right for it to be now. The Spectrum actually seems to be gaining in popularity as opposed to waning.
Chris Smith: I think the time was right with our relationships as well as our reputation, and the availability of licenses that we’ve got. And we wanted to get it right. If you look at our product range, starting with The C64 Mini, then we did the full size C64; each of those is more complex with regards to the requirements of the factory and building our relationship up with the guys that we use on the manufacturing side, and indeed, with Plaion. And the Spectrum is hard to do. You’d think it was easy, as it was all done on the cheap back in the day, but the processes for doing rubber keyboards and things today…
“We all had Spectrums for Christmas, so it felt right that The Spectrum had a
Christmas release” Chris Smith
What were the difficulties you faced bringing The Spectrum to market that weren’t there with your other products? Chris Smith: In terms of the technical features, we’re always adding new things, and of course we try to roll those forwards where possible to the next product. Plus the Spectrum itself brings in a number of manufacturing technologies that we haven’t previously used. The full-sized Commodore 64 was relatively
straightforward, because it had an almost traditional keyboard. It was basically plastic key caps, metal chassis, rubber, elastomer, silicone, plungers - all standard stuff that you see in game controllers and keyboards. The trick was to get it to feel right, and that was the challenge for the guys in our manufacturing side. But The Spectrum took it one step further. It’s got a whole keyboard that’s printed. It has a particular feel that needs to be reproduced. It also has a metal keyplate, and we had a lot of challenges getting all of that to work, because the rubber wouldn’t be distributed uniformly. It wouldn’t fit into the holes for the keyplates consistently, because the rubber
was shrinking or it was stretching, and it was really difficult from a manufacturing point of view. There’s also some technical considerations around the way keyboard scanning works. Spectrum has ghost keys. A lot of emulators and things will emulate those ghost keys. We were also emulating them, of course, but the keyboard was also subject to those ghost keys and there were problems with it being done through USB, which I won’t bore you with, but it needed me in a room with the guys out in China to solve the problem. So, yeah, it was not easy. Plus, we did The Spectrum very much quicker than we’ve done any other product, which brought its own challenges. Part of that speed was because we know the Spectrum so well, but also to make sure that we were ready for Christmas release. You know, we all had Spectrums for Christmas, so it felt right that The Spectrum had a Christmas release.
Last year the crowdfunded Spectrum Next arrived just before Christmas, and there are other options for fans: the Switch-like ZX Touch, the N-Go, etc. Do you consider them competition? Darren Melbourne: We’ve always tried to be very respectful of the Next team and what they’re doing. What they’ve done is outstanding and what they’ve continued to
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