The Inves Spectrum+ (link provided by Zonadepruebas) was a Spectrum 48K clone made by Investronica, the spanish partner of Sinclair Research, and responsible for Sinclair distribution in Spain.

This clone has suffered from numerous incompatibilities, mainly because of its non standard ROM, altered in some ways, mostly of them to comply with spanish regulation, that demanded that every computer with less than 64K had to be "spanished". That is: error messages had to be in spanish, and the keyboard and screen had to be able to display some spanish characters, like Ñ, ¡ and ¿

Among the features of the Inves Spectrum, there was one that we can consider "unique" on the history of Sinclair computers: the Inves Spectrum was presumely the first Spectrum clone that could be damaged permanently by issuing instructions...

On page 32, issue #156 of the spanish Microhobby magazine, this could be read:

The text says: We take this opportunity to warn Inves users about a rumor that states that issuing: BORDER 5 RANDOMIZE USR 4665 the computer can be damaged. We haven't tested this yet (if this work, it means we would damage a computer) but we hope to put it under test in a future. Once ago we told you that it was impossible to break a computer by issuing commands from the keyboard. Well, this would be the exception that proves the rule.

It seems that, after all, they didn't do the test. Too afraid to damage one computer? Well, the Inves Spectrum is now considered "rare" as it only sold in Spain (although I've seen one or two in Britain, but they could have bought from a spanish ebayer) and only a few months before Amstrad would take over Sinclair, so I'm not surprised that there's no news about someone having tried this "randomize of the death" to the date.

In the meanwhile, the ZXSpectr emulator had been released, and claiming that it's the only emulator that supports the Inves Spectrum+ with its oddities. Nevertheless, Spectaculator seems to work well if the Inves ROM is supplied to it (but without the side effects discussed below).

ZXSpectr would have been just another Spectrum emulator, but had a distinctive value added: its author, César Hernández Bañó, showed the results of his own research about the strange behaviour of the Inves. One of them was the following:

It's with Spectaculator, which I tried the "randomize of the death" with. Thanks to the ability of Spectaculator being able to put breakpoints into anywhere in memory, I traced the code beginning at address 4665, checking that it couldn't do any harm to the computer: the first two/three bytes were incorrectly decoded, as the address 4665 falls in the middle of a multibyte instruction, but after that, it's merely a jump in the middle of some ROM routine. The Phillip Kendall ROM collection lists the Inves ROM, so you can download it and try in your favorite emulator.

So, what happens with the real machine? Well, see it for yourself:

The first video shows what happens if the "randomize of the death" is issued to a real Inves Spectrum+. The video starts with a power cycle to initialize the Inves. If you can, compare this with the result obtained with Spectaculator running the Inves ROM:

Well, I think that after seeing this, it's the end of the "randomize of the death" hoax. And now for the poke-ROM issues, which I find more interesting. The following video shows an Inves doing a power cycle to initialize, then a tiny BASIC program is written, that pokes a 0 to every ROM location from 0 to 63*256+254. After running the program, I do some ULA related tests. After then, I issue a RAND USR 0, and after that, a hard reset by pushing the reset button. See what happens, and how the Inves can be restored to its normal state:

After this last test, I've wondered if this "mask enabling mechanism" only works for memory bus cycles or if it works for I/O bus cycles too. I've changed the POKE instruction for an OUT instruction in the program showed in the video, and nothing weird has happened. So, I think that whatever this is, it's a deliberated feature, not an accidental one. The same Microhobby article showed at the beginning of this post also said that "...it seems that there's some kind of buffer between the Z80 and the peripherals, and some ports have to be written to, to allow access to the external bus..."

This feature can be used to alter the way other ports work. If I do a:

FOR n=0 TO 63: POKE n*256+p,v: NEXT n

Then, port "p" will be affected by mask "v". That is, any value written to port "p" will be AND'ed with "v". I've tried this with even ports other than 254 and it works. It seems that port reading operations are not affected, so I cannot test if this works for odd ports too, as the only even port the Inves has is the Kempston joystick (port 223), which is a read-only port.

To end this article, I want to mention something that seems to have passed unnoticed to the people that has experimented with the Inves: some people find strange to poke to addresses that are located in ROM area, or at least, it seems so... doesn't it? It might not be that way. Just recall that the Inves Spectrum+ has 64K of RAM (two 64K x 4bit chips). Couldn't it be that the presumed ROM poke operations are indeed writting values in RAM? If so, does these RAM values act as configuration values for the ULA or some other parts of the computer? As a far as I know, there's no schematics for the Inves, and without that, further analysis is not easy.