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Hardware Technology

ZX Spectrum Next, An Advanced Version of the Original 8-Bit Home Computer, Has Been Released 95

Posted by BeauHD from the coming-to-fruition dept.
hackertourist shares an update on the status of the "ZX Spectrum Next" Kickstarter campaign: In 2017, a Kickstarter campaign was started to design and build "an updated and enhanced version of the ZX Spectrum totally compatible with the original, featuring the major hardware developments of the past many years packed inside a simple (and beautiful) design by the original designer, Rick Dickinson, inspired by his seminal work at Sinclair Research."

They didn't quite make their original planned delivery date (2018), but they made good on their promise in the end: the first machine was delivered on February 6 of this year. The Spectrum Next contains a Z80 processor on an FPGA, 1MB of RAM expandable to 2MB, hardware sprites, 256 colors, RGB/VGA/HDMI video output, and three AY-3-8912 audio chips. A Raspberry Pi Zero can be added as an expansion board. The computer can emulate any of the original Spectrum variants, but it also supports add-ons that have been designed by the Spectrum community over the years, such as games loaded onto SD cards, better processors and more memory, and improved graphics.
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ZX Spectrum Next, An Advanced Version of the Original 8-Bit Home Computer, Has Been Released More

ZX Spectrum Next, An Advanced Version of the Original 8-Bit Home Computer, Has Been Released

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  • As above, why?

    I guess if you have a lot of spare time on your hands this would be one way to spend it, but who really wants to mess with this?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I see you've never met an example of Nerdicus Hominus?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by psergiu ( 67614 )

      I do !
      Spectrum (actually, a clone) was my 1st computer - without it's plastic keys to bang on i wouldn't started in IT and thus would not have discovered /.
      A few years ago i managed to find an original Spectrum+ and just the fixes and add-ons ( new keyboard membrane (yes, they're still being made), new power regulator, replacement rubber feet, Composite video fixes, Interface 2, Interface 1bis ... ) costed more than a Spectrum Next and the image is still fuzzy/noisy on a modern flat-screen TV.

      Thank $deity i

      • Thank $deity i'm not one of the Amiga fans - i would have gone bankrupt by now :)
        ROFL :P

      • Amiga stuff is hilariously overpriced. No idea why they decided to ape Apple and go for PPC, especially when by the time they actually started making hardware Apple had moved on to x86. They should have just done the same and developed the software around commodity x86 hardware. That is likely one of the reasons Linux was able to catch on in the early days when other alternative OS's failed. Going with something else first is just wasting your time and setting yourself up for failure.

        Who actually buys the n

      • Yeah but can it run Linux^W Bandersnatch [tuckersoft.net]?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TXJD ( 5534458 )
      You answered your question. It's a hobby, for folks that want to spend spare time working on old 8-bit computers.
      • +1 on the title. Why indeed?
        In the 1970s, the z80 had the jump on Intel's 8080, and became the heart of most CP/M systems. I could see myself using one once, but not twice. The 68k was out about the time it was released. But CP/M programs were usually in 8080 assembler anyhow (In case some twit had an 8080 box). It did 4Mhz (=1Mhz bus speed), and had a video update interrupt every 20ms to copy it's 4k of video ram to screen. Likewise, the specs of the new box are pathetic. Their basic was crap. My enduri

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Monday February 24, 2020 @07:43PM (#59763216) Homepage

      You must not be a programmer. There is an elegance to working with a system you can understand completely without a team of scientists at your back, that you can model entirely in your own head, that works with human-readable machine instructions you can write out by hand.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        Not sure how any of this relates to the ZX Spectrum, though. Also, you must not be a programmer if you think modern computers don't work with "human-readable machine instructions you can write out by hand" or that no one can understand modern architectures "without a team of scientists at your back". You sound more like a programmer groupie than a programmer.

        • Bullshit. Nobody memorizes the entire x86 instruction set or touches it by hand. No one person could draw you a graph of the entire internals of any of the Intel chips made in the last 2 decades. *Millions* of transistors, dude. Stop showboating.

          • >Nobody memorizes the entire x86 instruction set or touches it by hand.

            I know plenty of people who do. Given where I work, that's no surprise.
            I only know a couple of instructions very well, but that's because they are my fault.

        • True ...
          After all my Mac does not work different than my Apple ][ ... it just has more memory and an FPU, MMU, some USB sockets instead of just one analog port and one serial ... and a GPU.
          But there is nothing magically in it I don't understand (well, there is, the dreaded Intel CPU, are you sure you can write human readable instructions for it by hand?)

