Ah, takes me back...
The nostalgia... I'm especially looking forward to the 1980's style delivery date promises: this year; next year Q1; next year Q2, next year Q4 etc etc.
Sir Clive Sinclair in tech tin-rattle triumph
Sir Clive Sinclair has in just three days tin-rattled his way to over £160,000 towards production of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+, described breathlessly as "the world’s only hand-held LCD games console with 1,000 licensed games inside that can also connect to your TV!!". Following the success of the similarly crowdfunded …
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Tuesday 23rd February 2016 16:46 GMT Danny 14
Re: Retro Spec
I remember getting the zx spectrum with 6 game pack. Testing my memory I remember "make a chip", "Horace goes skiing", a hunter game where you played a small animal, chess, a racing game (with 3 tracks!) and something else that I cant remember. Oh and a demo tape that had an arkanoid clone.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 13:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hard to take seriously
Downvote away, I don't care...
It's hard to take anything this owl* comes up with seriously. Remember the C5 and how well that did? I'd be willing to bet any money the same will happen with this. Is there really that much demand for it?
* He looks somewhat like an owl.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 13:47 GMT andy 103
Re: Hard to take seriously
I don't think the C5 - or indeed this console - are "visionary" at all. It's just an example of an item very few people actually want.
Clive Sinclair seems good at coming up with ideas for "stuff" but unfortuantely it's not stuff that people (the market) actually wants to buy!
The C5 was a vehicle which nobody wanted. This is a console, which very few people are likely to want enough to buy.
So it might well appeal to geeks and Reg readers. But it begs the question, what's the business-case for producing them? It just seems like something that will be a massive loss! Which is a strange concept indeed for a man who's supposed to be quite clever. Lose money? Oh ok then sounds great(?!).
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Thursday 18th February 2016 20:20 GMT werdsmith
Re: Hard to take seriously
@andy 103
You said that Sinclair didn't make stuff that the market wanted to buy.
Regardless of financial data, Sinclair could barely make their ZX81 and Spectrum fast enough to satisfy the market.
Before that the Cambridge Scientific was also in demand but took months to fulfil.
But you'd need to go back 35+ years to remember it all.
So LOL indeed.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 15:59 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Re: Hard to take seriously
The C5 wasn't a horrendous idea, but the execution was horrid. It was a pedal assisted transportation device that could be ridden without a license, so theoretically there was a market for it.
Unfortunately it was completely impractical and frightening to drive in traffic. My uncle gave it a quick go and found it far too scary when cars were around.
If Sir Clive had managed to make it closer to car sized (say sub Smart car size) with a riding position that meant you weren't dwarfed by other cars, who knows, it might have managed to get somewhere.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 20:50 GMT goldcd
Harsh - but I'm with you on the criticism
Sinclair never 'invented', he had a knack of looking at a desirable product - and making a version that was an order of magnitude cheaper, for only a slight detrimental removal of functionality.
The Spectrum was possibly the worst of the "home computers", but this was massively outweighed to me at least, by being the only one I could afford. Without Clive, I'd have had nothing.
Why I'd want to but this thing, when practically *anything* I could buy today for less could do the same better is a mystery. Sole selling point is nostalgia.
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Sunday 21st February 2016 16:29 GMT itzman
Re: Hard to take seriously
Well exactly. Whenever Clive came up with something people did want, it was technically infeasible, and whenever he came up with something that was technically feasible it was in general worse than someone else's product.
We all dreamed of having a pocket TV, today, with 4G and smart phones 42 years later, we have it, but it says Samsung on it.
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Friday 19th February 2016 15:37 GMT x 7
Re: Hard to take seriously
the C5 made no sense in any country where it had to share roads with other vehicles
to be honest it made little sense anyway - the battery charge was insignificant, while the seating position was such that pedaling was uncomfortable, inefficient and very very slow - and gave you a crick in the back.
If the design had been any use, the modern generation of electric cycles would have copied it. As they've not, then the C5 design was clearly a botched dead end.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 15:07 GMT Paul Shirley
Re: Hard to take seriously
MyffyW :"C5 has since been eclipsed by a plethora of electrically-powered scooters taking the elderly and infirm to and from the shops"
And they drive on pavements. The C5 was a road vehicle Well, supposed to be, only the suicidal would actual take one on the road and few of them did it twice. Most of us checked the flimsy plastic construction, noticed your head is below window level in surrounding cars and refused.
