Repairing Santaka-002 ZX Spectrum clone

Santaka-002 ZX Spectrum clone

For quite some time I was looking to acquire Santaka-002 ZX spectrum clone. There are couple of reasons why I was interested in this particular model.

One day I got lucky and purchased it online with a reasonable price. Owner even added some old pirated ZX Spectrum tapes, ( that is another topic for this blog ) and event part of its manuals! So that was a good find!

First inspection revealed that poor Santaka was broken during transportation ( probably ). Some keys were knocked out and case was broken.

Poor Santaka-002 with broken keys :(((

After opening it I have found couple of things:

board looks pretty clean and intact so only case was messed up,

some modification were made ( or not ? that was my confusion )

some board was added.

Internals of Santaka-002
Santaka-002 PCB

Santaka-002 Zilog Z80 CPU, with added wires that go to this DIY addon board.
Addon board. After fiddling with it, found out that it is just a joystick port.

First I started investigation from this addon board that was added to this Santaka. Reverse engineering the schematics I have found out that this is actually a joystick port. It seems Santaka-002 does no have any joystick ports and someone added one.

Video board had some tracks removed and that was a sign that it had some issues and someone was debugging and trying to find the problem. Or not ?

Santaka-002 main board
Seems some modification were made.
But when looking ant the back side, I decided that this is probably the way it was made in factory ?
Back of my Santaka-002 PCB.
Made an improvised cable using a DIN connector and RGB cable. Raedy for testing.
And Santaka-002 works!
Glued back all broken pins of the case, reinserted all keys, and it looks like new! Sort of 😀

1 Comment

  1. Hello, thx for post. please tell me what is the serial number of your computer? I restore the circulation of clones of the Spectrum.

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