        • Nonsense. Let's take as a modern 'equivalent' the original Raspberry Pi. Its CPU is documented in the ARM1176JZF-S Technical Reference Manual which comes as a 759 page pdf. Comparable documentation for the Z80 CPU is about 20 pages.

          That doesn't include pinout (none for the ARM CPU as you'll normally encounter that as integrated part of a System-on-Chip), signal timing diagrams or electrical specifications. Or the VideoCore IV GPU that has its own architecture + instruction set. Or the boatload of complex

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by hattig ( 47930 )

            I think many people find this hard to grasp as a concept.

            It's similar to people who like old cars, who know the car, can strip it down and rebuild it, nothing is abstracted via engine management computers or the like, it's just something they can get their hands on and have fun (in their own way).

            Modern computers have a huge amount of abstraction under what the modern programmer is programming in a fairly simple language. Powerful, yes. But it's not the same as getting into the nitty gritty (but in a way th

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hattig ( 47930 )

      Because.

      Additionally - this was a very popular 8-bit computer back in the day, so a lot of people want to revisit their youth, and have a 'new old' system which might be a lot more reliable than their old system, and additionally have some modern benefits (fast loading being the main one). In addition, these old computers are far more accessible for a sole developer to write something *for personal fun* than modern systems, people don't have a lot of time these days, particularly those in the 40+ age range

    • lol ... i bought a vocore , just cos everyone was talking Pie ... , i would have checked the neo-64 but that mini thing didnt even come close, it just ran a few original games, no original OS or nothing ... plenty of people would i guess i mean, who the hell would buy a car ? that's just so you can buy rims, right ? i mean who would buy an iPhone when you can get a Xiamo for 1% of the price and it also has a flashlight ... nostalgia, mah man :p ... never had a Spec myself but i can totally understand why

  • Pi zero..... as an add-on??? (Score:3)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Monday February 24, 2020 @06:50PM (#59763020)

    Umm, couldn't you just emulate the thing in a Pi Zero?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      It would make a lot more sense, and cost a lot less, yes.

      • Maybe so, and only maybe, but then you're introducing hardware with proprietary blackboxes you can neither remove nor personally audit in any meaningful way, which sorta destroys a lot of the point of working with hardware from that era in the first place.

        • The Z80 cpu is implemented in an FPGA, so it's not exactly hardware "from that era", but close enough, I guess.

          • I have a few tubes of Z80 chips. But they are not that interesting. I have a few tubes of Intersil 6100 processors, too. That's a 12 bit processor that runs the PDP-8 instruction set. It's a lot more interesting than a Z80 chip, though they are both interesting diversions. And both a little more fulfilling than something on an FPGA chip.

            I also have a few dozen Z8000 processors. Now that is something vintage hardware nerds get into.

        • Anything proprietary about 8 bit computers from the 1970s and 1980s was either long ago effectively leaked into the public domain. I can get emulators for a good many 8 bit computers of the era, some that only nearly perfectly emulate the hardware, but in some cases actually improve on it. I played around with a Color Computer 3 emulator that had emulated the hardware hacks allowing for over 512k of RAM, emulated the more advanced Hitachi 6309 over the Motorola 6809, allowing accessing of much larger virtua

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by _merlin ( 160982 )

      Probably not - the Spectrum is one of those systems where you have to emulate everything cycle-by-cycle, and worry about things like open bus reads behaving properly. It requires a lot more resources to emulate properly than you'd expect.

      • ...which is something ZX Spectrum emulators are able to do for ages, even if implemented in JavaScript.

        Thing is, Z80 is very slow 4Mhz processor. So for each Z80 cycle (and minimum instruction takes 4 cycles), you have got like 100 ARM instructions to emulate that cycle.

        Plus, it is really really simple HW. There is only about 700K transistors in the whole computer, majority of which is dynamic RAM...

    • Yes, Spec-ception! you could emulate Several speccies on the Pi zero, talking to a REAL speccy on the, err, speccy... isn't that how Skynet kinda started?

    • Umm, couldn't you just emulate the thing in a Pi Zero?

      Then you would still need the most essential thing that makes a computer a ZX Spectrum: An innovative keyboard ground-breaking in how shit it is.

    • Lag is always a problem with software emulators. Even when using the "racing the beam" feature in WinUAE, my Amiga software runs much better on real hardware than on an emulator, especially with regards to mouse control. Some games are practically unplayable (with a mouse) under an emulator.

