Playing the Recreated ZX Spectrum is like travelling back in time

Everything from the rubbery keys to the controls (Q, A, O, P) is exactly the same - and Chuckie Egg is as infuriating as it was thirty years ago.

Yahoo UK tried a near-finished unit of the Recreated ZX Spectrum - and it's great.

The keyboard is a close-to-perfect recreation of the highly eccentric British computer, which marked the zenith of the British computer industry, selling five million units in the early Eighties.

Oddly, it’s just one of two recreations of the machine - with two separate KickStarter-funded projects to revive it coming to fruition this year.

The Recreated ZX Spectrum is likely to be first on sale - backed by Elite games, a British publisher who were behind many of the machine’s hits.

Later this year, it’ll face off against Vega, a project backed by Sir Clive Sinclair himself - but which, oddly, resembles a gaming joystick.

The early demo unit of The Recreated Spectrum shows that Elite have set the bar pretty high.

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It feels identical to the keyboard of the classic computer - but has been retooled so it’s battery powered.

Unlike Sir Clive’s take, it’ll work with iPads, Androids, PCs and Smart TVs - and will be fullly portable.

Elite have been republishing Spectrum games for years, and boast that their version (powered by an app which the keyboard connects to via Bluetooth) will have exclusives such as Chuckie Egg and Manic Miner (two of the machine’s best games).

Playing Chuckie Egg, it’s as fast and furious as it was on the original - with the rubbery keys as responsive as they were back in the Eighties.

While the Recreated machine is a Bluetooth keyboard, technically speaking, Elite boosted the response for games (normal Bluetooth keyboards don’t tell apps that you’ve released a key, for instance), and it’s as fast and furious as it was back in the day.

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Whether anyone would actually opt to type emails using the gadget is more open to question - it’s a neat gadget, but it’s about three times thicker than a standard Bluetooth gizmo.

That’s not the point, of course.

The point is filling middle-aged men with nostalgic joy - and on that score, The Recreated Spectrum looks set to deliver.

The demo version current offers ten games free - but by launch date, Elite hope to have 50 games bundled - and sell more for 79p each.

The computer itself will cost in the £50 to £100 range.

With details on Sir Clive Sinclair’s Vega still scant, and a release date still elusive, The Recreated ZX Spectrum looks set to have time on its side.

It’s also a bit more versatile - and if it does inspire a new generation to try out Manic Miner and so on, Elite will offer a dev kit allowing Android and iOS game developers to use their software with the keyboard.

Register at RecreatedZXSpectrum.com and be amongst the first to be told when and from where to buy ‘The recreated Sinclair ZX Spectrum’.