k eao, recently compiled a book summarizing the history of the known Portuguese developers for the ZX Spectrum, that he had been digging through hundreds of tapes they have been finding, recovering and digitizing throughout the years. The book was released by the museum, release date coinciding with the 40 years anniversary of the ZX Spectrum.
The museum is also in touch with some of the people who used to work at the Timex factory in Costa da Caparica. Timex manufactured an official clone of the ZX Spectrum and it was distributed internationally (United States, South America, Poland). The factory closed down in the 90s but a lot of the workers from Timex are still alive, kept in touch with each other and were now willing to share some of their information on the different projects they developed at Timex related to the Spectrum that used to be considered lost knowledge, not just information on the clones of the Spectrum they developed, but also some original prototypes that were never released to the public. You can find this sort of information exposed at the museum aswell, along with some recorded video testimonies.
A lot of the material being displayed at the museum has been donated, mostly by old ZX Spectrum developers or users who had something unique at home looking for a better home. At the museum you can find all the machines of the family and also plenty of the books that were printed and released in the 80s talking about the Spectrum. There are also a few refurbished Spectrums with DivMMC cards ready to play anything you used to have as a kid, without having to wait for the loading time and witness an "R Tape loading error, 0:1" ever again.
In 2021, after noticing the museum did not have much information on active demoscene or Russian clones of the Spectrum I proactively organized a livestream videochat between Joao Ramos of the museum and bfox, a known Russian demoscener and active organizer of the Yandex retromuseum, you can find the video on youtube https://youtu.be/4mlaok3J6cs. It was an interesting chat that helped bridge the knowledge of Spectrum, exposing differences between the Eastern and Western models and the efforts being made to preverve Spectrum history in different parts of the world.
In 2022 the museum organized a celebration of the 40 years of the ZX Spectrum, hosted in Cantanhede, i attended the event and helped lordcoxis do a small demoscene showcase section during the evenings. The event had a wide range of international speakers: people related to the Sinclair family, legendary game developers (Clive Townsend, Oliver Twins, Jim Bagley), btw you can find all the video recordings of those talks online at https://www.youtube.com/@LOADZX/videos. They also had some talks on developing for the Spectrum, a talk by lordcoxis on esxDOS development, an overview of Timex role in the Spectrum, and the preservation of videogame history in Brazil. A good set of talks overall and it did attract a whole bunch of people who physically went to Cantanhede for the weekend to see, listen and interact with the speakers. The event also had some stands with Spectrum related hardware and merchandise for sale and repairing solutions available if you wanted to bring your old Spectrum back to life. Entrance to the museum was also free during that weekend, was a great opportunity to get to know the project a bit better and i had a good time. We still had some COVID restrictions in place, i'm sure the event would have been even higher attendance if it happened a few months later.
Trying to get a bit more synergy between the demoscene and the museum I invited Joao to give a talk about the museum at Inercia Demoparty in Lisbon (4-6 Nov 2022) and they also helped us champion and announce the ZX Spectrum demoscene and AY music competitions that we organized at Inercia. Unfortunately not as many entries submitted to these two competitions as i was hoping for as party organizer, but we hope it helped catalyze something to get Portuguese Spectrum game developers a bit more interested in the demoscene and the active Portuguese demosceners more interested in the Spectrum.
The museum also had an area showing some Spectrums at Lisbon Games Week, the biggest games related expo in Portugal. It took place just a couple of weeks after Inercia. They hosted a series of small talks covering different aspects of the Spectrum: hardware, graphics limitations, programming, active projects related to it's history and present, I was one of the invited speakers, tried my best to explain in 20 mins what the demoscene is, where it came from, where it is now, how the ZX Spectrum is important for the Portuguese demoscene and why it is still relevant in this day and age to develop new demos for the Spectrum. A lot of content to cram into 20 mins but i was happy to have a dozen interested folks, plus the presentation was recorded and made public online. And a few people came talk with me afterwards asking questions and telling me they plan to do some entries for next year's Inercia. Let's wait and see if it ever pans out to some nice productions. I hope so!
In conclusion, if you're ever travelling through Portugal make sure to schedule a day in Cantanhede to visit the museum, i think you'll enjoy it. As for myself i'm looking forward to collaborate more with them in the future, they seem to be very open to collaborations and always ready to make things happen, everyone would benefit from more synergy between the museum and the demoscene so let's go for it. I heard Joao say on multiple occasions that he wants the museum to be a facilitator to all things Spectrum in Portugal, not necessarily the organizer of them so let's work together and make Spectrum demoscene things happen in Portugal again!
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