ZX Spectrum on a Pi Pico (Part 1)
Published on: 11th January 2023
I’ve got a huge fondness for the ZX Spectrum. It was the first computer I used, and when my parents brought one back from Boots back in 1983 (yes, Boots sold computers back then) I’m not sure they knew what they were getting me into. We all learned BASIC from the enclosed and mighty spiral-bound manual and I can remember my mum, gran and me painstakingly copying out a program to generate a Union Flag. It took all afternoon.
After a few years with the rubber-keyed 48K version I was presented with a +2A by which time I was even able to plug it into a tiny portable TV in the bedroom - no more asking permission and then interrupting everyone’s primtime TV.
I’ve kept an emulator on whatever computer I’ve owned since then for a bit of nostalgia and when the Pi was released it was an obvious candidate for more ZX entertainment, but still required an operating system and careful startup and shutdown. Maybe there’s a better way?
The Pico is is a stunning microcontroller board from Raspberry Pi with specs that are just enough to emulate a Spectrum. And a genius called fruit-bat has achieved this: a complete Spectrum working within the Pico’s 264K of memory. You can find his work here:
https://github.com/fruit-bat/pico-zxspectrum
