He wanted a Spectrum laptop, so he built one

“I wanted a Spectrum Next laptop. So I made one!” That’s the whole pitch on the Dorchester3D blog, for a build posted in November 2020. It puts a Spectrum Next, which Hackaday describes as a Spectrum motherboard rebuilt on an FPGA, inside a 3D-printed clamshell with a 14-inch screen pulled out of a dead laptop.

The 2020 machine is actually version two. Hackaday covered Dan Birch’s first one in January 2018 under the headline “Someone’s Made The Laptop Clive Sinclair Never Built,” and Open Electronics described its 8-inch 4 screen, joined to the base by hinges recovered from an old Dell laptop. Hackaday also noticed the catch: “there does not seem to be a battery included.”

The second version fixes the things that bugged him. The Dorchester3D post says the old hinges “did not lock into position when fully closed,” and that the first one used an off-the-shelf USB keyboard, which he calls “unacceptable in a Sinclair Spectrum laptop!” The new one uses a genuine Spectrum Next keyboard, “on loan” from his second Spectrum Next. Borrowing a keyboard from your own other computer is a very specific kind of commitment.

The battery showed up a month later. A December 2020 update says the laptop had needed a plug until then, and that a 12V UPS and a 10,000 mAh battery now give “about 6 hours of ZX Spectrum playtime.”

If you have a dead laptop in a closet, its screen and hinges are already paid for, and that’s exactly where this one started. Dorchester3D test-printed the parts on a CR-10S Pro to check the ports and hinges before sending the final case to Shapeways. The first one went to Shapeways too, and Hackaday said it “came back looking particularly well-built.” I’d run a test print before paying for a professional one, same as he did.

Six hours of Spectrum games, on a laptop nobody sells.