A Hong Kong company called Lambda Electronics liked what they saw of the Sinclair ZX81 when it was released and fancied a bit of that for themselves. They repackaged the little black wedge into a new case with a fancy-ish (compared to the ZX81) squidgy keyboard popular among small home micros of the day. They didn't stop there though. CPU was still a Z80 at 3.5MHz, but base RAM was increased to - gasp - 2Kb, a composite monitor output was added, 3 octave sound AND an Atari-style joystick connector.

The machine was marketed around the world under different names, like 'Your Computer', 'Lambda 8300', 'Power 3000', 'DEF3000', 'Basic 2000', 'IQ8300' and others.

There were some additions to the spec sheet - some extra characters - a pacman-adjacent ghost, a space invader and a racing car. No guesses what the intended use of THIS platform was :o) The ZX81 ROM was tweaked to be different enough to stop them getting sued into next week, but not enough to stop most ZX81 games from running.

Lambda also 'designed' (I use the word loosely, 'copied' might be more apt) a colour add-on box that hooked up to the expansion interface and plugged into the composite port. You then plugged your colour monitor into the expansion box. I have one of these with my machine but can't get it to work. Others on the Stardot forums have also had a go at this and the result has been the same as my experiments - sync issues. Since there's no documentation it's unknown if the video output is supposed to be PAL like the main machine, or NTSC. My supposed NTSC-compatible screen didn't like it though. Apparently with some circuit tweaking the box can be made to run on the ZX81 itself.

Trivia - Dave Curran at Tynemouth Software wondered if the IQ8300 ROM would run in his ZX81-compatible Minstrel 3, and after some tweaking he did get it to work pretty well. In doing this work Dave discovered that the character set lives in the ULA on the Lambda, which is impressive. Read more on Dave's blog.