Sparrow

The Sparrow 48K (formerly known as Sparrow LITE) is a modernized motherboard replacement, that fits into original „rubber“ ZX Spectrum and ZX Spectrum+ cases.

The board has a simple design with a number of improvements:

• composite video output, instead of a RF modulated signal
• video RAM in a single SRAM chip
• main 32KB RAM in a single SRAM chip
• system 16KB ROM selectable from 8 different ROMs in 128KB FlashROM chip, manually by DIP switch or with software via internal MultiROM expansion
• one small CPLD chip from Altera, instead of old 74LSxx chips
• pin rows for internal zx-bus expansions
• LM2596 regulator instead of the overheating original 7805
• +12V is done by small 1 Watt DC-DC Converter (and now needed only for the LM1889 video chip)
• -5V power is no longer needed
• protection against use of power supplies with wrong polarity
• power supply voltage up to 25V
• FADI compliant design

Sparrow SX prototypes rev1 and rev2 include these onboard enhancements (each individually switchable):

• RTC chip
• AY soundchip
• MultiROM
• RAM/CS signal on the edge connector for external upper-memory expansion

External links

• Sparrow 48K website