Spectrum Computing

So... a long while ago I bookmarked www.zxace.com, because it hosted PDFs of Sinclair User magazine -- and I was methodically working my way through those. I got to about issue 55 or 56, when the site/hosting seemed to die. www.zxace.com now resolves to a 404. So no more SU PDFs! Did I miss something?

Any info appreciated.

I don't know anything about ZX Ace, but there are lots of scanned issues of SU at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine

[mention]KenD[/mention] makes these available at https://retropdfs.wordpress.com/current ... llections/

You will need a torrent download tool such as this one.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/qbittorrent/

I had never heard of zxace either.

Thanks chaps. No idea how/when/where I find ZXAce but I guess for whatever reason it's now a dead'un.

5MinuteRetro wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2018 11:48 pm So... a long while ago I bookmarked www.zxace.com, because it hosted PDFs of Sinclair User magazine -- and I was methodically working my way through those. I got to about issue 55 or 56, when the site/hosting seemed to die. www.zxace.com now resolves to a 404. So no more SU PDFs! Did I miss something?

ZXAce.com is a domain I use just to surface a magazine reader for the trio of spectrum magazines. Example URLs:

https://zxace.com/reader/sinclair-user/48/2
https://zxace.com/reader/crash/16/0
https://zxace.com/reader/your-sinclair/16/0

There's also C&VG at https://zxace.com/reader/computer-and-video-games/1/0

Three months ago, I got around to making it work over https, and those LetsEncrypt certs have now expired. Just gone through to renew them, so the magazine reader there should now still work.

Let me know if you see any further problems. Happy to know it's been useful for someone else too

Mike Davies wrote: ↑Sun Jan 14, 2018 5:26 pm

5MinuteRetro wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2018 11:48 pm So... a long while ago I bookmarked www.zxace.com, because it hosted PDFs of Sinclair User magazine -- and I was methodically working my way through those. I got to about issue 55 or 56, when the site/hosting seemed to die. www.zxace.com now resolves to a 404. So no more SU PDFs! Did I miss something?

ZXAce.com is a domain I use just to surface a magazine reader for the trio of spectrum magazines. Example URLs:

https://zxace.com/reader/sinclair-user/48/2
https://zxace.com/reader/crash/16/0
https://zxace.com/reader/your-sinclair/16/0

There's also C&VG at https://zxace.com/reader/computer-and-video-games/1/0

Three months ago, I got around to making it work over https, and those LetsEncrypt certs have now expired. Just gone through to renew them, so the magazine reader there should now still work.

Let me know if you see any further problems. Happy to know it's been useful for someone else too

Brilliant! Thanks muchly.

Mike Davies wrote: ↑Sun Jan 14, 2018 5:26 pm

5MinuteRetro wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2018 11:48 pm So... a long while ago I bookmarked www.zxace.com, because it hosted PDFs of Sinclair User magazine -- and I was methodically working my way through those. I got to about issue 55 or 56, when the site/hosting seemed to die. www.zxace.com now resolves to a 404. So no more SU PDFs! Did I miss something?

ZXAce.com is a domain I use just to surface a magazine reader for the trio of spectrum magazines. Example URLs:

https://zxace.com/reader/sinclair-user/48/2
https://zxace.com/reader/crash/16/0
https://zxace.com/reader/your-sinclair/16/0

There's also C&VG at https://zxace.com/reader/computer-and-video-games/1/0

Three months ago, I got around to making it work over https, and those LetsEncrypt certs have now expired. Just gone through to renew them, so the magazine reader there should now still work.

Let me know if you see any further problems. Happy to know it's been useful for someone else too

Sorry to revive this after so long but... I love this resource. Why not shove some kind of homepage at zxace.com?

5MinuteRetro wrote: ↑Wed Apr 18, 2018 10:43 pm Sorry to revive this after so long but... I love this resource. Why not shove some kind of homepage at zxace.com?

Thank you for the support and feedback. I'm happy that the basic magazine reader is useful to people other than just myself. Not too bad for a weekend's worth of hacking.

The magazine reader is a proof of concept of distributing a sizeable archive of material (magazine page images) across multiple cheap VPS machines and be more cost-effective than paying £1,152 a year on one dedicated server. I'm currently using three small VPS machines with SSD disks. One tiny VPS to host the single html page and javascript that is the magazine reader itself, and the magazines are distributed over two other VPS. It's all static content, so doesn't require beefy servers.

I have a plan of turning zxace.com into a magazine-style site with a wikipedia-quality articles on games, developers and publishers. But I need a stable Spectrum catalogue first that I can reference. Rather than build my own catalogue, it's better that I support one that's part of our community. So I've parked my zxace.com project until Spectrum Computing and ZXDB features I want are in place, and my current commitments to both projects are completed.

ZXDB, and Spectrum Computing as it's front-end and community heart, is a great foundation for others like myself to build our own bespoke/specialised sites alongside.

Mike Davies wrote: ↑Thu Apr 19, 2018 7:12 pmSo I've parked my zxace.com project until Spectrum Computing and ZXDB features I want are in place, and my current commitments to both projects are completed.

Great! If there's anything I can help, please let me know!

Mike Davies wrote: ↑Thu Apr 19, 2018 7:12 pm So I've parked my zxace.com project until Spectrum Computing and ZXDB features I want are in place, and my current commitments to both projects are completed.

ZXDB, and Spectrum Computing as it's front-end and community heart, is a great foundation for others like myself to build our own bespoke/specialised sites alongside.

Okay, I geddit - thanks for the insight!