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  • Does the Speccy have enough outputs on the edge connector to make a simple DAC like the parallel port ones we used to make with a bunch of resistors for the PC?

    e.g. the homemade versions of this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing

    by qingcharles
  • Due to all the constraints the ZX Spectrum is a fantastic system for recreational programming; too bad I missed the latest Spectrum Next batch last year.
    by musha68k
  • There was a music editor I remember getting on a late Your Sinclair edition cover tape which displayed proper music staves and gave you 4-note chord output. Blew my mind a bit at the time.
    by regularfry
  • And who could possibly forget Chronos' title music, by Tim Follin?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-D24A_N4d4

    by 2a0c40
  • I have a memory of a Spectrum game playing some sort of synthesised speech through the speaker that seemed incredibly ahead of its time. I believe the game was called iBall. And the sample said something like “Fight iBall!” Have I misremembered that? Was this a fever dream?
    by urbandw311er
  • I wrote a Reg article based on this:

    https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/13/the-improbabl...

    I got some valuable links to tunes from a previous HN thread:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49611230

    It was just 3 weeks ago...

    by lproven
  • Doing stuff like this in the 8-bit era was never particularly hard. The difficulty was doing this and then anything else, because you basically need the entire CPU just for audio synthesis. For games, there was a very real trade-off between calculating video, game state, and sound, and sound often took the back seat.

    It's also why everything looked and sounded better on 8-bit computers that had hardware support for graphic sprites or sound generation, even if they had a less powerful CPU. And it's the untold story behind why 16-bit graphics looked so much better: it wasn't about the CPU as much as it was about having a dedicated video card / chipset with its own memory, a sound card that handled polyphonic sound and MIDI synthesis, etc.

    by socializer

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