ZX Spectrum Reviews

News

Juy 2026

Some excellent news to report. For years ZXSR was purely a website. Unfortunately in 2018 it had to be taken down due to moving jobs and being unable to take advantage of the unlimited free hosting provided by my employers webserver. Sometime in 2018 the site was changed to a REST API instead, because of the limited free webspace provided by Somee.com. Spectrum Computing has taken great advantage of the API and produced a wonderful set of Review pages.

I'm pleased to announce that the site has become a fully-fledged website again as well as an API. Using latest Microsoft technologies (.NET Core/Blazor), as well as some invaluable input from Gemini, I've been able to create a new site that is way beyond what ZXSR was previously. Take a look in the left menu!

API endpoints remain exactly as they were (see below) and this site is also powered by it, rather than database connections.

There are some limitations - there are no images present anywhere as they were taking up a lot of webspace, but with a much cut-down ZXDB (my heartfelt thanks to Einar Saukas for his unbelievable work in maintaining this incredible database) and a lot of data optimisations in the ZXSR database it's all managed to fit in with the limited space available.

There will of course be bugs. If you do spot any then please leave a message on this thread in the Spectrum Computing Forum. I can't promise to respond immediately - but I will eventually!

It really has been a lot of fun to work on and I'm very pleased with the results. So click around and enjoy!

Getting started

The ZXSR site has now changed from a traditional website into a REST API that any developer can plug into. Eventually the site may be converted back into a traditional site, as it was pre-2018, but this will not happen for the forseeable future. The REST API will always remain in place regardless.

To get started is very straightforward. The API accepts ZXDB ID's only and will return some basic details of the title along with all reviews currently allocated to it. For example, to search for Knight Lore, which is ZXDBID 9366 simply use the URL:

http://www.zxspectrumreviews.co.uk/api/title/9366.

And dependent on your flavour of browser the above link will return in either XML or JSON. Using the same URL in Postman will return JSON.

There is some API documentation available here.

(NOTE) 11th November 2025: an alteration has been made to the Reviewer nodes and the addition of CompilationReviewScores. Please see the documentation above for more info.

April 2026: Flannel Panels have been added for each issue (where reviews appear in that issue).

For GDPR purposes all contact data has been replaced with [redacted]. If you spot contact data or would like it removed, please leave a message on the Spectrum Computing Forum link below.

If you spot anything in a review that requires an amend (spelling mistakes, incorrect scores etc) then please leave a message on this thread in the Spectrum Computing Forum.

Acknowledgements

The ZXSR data would be in no way complete without the invaluable input from many contributors to the ZX Spectrum scene. It's about time ZXSR acknowledged the efforts of these amazing people. My heartfelt thanks go to the following:

• Einar Saukas, author of the stupendous ZXDB, for incalculable contributions to updating and tidying the ZXSR data and providing the inspiration to do so.
• Peter Jones, original creator of the Spectrum Computing website. An invaluable resource for making sure titles are allocated to the correct magazine issues and a LOT of other data.
• Martijn van der Heide for the World Of Spectrum website. Another amazing resource used for data confirmation.
• Lee Fogarty for continuing to support and ressurect WoS from the dead after Martijn decided to retire from the scene.
• Mort, the original scanner of the Crash magazines that provided the inspiration for putting the full text of all reviews into ZXSR.
• Ken D who's incredible work of OCR'ing an unbelievable amount of magazines made the whole transcripting process a heck of a lot less painful than it was originally.
• Matthew Wilson of Crash Online who all those years ago provided the inspiration for starting ZXSR.
• Nick Humphries, formerly of YSRNRY, who's sadly missed from the scene but another who provided a huge amount of inspiration to start ZXSR.