Spectrum ZX Laptop


[Jim] sent in this interesting laptop modding project. He started with a Spectrum ZX and a Toshiba Libretto 110. The libretto kept its brains, but the lower case and keyboard was replaced with the ZX hardware. Since both machines use matrix style keyboards (but different matrix layouts) he was able to create a passive adapter circuit to match things up.

13 thoughts on “Spectrum ZX Laptop

  1. Awesome mod… Do you have the libretto running a zx emulator though? :P

    Why must every pic on this site be greyscale – with the only exception (atm) being the laser etcher?

  2. #3- It wasn’t just difficult to type on, it was unreliable too- the membranes wore out very quickly (3 times on my Spectrum).

    I’ve done the reverse of this- I wired a PC keyboard to work on a Spectrum. I just cut all the tracks on the PC keyboard’s PCB, and wired up the switches in a matrix matching the Spectrum’s one.

    I didn’t fancy soldering onto the Spectrum’s PCB, so I just pushed the wires into the connector. Worked well till I gave it away a few years ago.

  3. Yup, the last thing I’d do with a ZX Spectrum (or speccy) is use its keyboard for something – hacking stuff is cool, but there are limits, its keyboard sucked so badly, that for mine, I actually went out and bought a third party keyboard that a local company made. We must be talking 1984 or 1985 here, wow.
    Now if he could turn that whole mod ass about face and put the guts of the speccy into the libretto and turn it into a mobile speccy, that’ll be better.

  4. What’s the point? Crap keyboard on a crap laptop?

    If it really was a speccy 48k in laptop form then it’d be ace. If someone’d put one together and interface it to a SD card then it’d be ace. I’d also like to see a minimig put in a laptop.

  5. The ZX keyboard is indeed quite terrible. It is just a bit of fun, not intended to be anything practical.

    Keeping the real ZX motherboard seemed a bit silly, since the libretto can easily emulate a spectrum and many other more powerful retro computers. Also, cutting up a 20 year old computer’s case was quite traumatic enough without taking an iron to the electronics. The original spectrum board is safely stowed in an antistatic bag and still works fine.

    @frk-kun – you can get hinged TFT screens for playstations, which presumably take a composite video input – perhaps you could fix one of them to take a spectrum’s video output.

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