An absolutely idiotic, dangerous product.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 14:10 GMT Tom 7
Re: Hard to take seriously
There's a fine line between success and failure. Sinclair spent a long time slackwiring that line before he fell. A bit of luck with one box of components bought on the cheap and he too could be miss-advising apprentices and pretending to be some kind of guru, or if Gates hadn't sold someone else's software to IBM he could have been selling overpriced mosquito nets to Africans.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 20:55 GMT goldcd
I think it's more that the British companies were Small at the time
Maybe the modern paradigm is a kickstarter campaign.
Sinclair never invented anything, he got smart people to assemble stuff into a package he could sell quickly and cheaply.
Large companies were flaying around trying to do the same, and adding massive markups that their overheads necessitated - and rocked up the the market with a price driven by their overheads, rather than building something to a price from the outset.
To me the modern Sinclair is a company like Xiaomi. Not "the best" - but packaging up good-enough to a price that's hard to compete against.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 14:30 GMT iranu
Re: Hard to take seriously
You can add the Zike to that failure. It was an electric bike launched in 1992. I rode it at Alexandra Palace bicycle show that year where a mate was exhibiting. On dismounting Clive Sinclair asked me what I thought. I said it was the worst handling bike I'd ever ridden and that it was a flawed design due to the fork and stem geometry, which would mean the sort of people that the bike was aimed at would find it hard to ride.
He didn't look happy! They only sold 2000 at £500 a pop and the Zike was discontinued 6 months later. Then again you've got to actually try in order to fail.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 15:06 GMT Roq D. Kasba
Re: Hard to take seriously
Another forgotten 'miss' was his earpiece FM radio, advertised alongside a picture of an old 10p for scale.
On the one hand, visionary, auto scan, long predating Bluetooth headsets, on the other premature, the technology hadn't caught up with the idea, so it was uncomfortable and kept falling out.
The point is he's had a few goes at bringing madcap shit to market, and sometimes caught a tailwind and bit of luck. I like that he isn't giving up.
If he'd invested in property like Sugar (where he made the bulk of his net worth, fortunate timing) he'd probably be in a similar space. I mean, Amstrad made a load of old bollocks too, and that e-Mailer phone thing was just awful. Hilariously, they used them as props on the faceless lobby assistant's desk set 'Lord Sugar will see you now' for a while.
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Friday 19th February 2016 15:41 GMT I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
Re: Hard to take seriously
At least the UK can still build it's own rail links and nuclear power stations.
Because they get away with repainting and renaming the repainted messes you mean?
What did they call Calder haul? Overhaul? Long haul? Haul too far?
Hang on... that was a joke wasn't it?
LOL <bit slow this morni bloody hell is that the time. Oh shit another day wasted. Fucking register wasting my bloody life. bastards!
Fuck off!!!!
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Thursday 18th February 2016 17:35 GMT Chika
Re: Hard to take seriously
*cough* *cough* Acorn *cough* *cough*
Nasty cough you have there!
Mind you, considering that the ARM came from Acorn (and Acorn was started in part by people from the original Sinclair) I suppose it's worth noting.
The only thing that bugs me with this design is the atrocious "D-Pad". It looks like it will be four buttons rather than a proper d-pad and I've never really liked that. Mind you, most Speccy games were played from a joystick if you had one and the keyboard if you didn't. I certainly like this idea better than the original Vega idea.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 18:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hard to take seriously
I'm concerned about that crappy four-buttons-for-one-thumb direction controller too. If one can't quickly and accurately toggle between pressing a single key and that key with an adjacent direction, without releasing the common key, a great tranche of those GAZEEELION titles will be abjectly unplayable. Including many of the better ones. The mere loss of precision alone, compared to operating with a dedicated digit always poised over Q, A, O, P and M/[SPACE], was enough to make many of the best designed-for-keyboard-control games unplayable with a joystick.
I'm afraid I can smell another nice idea marred by poor attention to detail :(
If anyone associated with the project is reading: Get a cunningly-thought-out precision eight-direction pad into the design or it WILL be useless. The direction controller is pivotal. ;o) If we can't get the mad duck out on the first day of playing Chuckie Egg, you have failed.
And NO... making it unplayable does NOT make it more fun.
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Friday 26th February 2016 17:11 GMT Greg J Preece
Re: Hard to take seriously
I also remember the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum all of which were hugely successful and, arguably, single-handedly kick-started the UK's home PC market.
They were also the reason that the console crash wasn't nearly as big a deal in the UK. Between the Speccy, the Commodore, etc, we still had plenty to play.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
