Martyn Carroll talks to the chaps behind the new Spectrum handheld
Banishing memories of the Vega+ debacle, the ZX Touch is a brandnew handheld for playing Spectrum games on the go, that’s available to buy right now. To find out more about it, we caught up with the device’s developer Goran Radan and its distributor Thomas Eberle.
Goran: For the past decade my professional focus has been developing embedded devices with graphical interfaces. Personally, I’m passionate about vintage computers, particularly the ZX Spectrum, so creating a Spectrum handheld seemed like a perfect fit. The first prototype was completed two years ago and I did it entirely for fun. Then I shared it with Thomas, who’s a huge Spectrum enthusiast and knows the community much better than I do. Without his energy and enthusiasm, the ZX Touch would have never become a product for market.
Thomas: I first heard about the idea of a Spectrum handheld when the Vega+ project was announced, but I wasn’t convinced. At the end of 2022 I was talking with
Goran about potential projects and he told me that he was already working on something new…
What lessons were learnt from what happened with the Vega+?
Thomas: We didn’t want to create another crowdfunding campaign, where people would be asking every day about progress. So we agreed to keep silent until it was ready.
Goran: I’m not a huge fan of the crowdfunding model or taking preorders before the product is ready. The Vega+ has been a huge burden for us. We couldn’t even conduct proper market research because we knew the Vega+ made the community quite suspicious towards similar projects.
The device comes with a number of homebrew titles pre-installed. Did you consider attempting to licence any commercial games?
Thomas: The problem is finding the right people to contact. However, the ZX Touch is a living project and we’re working on obtaining permissions for more games.
Goran: It wasn’t our intention to attract users with built-in games, but we wanted to ensure the user could experience the device moments after taking it out of the box. In other words, we wanted to avoid the situation where you buy a toy for your kid, but batteries aren’t included, and it’s a bank holiday.
How has the feedback been from early adopters?
Thomas: Mostly people have just told us that they’re very happy they bought it. But some have written whole reviews and given us ideas where we can improve. So with the next firmware update there will be s
