Sinclair ZX Spectrum Peripherals
The Spectrum had a huge range of accessories, from joystick interfaces to printers and disk drive units.
Here are a few pictures of some of the items in my collection - click on the images for a larger version.
All of these items work with the 16K, 48K and 128K Spectrums.
The Interface 1 allows you to connect up to eight Microdrives
to the Spectrum, or communicate through the built-in RS-232 serial port.
The other, longer cable pictured can be used to link up a whole bunch of Spectrums to
form a local area network!
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Sinclair later brought out the Interface 2 which allowed games to be
played from ROM cartridges, instead of tape.
The interface also features twin joystick ports.
The picture shows that the small flap covering the edge connector inside
actually opens upwards, unlike with most consoles. Not pictured are two
tiny covers for the joystick ports. Due to their size (and probably their
lack of usefulness!) these are often lost.
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Connected to the Interface 1, the Microdrive
was the Spectrum's mass (in those days) storage system. The devices could be linked
together in a daisy-chain if you really wanted to show off.
The Microdrive uses tiny, interchangable tape cartridges (the small black thing
in the lower-right corner of the box) which can store 85Kb of data a piece.
It works much faster than the regular tape deck set-up, loading 48Kb programs in
less than 10 seconds.
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Yet another joystick interface for the Spectrum.
I found this one interesting because it's absolutely brand new!
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