It’s the 80s, you’re working at Sinclair research, designing the Sinclair Spectrum, when suddenly Sir Clive pops his head around the door and says, ‘We don’t need to cut costs after all, just make it as good as you can’. What are you changing? #RetroComputing
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2) Keyboard
3) multi-colour mode
4) 64K Ram
5) Proper expansion port connector
6) Sound Chip
7) No memory contention
I'm glad that didn't happen, I love all its quirks from attribute clash to its farty sound chip.
It has to be small "corrections" like "don't break the NMI vector".
A slightly bigger one I'd make later on is "include the Timex hi res mono mode in the 128", so that CP/M on the +3 becomes useful later on.
Even though I had a speccy back in the day and enjoyed it, “colour clash” has always bugged me
Maybe I can get therapy.
An interesting question is what features would you keep...
Second ULA handling 4 channel stereo sound + joystick.
80 column text mode (software font).
Memory banking scheme on the expansion port.
Raster line interrupts.
Disk interface.
Base machine still 48K and 'simple', but expansion planned in.
Not wanting to be mean to MGT, but its case design really suffered for not having Rick Dickinson working on it.
And some sort of PSG for the audio.
I suspect by the time they're drawing enough current to blow a fuse on the 5v rail it means they're already toast.
These are very different things.
If the purchase (manufacturing) price is high then it wouldn't sell, however good it would be. This will limit the chip count.
It's 1982, 4164 chips are expensive, far more than 4116 + support. Back 2 orig design!
No game changers. Just an on/off switch.
But I don't know how good switching regulators were in 1982.