Archive Mission Statement

Please note this content is from the original WoS site, and may no longer be relevant. If you have any queries, please contact us.

This site’s mission is to create a full historical archive for the ZX Spectrum, its hardware, software, magazines, books and the industry that created it all, as a completely free museum.

World of Spectrum also plays host to the very active ZX Spectrum emulation scene.

Besides catalogueing every single item ever created, we want to offer you exact copies of it. Each entry is fully described, with as much detail as we can possibly find.

And we don’t only store the games themselves either. You’ll also find many, many additional files, such as inlay scans, advert scans, instructions and maps, as well as all emulators ever written for all platforms and hundreds of utilities.

This is an incredibly large task (it took tens of thousands of hours so far), but it has proven very worthwhile and we want to keep doing it forever.

Thanks to all the contributions made over time, the archive is in this state.

We also try our best to get permission from the copyright holders to distribute their software freely from this site. A mammoth task indeed!

We want this archive to be suitable for people of all ages, including children. For this reason, adult games are kept strictly separate from the rest, allowing filtering based on a single URL. Why we keep them? A lot of them were actually commercially marketed and thus deserve preservation.

HOW CAN I HELP?

The first thing would be uploading new titles (the Missing In Action project) or titles that are currently only available as snapshots (the Spectrum Tape Preservation and Spectrum Disk Preservation projects), of course.

Apart from that, we would be grateful if you could provide missing information. For example, we don’t know the full name of some titles, the publisher or year of publication.

Likewise, we are looking for instructions and hardware manuals, as well as scanned cassette inlaysgame adverts, and company adverts, or magazine issues we are missing.

You could also help out by typing up the instructions we currently only have available as scans.

For each of the above type of items, there’s a specific preservation project.

If you contributed to or hold the copyright of Spectrum software, please let us know what you think of its distribution on this site.

If you know of people who produced Spectrum software, please let them get in touch. We’re very interested in their opinions and are known to be responsive to copyright holders.