my speccy

[Jules Richardson]

On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 03:39 -0700, Arron McLaughlin wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I'm Arron, 15, from New Zealand.

Hiya and welcome.

Whereabouts in NZ? I used to find there were some nice pickings around
the north island when I was there - still lots to find in junk shops and
scrapyards (unlike here in the UK!). Plus of course garage sales were a
lot more common in NZ and local tips tended to be much more geared
toward recycling, so old machines would be picked out and put up for
sale for a couple of bucks...

> Yesterday I just finished piecing together two dead spectrums into one
> working unit. I had a few problems with screen quality so I replaced
> the modulator with a little composite circuit. Better quality, though
> flicker still remains.Might add a power switch also. This has been my
> first foray into Sinclair machines.

The speccy was what got me started in computing. Amazing little machines
for the price really - the C64 was probably better (at least graphics-
wise) but more expensive, and the BBC B was a real killer, but probably
twice the price of a speccy. 

I got rid of my Sinclair collection last year to concentrate on some of
my other machines, but I kept one 48K machines (and all my games from
way back when) for sentimental reasons...

> Are there any other New Zealanders here? I met Ethan Dicks a while ago
> on his way through the country.

It doesn't seem to be as much of a hobby there as it is in the UK, US
etc.  - which probably means there's scope for you to build up a really
nice collection if you so wanted.

cheers

Jules