As I explained in my first post about Old Spectrum Mags I’m going through all the old Your Spectrum and Your Sinclair magazines in the run up to the ZX Spectrum Next launch. Here’s my look at the highlights of Your Spectrum Issue 05 from July 1984.

All images are taken from the Internet Archive. Here is the full magazine if you want to take a closer look. Kudos to Jason Scott for uploading it. https://archive.org/details/your-spectrum-magazine-05

Below…I always knew Cheetah for their joysticks. I forgot they did software too.

Look at that advert in the top right, in the page below. I love the artwork. They’ve just drawn a stickman, but he looks so chilled and laid back for a stick man that it just makes me want to buy whatever they sell so that I can feel like that stickman feels.

Interesting articles about both Virgin stores and WH Smith expanding their gaming areas! An exciting time in gaming.

This Grafpad graphics tablet for the Spectrum intrigued me in Issue 3 of Your Spectrum but I did wonder just how many people actually used them. Well they must have heard me and popped back in a time machine because below is the left hand side of a double page spread which lo and behold lists all the users of the Grafpad! Followed by the main advert below that which was on the right hand page.

Matthew Smith maintaining the top two spots for another month!

And look! A whole article on the aforementioned Grafpad. It really did seem to be a hot piece of kit. No-one seems to remember it though, so it can’t have been all that successful?

Very interesting article here about early bulletin boards. That was such an exciting time for the ‘early internet’. Particularly after the excitement of the movie WarGames, just a year before. I love the chart on the second page.

I remember being so excited about Microdrives. I never had one but they seemed so futuristic to me. A very sexy piece of kit! ZX Microdrives – the fast way to save or load 85k of program and data. £49.95

Now this is how you make a video game advert. It’s only black and white but you totally want to fly that fighter jet in Fighter Pilot. Nicely done.

And I love this advert too. You can’t beat a nice picture of a cassette, but this one is cleverly done too.

Tune in soon for Issue 06 of Your Spectrum.