The Feature: Bizarre Add-ons
Put down your Menacer light-gun and your SuperScope for a moment and ponder on the Stack light rifle, a weapon of utmost devestation. Public Enemy put your Uzis away and get a load of this little baby. For the year is 1983 and for £29.95 you too could own a tatty plastic light-gun with barrel and sight attachments. It proves one thing at least, that light gun devices (or more importantly the software you get for them) has been and always will be pretty piss poor and abysmal. Those of you who own the James Bond Action pack already know this.
Over the years us Spectrum users have had some weird and wonderful add-on devices at our disposal. These fall into two very distinct catagories; useful and bizarre. Forget the multiface, video digitizer, modem or sound sampler - all they did was improve your basic Speccy by 1000%. What we all needed and wanted were plenty of freakish gimmicks that had absolutely no use whatsoever. A new deluxe keyboard for your rubber keyed Speccy would be very nice. Now you own a Sinclair computer that looks like a mutant with no identity. Speech synthesisers were all the rage, especially when you could make your 48K say rude words. Well worth five minutes of intense giggling. Mini amps and speakers could boost your beep. And what does a beep sound like when amplified? Yes that's right, pretty horrible.
Techy bods were well catered for with extra memory and routine packing Eproms and Motherboards. Relay Switching devices could turn your house lights or Hi-Fi on and off. The uses are not quite endless. And on the subject of auto-mation why not have the Speccy control your train set or Scalextric with a Datel Robotek? Answer: because you needed to be a boffin to write the software to actually do it!
My personal favourite was the Heart Rate Monitor. You attached a sensor to a pulse point and your heartbeat and related information was displayed on screen. Due to a slight fault in my kit the only way to register an output was to sellotape it to my penis and then think of Sarah Greene in her Blue Peter years. The joystick interface was in plentiful supply, none more difficult to master than the AGF programmable, a veritable nest of crocodile clipped wires. And how about the TrickStick, a vibrator shaped 'joystick' that sold like bras to nuns. We mentioned the Specdrum in issue 1 but not the Cheetah add-on keyboard. The sounds you could make with your Speccy were shite. Totally worthless and wonderfully collectable!
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