 
 Several
peripherals for the Spectrum were marketed by Sinclair: the
printer was already on the market, as the Spectrum had retained
the protocol for the ZX81's printer. Special aluminium coated
paper was required and is difficult to acquire today. A charge
was passed through styli, which burnt away the aluminium coating,
revealing the black paper underneath in the specified character
- 32 per line. 
Many Speccy add-ons are difficult to acquire today -from
thermal printers to the sleek microdrives.
 The
unique keyboard characters comprise not only the single
symbols (letters, digits, etc), but also the compound tokens
(keywords, function names, etc) and all these are entered
from the keyboard rather than being spelled out.
To obtain all these functions and commands, some keys have
five or more distinct meanings, given partly by shifting
the keys (i.e. pressing either the CAPS SHIFT key or the
SYMBOL SHIFT key at the same time as the required one) and
partly by having the machine in different modes.
 The
Sinclair Microdrive can hold up to 100kb using a single
interchangeable storage medium! The transfer rate is 16kb
per second with an average access time of 3.5 seconds. Up
to eight microdrives can be connected to the Speccy via
the ZX Expansion Module. A remarkable breakthrough and reasonably
priced (£50). First available in 1983
|
 The
Sinclair Spectrum sprouted a whole generation of machine code
programmers since 1982. Some of the most popular games appeared
almost as soon as the Speccy did: Classics like Manic Miner
and Jet Pac that have stood the test of time as they are as
playable today as they were over twenty years ago.
Manic Miner
One of the earliest and most successful
platform games released for the speccy in 1983 by Bug-Byte
Software and later released under the Software Projects label.
Dynamite Dan
 Many
interconnected screens to explore here.
Our here Dan must find all 8 sticks of dynamite that are randomly
scattered about the game each time you play. Then he must
find the safe, blow it and get the plans. 
Great gameplay and nice little intro tune by Mozart. Find the
test-tubes and get an extra life. Find food for sustenance.
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