Opus Discovery Spectrum disk drive

mjnurney

we live as we dream. Alone.
Joined
Aug 28, 2010
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Country
england
Region
Milton Keynes
After many years of searching i have finally managed to find an almost mint Opus Discovery disk drive for the sinclair spectrum computer.

This system was the first disk drive that i ever saw in real life and i suppose it would of been in 1985 or there abouts. A friend at school was showing off that he had a disk drive (i didn't know what one was) and he had a new sinclair printer too. (thermal and he did his lines on it at school - the teacher had not seen a printed sheet from a pupil before)

Anyway here is my pride and joy...

A 1985 Opus Discovery 3.5 inch disk system for the zx spectrum.

This disk drive can use the microdrive commands; i.e.

cat 1
load *"m";1;"filename"
format 1
save *"m";1;"filename" etc..

but the commands can also be shortened to

load *1;"filename"

The Opus Discovery provides several different expansions in a single unit, featuring a Joystick port, pass-through expansion connector, parallel printer port, a composite video/monitor output and a single 3.5in disk drive that supports disks of up to 250K in capacity (178K when formatted).

An upgraded model, the Discovery 2, was also introduced that featured 2 drives. The Discovery 1 could be upgraded to the Discovery 2 by returning the system to the manufacturer. The power supply for the Opus replaces the original Sinclair model, and is used to power both the interface and the computer.

Operationally quite similar to the Microdrive (albeit with disks), the same commands are supported by both the Discovery and ZX Interface I - this reduces the 'learning-curve' quite dramatically and allows many programs with ZX Interface I & Microdrive support to be easily adapted or use without difficulty. The ZX Microdrive is faster, however.

£199 (1985 price)
178K per disk 40 track
Ram upgrade'able to 196K per disk and a ram drive option.

Some 1985 facts

ZX spectrum 48K £119.95
ZX interface 1 £44.95
C64 with Ferguson TV £408.95
Atrai 2600 £49.99
Ford Cortina £3475

Sinclair stock sold to DIXONS for around £10 million in 1985 to fund the C5 (1986 Sinclair computers sold to Amstrad)
 

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Last edited:
That looks interesting, does it work? What format of disc does it take?
Does it run any games direct from the floppy?
 
Hi Phil

its a standard 3.5 inch floppy and it runs games direct from floppy , although at the moment I'm loading via a multi face from disk.

a game loads in about 15 seconds or so....
 
Hi Mike, I still have my original one of these, fully boxed as well. Unfortunatly its no longer working, I think it just shows a white screen when connected (it's been a while), you don't happen to be a master at fixing these as well :)

---------- Post added at 21:47 ---------- Previous post was at 21:45 ----------

I bought mine in Boots!!
 
NICE!

I have wanted one of these for a while too, that and a Wafer Drive (just coz ;))
 
They are actually very clever little devices - if you put the SRAM into it and have the later BIOS it actually attempts to read the format of the disk on power up so it can use multiple formats. I have mine fitted with 2 720KB drives.
 
@wmsteele

id happily take a look

@zetr0

i have my eye on a wafadrive ;-)
 
Thanks Mike, its a bit of a heavy monster, postage would be a killer, always intended to pickup the skills need to fix this.... eventually :D
 
Hello fellow Amibayers!
I recently acquired an Opus Discovery 1, so I bumped this old thread, with a few requests:
-Could someone point me to a how-to webpage or document, concerning the fixes needed to operate this with dual 720k drives?
Mine has just the original single 180k drive, I'd like to upgrade it since I have a couple of spare DD floppy drives, but I couldn't manage to find some kind of tutorial, after having searched around the web...
-The decal with "Opus Discovery" logo is completely missing from the front side, could somebody kindly get a couple of clear, detailed photos and upload them (or send via PM), for me to be able to print and replace the missing logo?
Thanks in advance and cheers from Greece to all of you, Speccy enthusiasts!!
 
Opus Discovery

Opus Discovery

Hello fellow Amibayers!
I recently acquired an Opus Discovery 1, so I bumped this old thread, with a few requests:
-Could someone point me to a how-to webpage or document, concerning the fixes needed to operate this with dual 720k drives?
Mine has just the original single 180k drive, I'd like to upgrade it since I have a couple of spare DD floppy drives, but I couldn't manage to find some kind of tutorial, after having searched around the web...
-The decal with "Opus Discovery" logo is completely missing from the front side, could somebody kindly get a couple of clear, detailed photos and upload them (or send via PM), for me to be able to print and replace the missing logo?
Thanks in advance and cheers from Greece to all of you, Speccy enthusiasts!!


Did anyone ever send you photo's of the logo?
Regards
Ant
 
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