back to article ZX Spectrum reboot latest: Some Vega+s arrive, Sky pulls plug, Clive drops ball

Sir Clive Sinclair's company has accused flailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd of trading while insolvent. Meanwhile, the firm has delivered some consoles – and been stripped of the brand rights to its flagship product. Last week some customers of Retro Computers Ltd reported on social media that they had …

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    1. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: You've only got yourselves to blame.....

      Yes those orignal popular 80s computers were rough and ready but I never noticed. To me in that era they were like some kind of magic. And without Sinclair I would not have got my hands on one at the right time. He drove the price down with his corner cutting and his sales numbers dragged the market with him. It was the point of revolution which actually did more for me than I can explain here. They most certainly not crap when not naively judged against the benefit of 35 years of development.

      I haven't backed this one as I spotted the red flags early and felt it was a £50 device not £100. But I like the idea.

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Looks excellent!

    As a confirmed Windows 10 fan (having upgraded my trusty Dell Dimension recently from Vista so I can run the latest version of Flash and speed up my Yahoo! Mail), I think I'm a pretty good judge of quality. And this looks seriously great. I've listened to the YouTube reviews, and honestly, some people don't half moan: crashes, stiff buttons, paper logos, ethical packaging, scratches, hand painted buttons, sharp edges blah... blah!. Stop whining, this is a hand-built creation, and get on with playing the 1000s of fully licensed games this little marvel comes crammed to the rafters with! You don't hear Ferrari owners moaning because their knobs squeak a bit, do you? As soon as the ten I ordered arrive, I'll post a proper review up, probably typed on the device itself. Good on you, all at RCL. What a winner! I'm really looking forward to the Vega QL+, surely the next logical development for these industrial titans! Where do I sign up!?

    1. Michael Strorm Silver badge

      Re: Looks excellent!

      > I'm really looking forward to the Vega QL+

      I'd buy that for a dollar!

      No, really, that's all I'd risk on it at this point.

    2. tony trolle

      Re: Looks excellent!

      "You don't hear Ferrari owners moaning because their knobs squeak a bit,"

      The factory just said they will wear in, don't you just hate that.

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: Looks excellent!

        "You don't hear Ferrari owners moaning because their knobs squeak a bit,"

        In fact that's a hell of a party trick in the right company. As long as there are no cats around.

    3. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: Looks excellent!

      Where do I sign up!?

      Well, you could ask the nice nurse when she comes in with your afternoon medication. Getting her to undo the straitjacket straps might take more work though..

      And the brightly-coloured crayons that you are allowed might not be fine enough to tick all the boxes.

      :-)

  2. Mage Silver badge

    No QWERTY

    A lot of games need more buttons than a pair of configureable joypads.

    There are so many levels of stupid to this project,

    1. Sceptic Tank Silver badge

      Re: No QWERTY

      There is always the virtual keyboard.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: No QWERTY

        That'll do so well for The Hobbit, Elite, or Skool Daze.

  3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "On the other, such moves would also hammer a stake into the corpse of the Vega+."

    It depends. The IP would be one of the assets the administrators would want to realise cash on. If there's perceived to be a market for the device someone might be interested in buying it and goinf into production. Not that that would help those who've already paid.

    1. israel_hands

      The IP would be one of the assets the administrators would want to realise cash on.

      But they've just been stripped of the IP by Sky, so there's nothing to realise.

      It was a stupid idea from the start anyway. Nowhere near enough buttons for probably the majority of games, there are Speccy emulators out in the wild already and it probably would have been cheaper to get a custom case 3D-printed for a Raspberry Pi and bolt a screen onto the front of it.

      I don't understand some of the things people invest in on those crowdfunding sites. I've seen so many completely boneheaded ideas that will obviously never work from even a cursory glance and yet people throw money at them. I can understand chucking a small amount of cash at something you hope gets made, but I've seen so many fully-funded campaigns flounder, followed by the inevitable radio silence from the producers, empty anger from the backers and complete and utter fucking apathy from the thieving bastards running the sites.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        "But they've just been stripped of the IP by Sky, so there's nothing to realise."

        They've been stripped of the Sinclair name and games. The H/W & firmware are still theirs. Whether that's of value or not is a different matter.

        1. israel_hands

          Fair point. But from what I've seen the parts are shit, the internal hardware is off-the-shelf and even if the reports of the firmware being shit aren't accurate, there are open source emulators already available.

          1. ItsMeDammit

            "...there are open source emulators already available."

            Indeed - the Vega+ uses one (FUSE).

