If you have been pining away for a Sinclair Spectrum based games console, SemiAccurate has good news for you. Retro Computers is launching the Sinclair Spectrum Vega ‘console’ along with 1000 Spectrum games.

The idea is nothing new really, there have been a lot of hardware emulators from the Atari 2600 on down that do what the Sinclair Spectrum Vega is doing. Retro Computers seems to be trying to do a really complete job with this revival though, not the usual quasi-legal hack job.

It starts out with the involvement of Sir Clive Sinclair himself, his company is backing Retro. The rights were acquired from Sky In-Home Service and software rights are being negotiated with the owners. This is why the Vega will ship with ‘only’ 1000 of the claimed 14K games available for the Spectrum, more are said to be coming via free download later. Once word gets out about the console, you can bet that the number will increase rapidly, the hard part is finding who owns what 20-30 years later.

Proceeds for the software will be given to charity, Retro Computer is donating 10% of sales to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. If nothing else the rights owners will get a donation to a good cause for rights to otherwise dead code. It all works out nicely.

Including the classic 9-key keyboard… err…

The Sinclair Spectrum Vega hardware is unspecified but they have prototypes running now. It is likely an FPGA, you don’t need much to emulate a 3.5Mhz Z80 with 16-128KB of memory. The hard part is getting the emulation right and given the names behind the Vega, we think they will. At the moment they are crowdfunding it on Indiegogo with things just starting out as this is written. For only 100GBP including 1K games, it is quite reasonable for the amount of time you will waste playing them. You know you want one….S|A