I nearly had an assembled Pico Spectrum but there was one big gap: no audio. It’s just not a Spectrum without the infamous tape loading sounds, and some in-game music would be nice too.
The components to clean up the audioThe GitHub site showed a simple circuit that I could set up on the breadboard but connecting everything permanently was going to require a real strip of circuit board. I’d got some that had tracks already printed which would be ideal. I did a dry run just pushing all of the electronics through the holes and I’m mightly glad I did as I’d underestimated how much room I’d need! With a better idea of space I cut off a corner and set to work attaching resistors.
I still needed four cables to link the Proto board to this satellite board. It crossed my mind that USB cables have four cores and I probably had an old extension cable somewhere I could sacrifice for the cause, so fished it out and cut a length. I could have got clever and cut the cable in half, giving me a plug and socket that I could have used to attach and detach the board, but chickened out and just used a straight length. This was going to be tricky enough without trying to be smart. And with everything finally assembled it was time to add some power and a keyboard and see if it actually worked!
The first test showing a loading screen! Success!And, astonishingly, it did. Somehow I’d soldered everything together without making an utter mess of it. Wonders will never cease. Now to try out the SD card socket and load an actual game…
