Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 / Z88 Forums

Absolutely amazing! I will never grow tired of reading what people are doing with the ZX81.

Please do keep us up to date with your Minitel project Martin as it is good to read of how people overcome certain technical difficulties.

Funnily enough I grew up in France and one of the things I like about the ZX81's block graphics is how much they resemble the Minitel graphics. And also Teletext I guess. We had the basic Minitel which was free but if you wanted the one Martin's using with the retractable keyboard you needed to pay a monthly rental. The call charges were often exorbitant though. As kids we always used to be entertained by the TV ads for sexy chat services on Minitel. In the Internet age of course now we know most of the 'women' on there would have been blokes. The connection charges for those were similar to premium rate phone lines - a pound (ten francs!) a minute at least. I think the main thing we used it for was booking train tickets, and sometimes the weather forecast. It's really amazing how far ahead it was in retrospect.

Well the Minitel had 2x3 graphics compared to 2x2 graphics on the ZX81. And the minitel had 40 columns. If it's not Hi-res compared to the ZX81, then let's call it Med-res.

I trimmed the keyboard membrane tails on the surviving original keyboard I have and got it working. It is noticeably a lot more responsive than the reproduction. As in you only need a fraction of the pressure to trigger a keypress. I'd go as far as to say that most games are utterly unplayable on the stiffer repro keyboard but with a genuine keyboard they are fine.

Where did you get the replacement from?

The ones from Sell My Retro are initially a bit hard but through use ( mine were hammered daily )the top layer does come a bit more pliable to the point of feeling the hole on the next layer like the original, cannot speak for other types though.

The membrane is one of the reasons I decided on external keyboards, a much better experience.

I got the 2019-made Pure Retro ones on eBay, since the regular 2014 design from RWAP was sold out with no ETA for restock.

patters wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 3:23 pm It doesn't even stick out. That's the beaut. The antenna is on the PCB. The ESP32 is incredible really. £7.50 and it can even run Doom!.

That is the coolest thing I have seen in a while! I still remember the size of the PC I had that ran Doom bitd and it wasn‘t that small! It was an Escom DX4 80 if I remember correctly.

Not long until people will be emulating a PS4 on a solar powered computer that fits inside a contact lens. Seems ridiculous now, but it's a logical progression.