Black Wallets
With the release of the Sinclair ZX Microdrive the company brought out a stylish black wallet for the storage of the precious ZX Microdrive cartridges. During the years some of these piled up here – but not that much, because the Microdrive cartridges were not really cheap. Especially compared to the (later) prices for 5,25 or 3,5 inch floppy discs.
Fast Forward
Nowadays most of the retro computer users upgrade their systems to use more or less „modern“ storage devices. The most prominent in this regard is the standard SD/MMC card.
Being cheap, small and holding several gigabyte of data this devices recommend themselves as the perfect solution for old computers. Regarding the Sinclair ZX Spectrum there are several add-ons (like the DivMMC Future or the vDriveZX) for the old machines as well as new systems that has an SD/MMC card reader as their standard storage device (like the new Sinclair ZX Spectrum Next or the ZX Uno).
By pure coincidence the physical dimensions of a SD/MMC card is not far away from the ZX Microdrive cartridge – so it was easy to prep some SD card cases to fit into Sinclair’s original black cartridge wallet. Now all my ZX Spectrum (Next) SD cards happily reside beneath my old microdrive cartridges – and do not stand out anymore…
Labeling
While my original SD card for the DivMMC Future and the ZX Spectrum Next’s system SD card have dedicated labels, all other (aftermarket) cards for the SD card relevant devices (ZX Spectrum Next, DivMMC Future and the vDriveZX) of course only have show vendors standard label. To present a more „professional“ look and to quickly identify which card belongs to which of my numerous devices I designed some lables to print out and attach to the cards. No more vDriveZX card in my DivMMC (or the like 🙂 ).
Related Links
Sinclair ZX Microdrive
Sinclair ZX Microdrive cartridges
DivMMC Future
vDriveZX
Sinclair ZX Spectrum Next
ZX Uno