      "Real" hardware, whether on a custom ASIC or FPGA, is worlds apart from emulation.

  • Ugh (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I had a TS 1000 back in the day and it was painful at best. Even for that era. Let it go, let it go!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by psergiu ( 67614 )

      TS1000 ( the 2KB/NTSC version of the 1KB/PAL ZX81 ) was indeed crappy.
      Spectrum had coloUrs. Spectrum+ had a usable keyboard. Spectrum 128K had double the RAM and AY CHIP music !

  • Emulate that horrible sponge rubber keyboard?

    • They don't, it's a butterfly keyboard.

      With all the upgrades, it's more 'what the Spectrum could have been, given lavish development and decades of progress in semiconductors' than a straight copy of the 1981 Spectrum.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by hattig ( 47930 )

        Indeed, this is what a Spectrum upgrade system release in the early 90s could have looked like - backward compatible, but with new features, performance, and a reasonable keyboard. For a lot of people, this fulfils their 'what if' nerd dreams :)
        Mine will arrive soon, I hope.

  • A homage to the great Sir Clive Sinclair (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NotTheSame ( 6161704 ) on Monday February 24, 2020 @07:49PM (#59763232)

    The ZX Spectrum was a bloody brilliant computer for its time. You could buy it in 1982 for £100, when its main rival the C64 was £300-£400. You could plug it straight into your TV. It booted straight into BASIC, making it a great computer to learn programming.

    And it played games. Have a look at R-Type on the Spectrum - not bad for a 40-year old budget machine:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Games saved on a portable cassette recorder if you were lucky, over an interface that glitched every time you wiggled it, which was every time you pressed a key on the world's worst keyboard.

      • Most of the hardware back then was pretty flaky. Commodore's 1541 disk drive was an awful beast, and I remember the Apple II external drives getting pretty flaky by the mid-1980s. Tape storage for most 8-bit computers was hit and miss. I remember my buddy and I swapping tapes, but because his cassette recorder ran slightly slower than mine, it took a helluva lot of tries to get his programs to load. Quality control in the 8 bit era was hit and miss, particularly for third party hardware, and hardware was a

        • I remember the 3 second copy between 2 Commodore 1541 drives in combination with Dolphin Dos on a C64.

          My C64 had several case mods, like a fan built-in for cooling the ROM board in it. That ROM board had several ROM chips on it. And there were 20 switches to select different C64 ROMs burned in these chips (using a binary system of selection).

          Spend way too much time and money on that computer. But not on 1541 drives, those brick models were very solid in my experience.

      • You're thinking of the ZX81, the Sprectum's tape handling and keyboard were both much improved over the '81. PLus, no RAM pack wobble.

        • >PLus, no RAM pack wobble.

          Wait, what? Maybe if you were some mucky-muck rich kid who had a Spectrum+
          I had a Spectrum 16k, with a 48K rampack stuck on the back of it. I had to stick a book under it to support it so it didn't wobble.

          Never saw the dizzy heights of the 128k Spectrum. By then I'd graduated to an Atari ST.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )

      I had the TImex-Sinclair 1000. WITH the 4KB (16KB?) expansion module.

      • 16kb. A row of 4116 dram chips. They actually deselected the original 2k SRAM which was sort of dumb but simplified the design. A better design could have kept the SRAM in the memory map so you'd have 18k.

      • I still have my Sinclair ZX-81 that I got for Christmas in 1981. It has the 64k expansion module taped to it and the 4 in thermal printer. They both cost $100 back then.

      • I borrowed a TS1000 back in the day, and it was more like a ZX81 than like a Speccy. The Timex Sinclair was not really a very good option for those of us in the US. If memory serves, the Commodore VIC-20 was a few years old by the time the TS1000 was introduced, and could be had for only a little bit more (less if used) and was somewhat more capable graphically.

        I'd argue that the Speccy versus ZX81/TS1000 was the same sort of leap the Commodore 64 versus VIC-20/PET. Simply not the same generation machine an

    • My impression was that the Spectrum was the U.K.'s Nintendo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rklrkl ( 554527 )

      The ZX Spectrum wasn't "bloody brilliant" at all - its only saving grace was that it was "bloody cheap" which got it the lion's share of the UK home computer market (attracting most games developers in a chicken and egg scenario).

