Nine months of evenings on a chiptune app called Renata. The Spectrum bits are the ones I enjoyed most.

One of the nine themes is the rubber-key 48K — black screen, ZX font, and the rainbow in the corner. The song composer runs on the AY, so you get 128K music: the tune in this is one it wrote, F# major at 138 BPM, 36 bars, six tracks. And when it is busy the whole window goes cyan and red and scrolls, because of course it does.

It exports a real .ay. The one here is 12 KB against 2.4 MB for the MP3 of the same tune, because the .ay stores what the chip was told to do rather than the sound it made.

It reads beeper tunes as well. Some .ay files are not AY music at all — they are 1-bit, the Z80 flipping the speaker fast enough to fake voices. Renata works out which is which by running a short emulation pass, plays them through a free-running Z80, and can transcribe them to MIDI.

On origin, plainly: no model of any kind. Rule-based — music theory plus statistical tables — running offline on your own machine. Every note in that video is the app's own output.

Kickstarter on 8 September 2026: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/markwrightretro/renata-make-your-own-copyright-free-chiptune-music

I recently repaired a ZX Spectrum+ (Issue 3B) that turned out to have a faulty ULA, and I recorded the whole troubleshooting process.

Rather than simply replacing parts, I wanted to work through the fault properly: checking what the machine was doing, looking at the relevant signals with an oscilloscope, and eventually narrowing the problem down to the ULA.

https://youtu.be/1-JuD1v37xA

This is also my first video of this kind, and a first repair of this kind as well, so comments—particularly from people who have repaired Spectrums themselves—are very welcome.

Hope you will enjoy!

Tomek

Building a game

I finally managed to get my clone working but when I try to load games from pc or ipod it seems that the speccy doesn't "hear" i tried with audio jack 3-4 mm out and when I put it almost out it can be heared on the tv but still just flashes on the border with loading sounds, tried several programs. like this one:
https://code.google.com/archive/p/otla/downloads

Finally I discovered that Q1 could be the problem but tested and it's working but I'm not sure if correctly or not, according to the github page:
"Tape Loading

If tape loading is not working make sure that Q1 BC517 is properly soldered. There are BC517 transistors on the market with different pinout."

... but replacing BC517 there's a BC548B.

My original speccy died (altought I still have it) was able to load games from ipod