Hardware Heaven: Spectrum +3

» Manufacturer: Amstrad » Year: 1987 » cost: £249 (launch) £40+ (today)

We take a quick look at Amstrad’s final Spectrum release

In 1986 Amstrad shocked the gaming community when it revealed that it had purchased the rights to manufacture all existing and future Sinclair products. The price? A cool £5 million. Realising that there was still plenty of interest in the Spectrum brand, Amstrad’s first stab at releasing a new machine was the Spectrum +2, a device that was very similar to its existing Amstrad CPC 464 in that it featured a built-in tape deck. A year later, in 1987, Amstrad released the Spectrum +3, which appeared quite similar in looks to the +2, but featured a black, rather than grey, case and a three-inch floppy disk drive.

Unfortunately, there was a lot going on under that black casing that lead to numerous issues for the 8-bit computer. Early releases of Amstrad’s new Spectrum featured a distorted sound chip, while the addition of two extra 16KB ROMS and an operating system which was a modified version of Amstrad’s PCWDOS meant that certain 48K and 128K games were incompatible with the device. The ZX Interface 1 was also completely unusable, creating a blow for anyone that had one.

While it proved to be reasonably successful (Your Sinclair reported in issue 60 that it represented around 15 per cent of all Spectrum sales), it was discontinued in 1990, coincidentally the same year Amstrad had a swanky new range of CPCS out.