New Year is a time for celebrating and also a time for relaxing, if you recently spent any couch time playing some of the newest gaming releases, your brain will for sure be suffering over-stimulation brought on by the hi-def image onslaught. Why not take timeout to de-tox your visual cortex by exploring some of the earlier computer games which used less sophisticated, chunky graphics. Elite Systems are a company heavily into mining this seam of gaming nostalgia and have acquired the license rights for many of the old school ZX Spectrum games. Old favorites including Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy are now available as Apps playable on Tablets and Smartphones running iOS.  Not content with just porting the software, their most recent venture launched on Kickstarter is to recreate the Human Interface experience of a physical ZX Spectrum keyboard (complete with rubber keys).

 

Don’t worry you wont need to record over those bootlegged Duran Duran or Culture Club albums to store the programs on a flaky C90 audio cassette, this Kickstarter project plans to replicate just the original case and keyboard, interfacing to the Tablet or Smartphone using Bluetooth.

 

Although the original plan targets the iOS enviroment, Android and Windows versions are in the pipeline. The Bluetooth ZX Spectrum achieved 10 percent of its target finance in a little over 12 hours after its launch on Kickstarter.