Then, my Facebook contact and friend Davide Barlotti offered me the loan of his. I hadn’t realised just how rare they had become. I wanted to recreate a SPEC-MATE, but try as I might, I couldn’t find one to buy or loan.

Hacking became exponentially easier!įast forward to the present day where my knowledge of hardware has come on a bit and PCB manufacture is a breeze with suppliers providing an amazingly high quality services for economic rates. This meant that you could load a dissassembler into one part of memory and a half of the programs code in the other.

This was a revelation! And one of the really useful features was that the SPEC-MATE made two files of main memory. Later on, he loaned it to me so I could capture my game collection to Tape/Microdrive. Handily though, I had a friend who was into computers and had a more affluent family than I. Some programs defeated my limited knowledge. Of course, these interfaces were quite expensive and above the budget of your average schoolboy hacker! I used to hack long-hand, that is to say, from the loader up. The interfaces would freeze the game/program you were running and allow it to be saved to some sort of media, Tape, Sinclair’s own Microdrive or floppy disc for example. This was a very common practice made easier by certian interfaces.

Along with my friends help, I used to hack games for infinite lives etc. Back in the heyday of the Sinclair Spectrum and other 8-bit computers that kick started the home computing movement, I owned a Sinclair Spectrum 48K Plus that I upgraded from my original rubber key Spectrum with a kit from Sinclair. I’ve been searching for a SPEC-MATE for several years, since the advent of the Spectrum Next rekindled my interest in Spectrums in general.

Speccy power supply 12v