Spectrum Computing

Three years after KS #1 was successfully funded, the kickstarter has finally seen the last units shipped. The last few will be making it through the delivery system to people's homes now.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/18 ... ts/2878639

When do you think the 8-channel + CTC will go in ? Ballpark estimate ? Probably in the next few days. It really depends on when I can put together a few hours to work on it. How many audio libraries are now available for Next ? Not much in terms of libraries at the moment. People are doing copper s...

Hue is all wrong (a common NTSC problem), aspect ratio is different with a smaller border, and it has "bright black" that shows up as brown! Interesting if you are into image preservation, paletes, sRGB colours, etc. Unfortunately he doesn't know very much about the machine. The bright bl...

Yes cheers Bob. There it is on page 2.

Yeah I am not surprised that Sinclair had little in the form of documentation. The engineers at Timex encountered similar problems and ended up hiring Dr Ian Logan as consultant for extending the Basic (or was it Andy Pennell? I can't remember anymore -- there was someone though). That part is easy ...

Where does this info (that it was a bug) come from? It's coming from the Derby design spec (which I have never seen nor can I find it in a quick google search) and the 128K service manual . The 128K service manual clearly documents banks 4,5,6,7 as contended (VA14 and VA15 are not in a don't care s...

Yeah, that would be a one-time, start-up-only change. I still haven't figured exactly how to handle PAL/NTSC (especially audio!), but I presume I will make the adjustments during start-up. There are some things coming that may help there. A Z80 CTC (counter timer) with 8-channels is going in that c...

We have a Basic interpreter in NedoOS. What commands should it support to have compatibility? It's not going to be as simple as that. The operating system and basic are significant extensions of the +3 that are tied to hardware features in the Next. You can have a look at a summary of differences h...

Could you please elaborate a bit on 128K ? I'm asking as I would love to have a parallel [to Next] codepath for a 3.5 MHz rasterizer. Save for 1-bit vs 8-bit, most of rest of the code should be same. I plan to use a few larger LUTs, hence 128 KB. From what I've seen so far, cycle differences betwee...

Apologies if I moved this thread off-kilter, I was just querying the suggestion that the Next was the most compatible Spectrum machine ever. I have never studied in detail the differences between the board revisions. The definition of most compatible seems to be different for different people :) Th...

Alone Coder wrote: ↑Tue Jun 02, 2020 6:40 pm

sunteam wrote: ↑Sat May 30, 2020 11:15 am I've just released Grelox - Colony 7 - https://sunteam.itch.io/grelox-colony-7 ... ctrum-next

Any chance for ATM Turbo version for Russian Speccy scene?

Many of these things are being written in basic which makes it a little harder to directly port.

Just adding to what has been said already. Now, the questions: 1. CPU Speed: Setting 28 MHz : Register $07 appears to be able to set speed (3.5,7,14,28). Do I, as a programmer, have a full control over that without having to ask user to change speed manually ? Meaning, I set this register and poof, ...

You also know all this, but for some reason you relativize things again, with this rose tintend approach so I'm not surprised at all. Following your logic, we don't even need a VGA output for Next, Sinclair certainly didn't predict that Spectrum would attach to the monitor, nor do I know anyone who...

This is irrelevant if the "total compatibility" with the original spectrum models is claimed. This means compatibility not with just the old software most likely not using obscure effects, but with any new software for the old hardware that might use them . Compatibility with all these sp...

I had some problems running Manic Pietro over VGA. Tried every video mode at 50Hz, but the multi colour was badly corrupted. The only way to get it to work was to use the Pentagon .tap and start the game in Pentagon timing mode. Anyone got the 'vanilla' version going? It's not a big deal, but thoug...

There is a lot of info in this thread already but it might get lost amidst our rambles and bickerings, and also some of it is a bit too in-depth and technical for mere mortals. It'd be nice to see it collected in one place and in concise form. Some questions then: -is there any sort of Next wiki we...

Football Manager Revisited 2018 displays a "Nonsense in Basic" error when you press a key to start, the snapshot works fine on my +2b. I can't find a working snapshot and there isn't a tap file to see if the problem is fixed by selecting a specific machine from the Next menu. There are so...

But if the Next is more compatible than those extended variants, why is it I can play the games mentioned in this thread as not working correctly on the Next perfectly fine on my Spectrum +2b with DivMMC, which is notorious for compatibility issues? Please make sure these things are reported to the...

* You can try to speed up the spectrum to fit the right number of Ts in one vertical frame and halt the clock during portions of the horizontal scan to match the hdmi horizontal rate. This doesn't work either as it breaks audio. Beeper sound is sh*t and ay doesn't work for sampled music or stuff th...

But the Next itself is not a Spectrum. It’s a concept of an abstract gaming machine with a few nods to the Spectrum (mostly in terms of its industrial design and menu UI). The Spectrum compatibility layer is just that—a compatibility layer. I don’t believe the designers had the goal of making it a ...

The Next has exact timing for 48k, 128k and pentagon in 50Hz VGA/RGB. It is close with +3 and that will come when some time is spent on it. This is why you can run all 48k, all 128k, and all pentagon sw properly. It does not have correct timing on HDMI and this has been repeated many times for the p...

It's very easy to forget (and I forgot too) that when programs are loaded in a legacy mode (48k, 128k, etc), the original roms are put in place. So if the tap is loaded in 128k mode, eg, the REG command will cause a syntax error. There is no choice but to do it with OUTs instead of REG for this case...

Yes you can use the box collision for a coarse test and then refine as Joefish mentioned, either with more smaller rectangles or changing the shape / method of the collision test. The example box collision test is also able to cook in a tolerance measured in pixels that shrinks the sprite's collisio...

With box collisions. There's an example here:

https://www.z88dk.org/wiki/doku.php?id= ... es:sp1_ex1

Agree with all the above with one exception -- the z80 was designed for 16-bit io deliberately. The 8080 was designed for 8-bit io as it puts the same byte on A15-A8 as A7-A0 when doing io cycles. In contrast, the z80 invests extra gates to put a unique 16-bit io address on the bus. The skew toward ...