      The original ZX Spectrum was frankly awful - the keyboard was a disaster, the machine was slow, it had terrible sound, an awful blocky colour palette and a horrendously poor BASIC (certainly not very good to learn programming on).

      By far the best machine around that era was the BBC

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xonen ( 774419 )

        You're being funny. Apart the differences in price tag - $100 for the ZX vs over $1000 for a beep, they had an entire different audience. The BBC was popular in schools because it was robust, supported printers and shared diskdrives and such, and probably most important - allowed custom ROMS with 'business'-type software.
        The ZX was aimed at the home and hobbyist market. Learned kids and adults programming and entertained them with some games.

        Now, shall we see if the BBC was really a better computer in the e

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
          The BBC Micro had a cassette interface just as the Spectrum did. Floppy disk drives (and hard disks) were an optional extra, and as you say, they cost a lot more. Even with cassette only, the BBC Micro was still a lot more expensive than the Spectrum. The fair comparison for the Spectrum might be the Electron, a cut-down, cheaper (and somewhat slower) version of the BBC Micro. I liked it more than the Speccy; it had the same feature of entering BASIC programs with a single keystroke for each keyword, bu

        • >It had virtually not games available

          Um.. It had Elite!
          And some odd caveman game I forget the name of. Not to mention some other platform game where you had to kill a witch by dumping a bucket of water on her...

          I owned a speccy. I cut my teeth on its basic. School had BBC Micro's and that's where I learnt 'real stuff'. I recall my first ever 'hacking' success was writing a copier to copy the Elite floppy. Ingenious copy-protection - it had an unformatted sector at the beginning of the disk which meant a

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by hattig ( 47930 )

        The BBC Micro was a tank, but the cost simply made it unaffordable for most families.

        £100 (£355 today) was accessible, even to the lower-middle classes. These computers were an enabler is social mobility upwards for so many people subsequently due to the skills learned, in a society where that was quite difficult.

        The awful palette is exactly the same as the BBC Micros by the way, indeed with the brightness control you could say it's better. But the other graphical limitations (mono with characte

    • I started with a ZX81, but after a few yeard I switched to the Amstrad CPC6128, which was almost like the Spectrum, I loved this machine, played games, learn ASM, etc and at the same time did Turbo Pascal 3.0 and dBaseII in CPM3.

      R-Type looked the same on the Amstrad.

  • The MiSTer FPGA project has a speccy core (Score:5, Informative)

    by NerdENerd ( 660369 ) on Monday February 24, 2020 @08:17PM (#59763304)
    If you want to play with an FPGA speccy your money would be way better spent on a DE10 Nano and a ram module then not only do you have a cycle accurate recreation of a speccy but you also have cores for SNES, NES, Neo Geo, PC Engine, Master System, Genesis, Amiga, C64, Vic 20, Mac, 486 and heaps of others including many arcade systems. More expensive than a Pi and you can't run as many systems but you get a much more accurate simulation of the target system than with most emulators and no lag. Check out the MiSTer project at https://github.com/MiSTer-deve... [github.com]

    • Just buy a few Z80 processors, some SRAM, glue logic and a good EPROM emulator. Real hardware isn't difficult to acquire.

      • This is NOT just a basic Z80 SBC Single Board Computer. It has many built in Audio interfaces, SD Card interfaces, i2c, SPI, i2s, Z80bus, RTC, Wi-Fi, RPi to do 'other' optional functions, More Advanced graphics modes and sprites, Multiple machine personalities, multiple cores, the list goes on. Does the whole of the Slash Dot community consist of opinionated people who argue against a topic they know zero about? Try researching people.
        • It also has DMA controllers, a co processor similar to the Amiga, Banked memory, Multi format Joystick interfaces, A built in full keyboard, 2 monitor screen support, SID audio, MP3 and many other format audio playback, Upgradable FPGA based design ....
    • Picture this, You're in your 40's, 50's, whatever... You have a Wife, young kids and almost zero 'me' time... you're almost a footnote in your own life... Try putting that PCB in the living room by the TV without it getting destroyed More importantly, try getting it past the wife..... Now, the NEXT.. Shove it in front of the TV Let the kids loose on it with little fear and enjoy their journey of figuring out how to use it Let the family embrace your own childhood memories and enthusiasm
    • Absolute nonsense from someone who has no idea what the Spectrum Next is. It is a complete Bespoke System not just a generic FPGA box. Do some research.
      • I watched Nostalgia Nerd's one hour video on the thing and I would still say that a MiSTer FPGA is a better investment.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hattig ( 47930 )

      Yeah, I really want to spend my one or two hours free time a week (a month!) pissing around setting up things.

