As I had the rare and awesome opportunity to be able to buy 5 or 6 Opus Discovery interfaces this year, and because I couldn't find hires pics of the board on Google, I thought it was time to upload some myself.

Here's a video in which I'm dissassembling a floppydrive from an Opus because I forgot to set the driveselect correctly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjvzLBlzDgY

Here they are pics (click for hires):









Some problems I had to repair with these Opus Discovery interfaces were:
- defective rectifier
- defective ROM
- one didn't have a 6116 ram chip, don't know if it is needed, but I ordered one anyway
- one had a defective WD1770 floppy controller; replaced it with a WD1772 from an Atari ST: another model but pincompatible, and that worked great!
- one floppydrive failed, but luckally that Opus had two! Only needed to make a bracket to cover the space
- the soldered wires on the 'flying' LM317's come off easily with some movement: very frustrating when you are repairing an interface...

I encountered these interesting things:
- two had a rom v2.2 (one even had a paper with rom changes, but I didn't scan it, sorry!); the lowest rom version I found was 2.1, probably the default factory-rom
- I had one large filled floppybox with about 40 floppies filled with data; very rare to have owned as all others had only one or two or no floppies at all
- there are some different ways of how the voltage regulators are mounted
- there are some different board versions, haven't checked for numbers

This seems a lot of trouble, but believe me: ZX Spectrums fail a lot more and at a lot of more parts.

All together the Opus Discovery is a very solid system, which still works after so many years!

I just opened a new topic on World of Spectrum (click here) with info about ordering the new stereo sound enhancement.

It's a complete kit including stereo audio output socket and switch to choose between ABC and ACB sound.
All is explained in this manual (click here).

I was able to harvest these wonderful items from my attic and some recent boughts:



So this is how Clive ment computing!
Nice and fun, but I'm happy I also joined the modern pc community ;)

(unfortunately not all components are working; the interface one and two however, including the Cookie rom, do!!")

(Created with BMP2SCR_EXP)

I've created a document to enhance your ZX Spectrum 128K, +2, +2A, +2B or +3 with a real MIDI output.

Download it here!