Spectrum Computing

Anyway - for anyone wanting to write crap Next games, as I am, @Seven.FFF has posted a fully-working MMC image with NextOS 2.08, which I've just tested with CSpect 2.19.4.4 and it has no problems running what I've just written on a real KS2 Next, but was failing horribly with 2.06H still installed....

I know Ben at ByteDelight had some concerns that Megadrive controllers were killing his divMMCs, but I don't know if anything was ever proved. (I know this topic is not about the Next, but after mentioning safety concerns, I can reassure people that the Next IS designed to work safely with Megadrive...

Thanks, that explains everything. I am wondering if it still makes sense to upgrade firmware in my case, because what I have seems to be really old one. What would be the recommended ESP firmware version for those who are willing to take the risk? I think it should be possible to open the case, rem...

deanysoft wrote: ↑Thu Apr 04, 2024 7:59 pm Keeping the banks organised is easy with Zeus as it has a Zeuspage function and you can easily view all the RAM.

Yea, Zeus is great for 128K coding.

I was just about to ask if ESP reset helps. Frankly, I did not expect that alone to help. Because, there is a thing that makes it interesting. And the thing is the fact that .http alone works. AFAIK, zxdb-dl just uses it internally (am I wrong?), and thus either both should be broken or both should...

I can't say I've found a use for this so really only use banks 0,1,3,4,6 and 7 which are always appear at $c000 to $ffff One good use is where you have a double buffer using the shadow screen. You display one screen, and draw your updates to the other. When you finish updating, you display the othe...

I've run into a problem with GetIt (a few other users have mentioned same in the comments); it seems to hang after the splash screen with the message "checking wifi…" GetIT is a fairly new application and it can be a bit flaky sometimes. In particular it can leave the ESP WiFi module wedg...

PC desk speakers should be fine, and you should be able to get an extension cable from Amazon for a couple of quid. You probably want something with a stereo socket at the speaker end and a mono plug at the uSpeech end.

It’s been a couple of days since I watched it, but didn’t he say the OUTs were the same for the uSpeech and the IF1? Basically the aim is to disable any internal hardware that uses the same port decoding, or has an its own ROM if your device also has its own ROM. This conflicting is a basic thing th...

Once modified (or not), here's a Next tutorial video from Tim Gilberts (of The Quill and PAW fame) including the Next OUT commands you need to type to enable the expansion bus and disable the internal hardware that clashes with the uSpeech:

It is often repeated that Currah uSpeech isn't compatible with any Spectrums that don't have RF output. Usually people mod them to output audio directly. Here's one such mod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdAvMTof0jo It is, apparently, possible to get it working without a mod. The audio is availab...

I hope it is per game It’s per game, as are all the game load options. That’s why the options exist in the first case,?to allow you to tweak the hardware for the way each game needs - which is often at odds with other games. One game only works on 128K, another game only works on 48K or with USR0 m...

As a proud owner of a ks2 zx next Sounds like you may not be aware you can map keys to your joysticks in all TAP/TZX/Z80/SNA games on the Next. This works similarly to the rewirable ComCon joystick interface you may remember from back in the day. After you’ve pressed enter in the NedtZXOS browser, ...

If it’s licensed under an alternate licence that would indeed be tickety boo. But are there any licence details included in the distribution at all? I’m asking you because I don’t really want to spend $10 to find out.

Is he including the BSD-3 licence for that emulator he’s redistributing as part of what he’s selling?

Surely you need to be reading that at a hell of a rate to detect the switching, to the detriment of the game? It presents constant bit values to, say, IN 31 with a kempston interface, so you only need to read once per frame, just like you would with a joystick. The values only change when the user ...

Now if some boffin could remake Deathchase for the Next & make it compatible with the Driving Controller, that'd be incredible! Atari driving controller will generally work anywhere Spectrum joysticks work, and with any kempston/sinclair/cursor/protek protocol. They only use left/right/gnd pins...

You can detect multiple keys, but you can’t detect that other keys weren’t pressed, because of the way this kind of matrix shorts out a row to a column. And the more extra keys are pressed, the more phantom keypresses register. With carefully crafted fixed defined keys you can get away with a certai...

I'm definitely able to detect at least 4 keys at once (it also depends on the PC keyboard when emulating though I guess, some keyboards have limits to which keys can be pressed simultaneously). Using emulators to derive the hardware characteristics of real spectrums is a bit... counterproductive. I...

The ROM routines (that set LASTK) are great for quick routines when you're typing words and sentences on one key at a time. In most games you're moving up/down and left/right at the same time, or left/right and jump and the same time, or moving and firing at the same time, or rotating and thrusting ...

cool, got that working. so how do i tell the program not to not let 'a' register go passed say 31? If you wanted to wrap X around so it goes 0,1,..,30,31,0,1 you can use a neat trick with and 31 , because 32 is a power of two: Key.SpSsMNB equ $7ffe ; Half row for Space, Sybmbol Shift, M, N, and B X...

There's lots of ways depending on whether X is in a register or memory location, whether it can go larger than 255, whether you want it to wrap or stop at a certain max value, whether you want to do something with X after increasing it, etc. But something like this is a good start: Key.SpSsMNB equ $...

sludge : 1) Mouse : The Next only uses ps/2 mice that plug into the ps/2 socket. These are converted to Kempston protocol in the FPGA core. It's purely a hardware thing, there's no software drivers or USB stack. You're thinking of some mice that were made 20-25 years ago that could speak both USB a...

If you wanted to play with the ps/2 keymap, it's not especially well documented, but this should start you off. The keymap lives in c:/machines/next/keymap.bin, and is loaded at power on and cold reset. It's a 1024 byte file containing 512 pairs of bytes, even one being a 16 bit big-endian keycode m...

It's a known bug/limitation in the ps/2 hardware state machine, unfortunately: https://gitlab.com/thesmog358/tbblue/-/issues/86 It's on Allen's fix list to do a rewrite of the ps/2 keyboard module, but a few other things have to happen first, so it may not happen immediately. There isn't much of a s...