      MiSTer is good, but it's not a solution for everybody.

      Note that the Next can run other cores as well - I don't know if the FPGA can cope with an Amiga-level core, but there are cores for other 8-bits appearing already.

    • You missed the point entirely.

      • No I didn't, I know the Spectrum Next is more than just a Spectrum. My point is that you get more from a MiSTer FPGA than a Spectrum Next.

        • But you don't learn anything running an emulated cpu. You don't understand all the details like clock signals and interrupts.

  • I was seriously into emulation around 20 years ago, just as MAME was really taking off and dozens of emulators were being written. I really wanted to get some physcial hardware but my wife said no as it could burn the house down! Ha ha! I fought but in the end I'm glad I didn't waste my money and time. What I learned by emulating 8bit micros from the 1980s, when I learned computing, was that it was all rose-tinted nostalgia. Sure I have some damn good memories of me and friends talking about the games and l

    • I maintain that there is value in combining old techniques with new.
      I wrote about it with real world examples here : https://github.com/dj-on-githu... [github.com]

    • "I was seriously into emulation around 20 years ago, just as MAME was really taking off and dozens of emulators were being written. I really wanted to get some physcial hardware but my wife said no as it could burn the house down!"

      True story: I got a hand me down TI/99-4a for my 10th birthday from my uncle. I spent hours going through the big 3 ring binders of documentation full of Basic examples and typing in and modifying the listings to see all of the cool stuff I could do. The computer was hooke

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      I'm the exact opposite.

      I'd really rather load up a DRM-free game, from my childhood, that was fun, quick, made without internet-coop being the default mode.

      Hell, out of 1000+ Spectrum games, own since the mid-80's, I remember completing only one... which involved my entire family and the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life to map the damn thing.

      I've been using emulators since the days of the 386 (Gerton Lunter's Z80, then WinZ80, then Spectaculator, etc.) and I remember the first time

    • I disagree. I spend way more time getting stuck in a just one more go loop on old games that modern PC or PlayStation games. Spectrum games are way below the level of game I play, mostly arcade, SNES, Genesis or Neo Geo.
  • There's a certain appeal of having an 'all in one' , 'safe' platform on which to unleash the children. how easy is it on a modern PC to have a totally closed environment in which you can simply boot, type in.. 10 Print "slashdot woz ere" 20 Goto 10 and Run Added that this is an FPGA based platform so effectivley just boots and can be anything an FPGA can be programmed with As for the Raspberry Pi on board - it's an order of magnitude faster than the host machine...and 'why' - BECAUSE... for some - there'

  • Ignorant experts? (Score:5, Informative)

    by castingflame ( 6641096 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @05:03AM (#59764220)
    The fact that many of you do not understand Why do this or use this FPGA hardware hardware or even choose the ZX Spectrum, does change the fact that over 3000 people backed the Kickstarter and there is the same amount again waiting for the 2nd run of machines. People lack of education about the project does no invalidate it, rather it just highlights people inability to do research or understand the technology or 'wants' of a retro community. The original ZX Spectrum was in a big part responsible for bringing computers into homes in the UK. It help start a whole industry and career for many. The Next is NOT like any other emulator or FPGA Synthesis. It incorporates the best of the older hardware and a lot of new Audio, Video and other functionality.
    • It is an Official Sinclair Branded ZX Spectrum machine that has integrated hardware, Keyboard, expansion bus etc like a Real computer. While I appreciate the MIST(er) it can not do what the Next does and it is not a self contained computer.
      • The MiSTer is a self contained computer. Out of the box the DE10 Nano board can run Linux on it's dual core ARM process and it can many FPGA recreations after a simple install to the SD card. The addition of a $20 SDRAM module allows you to run all FPGA cores over HDMI. The extra hardware is only necessary for analogue outputs if you need old CRT and audio outputs.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Back when Sinclair Research was just boot-strapping itself I was in college working on my undergrad degree in industrial manufacturing (Equivalent of Industrial Engineer in today's lingo). I was bored out of my mind and had started to teach myself electronics just for the challenge and to keep my mind occupied.

    In order to graduate, I needed a particular class, and that class had a prerequisite that I needed to have first. Try as I might, for five semesters straight, I could not get into the prerequisite cla

  • With Tandy all but dead, I wonder about the IP.

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