Sir Clive, where art thou?
Do something, mate!
Ex-ZX Spectrum reboot man threatens sueball over unpaid invoices
Yet more financial claims are piling up against failing ZX Spectrum Vega Plus firm Retro Computers Ltd, with the company's former web fixer threatening to sue over allegedly unpaid invoices. One-time contractor Lee Fogarty, who performed a range of roles including web dev and organiser of product testing, has told The Register …
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Friday 23rd March 2018 15:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hentai for Business
The reference to his "corporate tentacle" is somewhat creepy.
That said, "Clive Sinclair's Corporate Tentacle" still sounds like a good name for a band. (#) Especially one that includes Clive Sinclair himself.
(#) No, it doesn't. It sounds like one of those names that people *say* would be a good name for a band, which is something different altogether...
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Thursday 29th March 2018 20:33 GMT Oh Homer
Re: "sounds like a speccy game"
Well, there's always "Day of the Tentacle", although that was actually an MS-DOS game (now ported to many other platforms, including current-gen consoles and Linux).
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Friday 23rd March 2018 14:46 GMT Lee D
To be honest, looking online, they all look to be a complete bunch of children bitching about each other.
You know what, just take it to court already and get it over and done with. If you owe him, you'll have to pay him. If you don't, you won't. Either way those people who basically funded your company (I'm certainly not one of them - I don't do business in this manner, even on a personal level) still don't see the devices promised.
It's getting boring now, guys. Maybe when there's a story about someone who ISN'T owed money by this sham-show, it'll be worthy of a news article.
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Friday 23rd March 2018 15:06 GMT Dan 55
Yeah, cheers Retro Computers Ltd
For taking part of my childhood and wiping your collective arses with it.
Can't you all go forth and multiply now? People might even crowdfund you another £500,000 if you promise never to make another public statement again and never to co-opt part of computing history and sully it with your nonsense again, which is more than you've achieved with the £500,000 you've pissed against the wall.
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Friday 23rd March 2018 16:47 GMT DontFeedTheTrolls
Re: Article dated 23 March 2018:
Given you get 9 months to deliver the accounts in the first place, there really shouldn't any excuse for being late at all.
It's not like delivering accounts is inventing or developing something, it is a simple reporting of facts that happened. (#CreativeAccounting)
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Friday 23rd March 2018 16:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
FFS, all this over an emulator running on some generic ARM system...!
All this fuss over something that was only ever going to be a Spectrum emulator running on some arbitrary low-powered hardware anyway!
In other words, nothing you couldn't already do on countless pre-existing systems, the only benefit being that this one was ready-to-go, "official" and came in a Sinclair-branded case. (#) That's all.
Said it before, but surely there must be companies in China already offering ready-to-manufacture low-powered handheld designs based on smartphone technology running Linux or Android they'd be happy to lightly customise to spec without the setup cost and hassle. (£513,000 sounds like a lot of money, but in the scheme of things, it's peanuts, and easily frittered away).
Yeah, they were going to manufacture it in the UK, which I'm sure was well-intended, if they'd planned it out. Except that they apparently didn't, and at this stage I don't think anyone expects anything to ever come out of this debacle beyond more squabbling.
(#) Even *that*- while nice enough- didn't appear to have much connection with the original beyond the rainbow flash and Sinclair logo. (###) It's designed by Rick Dickinson, who was behind most (all?) pre-Amstrad Sinclair cases. Decent, but not enough like the original to warrant the cost and financial risk of tooling for a custom case. (##)
(I don't know much about case manufacturing, but I do know that design and tooling setup costs are generally quite high until mass production renders their per-unit cost marginal.)
(##) His designs for the proposed (and far more interesting sounding) 'Spectrum Next' case are more promising. (The Spectrum Next is being run by a completely different bunch, and is supposed to be a true hardware emulation and enhancement of the original).
(###) Unlike the original Vega's bizarro button-deficient take on the original Spectrum case.
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Friday 23rd March 2018 17:55 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: FFS, all this over an emulator running on some generic ARM system...!
That alone makes this all the more strange.
I've been working on building an ARM (RPi 3) based device that emulates an even older computer. The kit even comes with a case, close to 100 diodes (for the front panel), circuit boards and all the front panel switches. This is all put together by someone in their spare time. No need to Loadsa crowdfunding here.
http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8
This makes IMHO the Sinclair thing even more of a scam. IT might not be but at the moment thats the way it seems to me.
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Friday 23rd March 2018 18:21 GMT Cynic_999
£50K tops
Having single-handedly designed many commercial products of similar complexity, a full-blown enhanced Spectrum emulator (including LCD screen & network interface) would probably take me 6 to 9 months to first commercial prototype (Schematic, PCB layout, case/keyboard design, firmware development), and cost about £40K (including my modest income during the development period.) Say £50K tops. Then another 3-6 months and about £150k for tooling, jigging and test fixture costs + a first mass-production run, which will hopefully be recovered in a few months by the sales of the products of that first run. Excludes marketing costs.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
