for a simple colour graphic display. Text can be displayed using 32 columns × 24 rows of characters from the ZX Spectrum character set, from a palette of 15 shades: seven colours at two levels of brightness each, plus black.The image resolution is 256×192 with the same colour limitations. To conserve memory, colour is stored separate from the pixel bitmap in a low resolution, 32×24 grid overlay, corresponding to the character cells. Altwasser received a patent for this design. An "attribute" consists of a foreground and a background colour, a brightness level (normal or bright) and a flashing "flag" which, when set, causes the two colours to swap at regular intervals. Unfortunately, this scheme leads to what was dubbed colour clash or attribute clash with some bizarre effects in the animated graphics of arcade style games. This problem became a distinctive feature of the Spectrum and an in-joke among Spectrum users, as well as a point of derision by advocates of other systems. Other machines available around the same time, for example the Amstrad CPC, did not suffer from this limitation. The Commodore 64 used colour attributes in a similar way, but a special multicolour mode, hardware sprites and scrolling were used to avoid attribute clash.
Sound output is through a beeper on the machine itself. This is capable of producing one channel with 10 octaves. The machine also includes an expansion bus edge connector and audio in/out ports for the connection of a cassette recorder for loading and saving programs and data.
The machine's Sinclair BASIC interpreter is stored in ROM (along with fundamental system-routines) and was written by Steve Vickers on contract from Nine Tiles Ltd. The Spectrum's chiclet keyboard (on top of a membrane, similar to calculator keys) is marked with BASIC keywords, so that, for example, pressing "G" when in programming mode would insert the BASIC command GO TO.
More info :
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zx_spectrum
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http://rapidshare.com/files/42988082/ZXSpec.zip
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