Speccy2010

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A cased Speccy2010 unit
The Speccy2010 circuit board

The Speccy2010 is an unofficial ZX Spectrum clone created by Ukrainian developer Syd, as an improvement on his earlier Speccy2007 project.

Features

The system is based around an Altera Cyclone II FPGA, which takes on the role of the Z80, ULA and AY chips. Being based on configurable hardware, the firmware is loaded from SD card on startup and can potentially be upgraded to add new features (such as the TurboSound extension, providing dual AY sound chips). Snapshot, tape and TR-DOS disk images can also be loaded from SD card.

The Speccy2010 takes an external PS/2 keyboard and mouse for input, along with two standard Atari joysticks. Video output is switchable between composite video, S-Video, SCART RGB (using a custom cable to the VGA port) and VGA at 50, 60 or 75Hz.

The firmware and hardware design are fully open-source, maintained as a Google Code project.

Availability

Syd produced a batch of around 50-100 complete units, as well as selling the bare PCBs. Most of these units were purchased by users in Russia and the Ukraine, with a handful going further afield in February/March 2011 — a blog post by Matt Westcott describes his experience of ordering one for delivery to the UK. Unfortunately by mid-March 2011 Syd had encountered problems with international delivery, and indicated that he would be unlikely to accept international orders in future. In any case, the existing stock had sold out, and owing to personal commitments Syd had no plans for any further production runs.

Around the time these units were on sale, Russian distributor ZST was also offering self-assembly kits via the zxkit.ru website. As of October 2012 these are still advertised on the site, although it's not clear whether these are indeed still available.

A further batch of Speccy2010 PCBs has since been produced in the Czech Republic - these are available (as bare boards only) from the divide.cz shop. Anyone undertaking a Speccy2010 home build project would need to be comfortable with surface-mount soldering, and will likely need to source local equivalents for certain components only available in Russia (Shiru on WOS Forums has offered to assist with this).

In May 2012, Polish hardware developer Lotharek announced that he was in the early stages of producing an updated model named Speccy2012 — as of October 2012 further details are yet to emerge.