Sinclair Resurge Ltd

The ZX Spectrum is back – and there’s no need to dig out your tape recorder

Have you ever wondered what inspires HBossa Studios to dream up oddball games such as I Am Bread? Look no further than gamer-in-chief Henrique Olifiers, who had his childhood mind scrambled by eccentric ZX Spectrum games such as Jet Set Willy.

“Thirty years ago, I was playing a game where the whole house was trying to kill me and I end up with my head inside a toilet,” he says. “Why don’t we make games like that any more? Why so serious?” Hence Olifiers’ affectionate and ambitious plan to revive Sinclair’s long dormant computer range with a 2017 model – the fully licensed ZX Spectrum Next, complete with design work from original Sinclair designer Rick Dickinson.

The Next board is an evolution of the TB Blue, a Raspberry Pi-esque Spectrum-in a-box built by Victor Trucco – a veteran retro engineer who’s also a childhood friend of Olifiers. Trucco planned to sell the TBBlue outside of his native Brazil, but Olifiers dreamed bigger. “I started to push it,” the Bossa man explains. “Why don’t we add more memory, more graphics modes? I reached out to Rick Dickinson, and he was in. Lo and behold, we had the Next.”

There’s no software emulator here, nor a desire to mimic the game-jukebox approach of 2015’s Spectrum Vega. Next’s hardware perfectly simulates Sinclair’s chips down to the microsecond, so it’s compatible with everything from Jet Set Willy to a 2015 home brews version of Castlevania, and has ports for cassette recorders and Sinclair joysticks. It even plays the 1987 conversion of Taito’s Arkanoid – a tester’s nightmare because of some esoteric graphics coding. “That game is crazy,” Olifiers says. “If Arkanoid works, chances are everything else will.”