        2. Dan 55 Silver badge

          It's not of value. They shouldn't be able to use the ROM either, that belongs to Sky.

  4. Bibbit

    Someone must be happy

    They raised almost half a million and produced sod all. So the scumbags heading upthe racket shift the money off shore and laugh all the way to the Cayman Islands?

    1. wolfetone Silver badge

      Re: Someone must be happy

      I think a lot of the money may have gone in to sex robots.

      So in a way, the Vega+ backers have contributed to sex workers in a way. But everyone got fucked in the end, so does it matter?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Someone must be happy

      @Bibbit; Half a million sounds a lot on a personal level, but it's really nothing if you're frittering it away on unnecessary (and expensive) legal expenses, not to mention covering wages.

      For that reason, I hadn't expected there to be *any* left by this stage, and nor- as a result- for the Vega+ to ship at all, not even in the ultra-shoddy state it actually turned up in. It wouldn't surprise me if they'd covered the cost of producing that limited run from money elsewhere in the company, purely to avoid being kicked off the board and/or sued up the wazoo.

  5. short

    Fifty is a bloody odd number

    That's right in the sweet spot of annoyance - Too few for any kind of volume (real plastics, cheap parts and PCBs), and too many to casually knock out in an afternoon.

    SLA plastics, then? Would help explain the grotty buttons - but the clear display cover looks like a real moulded part?

    While it's no great loss if the Vega+ dies on its arse, it would be a shame for all the tooling to have been made, and then just a run of fifty cycles, then in to the bin. Especially for the people whose crowdfunding paid for the mould making.

    £500K doesn't get you many goes round at design, tooling, testing. Does it look like they nearly got there, or is this a product that's 90% there, and just needs a second, and possibly third 90% to be adequate?

    1. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: Fifty is a bloody odd number

      One of the reasons I held back from backing Planet Gemini, until I was sure, was because they were only aiming for $200K which I felt was never going to be enough. In the end they have attracted over $2.5M so far and I have a fine product.

      I don't think there is much laughing at RCL because it has been said that they have a legal bill of over £200K and those law firms aren't going to let that go. And I would guess that the rest of the cash is squandered on salaries and other expenses.

      The actual vega+ as shown for the start of the campaign actually looks really nice, but the final product is a poor cut down version. The internals and firmware are a state because the good engineers were badly treated, not paid and generally alienated by RCL.

  6. DrXym

    The consolation prize

    At least the rarity of these pieces of crap will probably become collectible in time and might actually sell for more than they were initially worth.

    Still though, it highlights the folly of paying up front for a product that doesn't exist hoping it will appear at some unspecified point in the future in some form. Or not.

    1. Paul Shirley

      Re: The consolation prize

      Paying up front for the original Spectrum long before any finished versions were built isn't a lot different!

  7. E_Nigma

    Sad

    It looks like something that they built together good knows where with their last few pennies. Had the project not been mismanaged so badly, I assume that they would have had it manufactured to a somewhat higher standard.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Shame

    It looks OK but not a patch on the original concept image.

    Shame as it had potential.

  9. Snarf Junky

    I presume the people who fell for this are the same ones wetting themselves over an Atari console that will more than likely never see the light of day either. Most retro computer stuff should stay exactly that. Let's face it, it was cutting edge at the time but it mostly pretty crap now.

    1. E_Nigma

      You're mixing up two things

      You're mixing failure to (properly) produce what was promised with obsolescence. This isn't crap because 30+ year old computer designs are crap by today's standards. This is crap because the execution is completely botched. It freezes (the old Speccy didn't do much of that), it arrives with visible physical damage, the controls are bloody awful (you have to press the directional buttons like crazy) and ~98% of games are missing. There is no need why any of that would be true (actually, this ought to be quite easy to not mess it up).

      As for the other thing, it may be that, even if it had been done properly, people would have had a bit of fun at the beginning and then put it away forever, but in the age in which Flappy Bird was a smash hit not long ago, there's a plethora of Spectrum games that one could get hooked on.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: You're mixing up two things

        This is crap because the execution is completely botched. It freezes (the old Speccy didn't do much of that), it arrives with visible physical damage, the controls are bloody awful (you have to press the directional buttons like crazy) and ~98% of games are missing.

        Surely this is just nitpicking. Just you wait for version 2!

        1. SeanR
          Meh

          Re: You're mixing up two things

          this IS version two

          RCL said so...

      2. Spartacus Mills

        Re: You're mixing up two things

        someone actually programmed a very good Flappy Birds clone for the speccy a couple of years ago (just called 'FlappyBird')...sadly it doesn't seem to be in the WoS archive.

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