Spectrum Computing

Email info@specnext.com Peter. The packaging was tweaked for the Accelerated by adding foam blocks to stop the Next slipping under the well which was prising keys off when it occasionally happened. Fixing the tendency for the cardboard to rip was beyond the scope and budget for now, but that insert ...

The SMS factory has not been advised to shut down. They make all kinds of electronics including medical equipment. Regarding the lack of emails, these are coming directly from the courier. A lot have been disappearing into spam folders, and even more have been rejected by people’s email servers. It ...

Mike C says: "Are you looking at images of people receiving their Next's and feeling down, because you're still waiting on yours? Another batch of accelerated models is due to be collected by our logistics partner tomorrow. They will then speed out into your hands. Again, this is fulfilment to ...

16-bit I/O has been in Zilog and second-source documentation from the very start. I have a very early manual which makes it crystal clear that B or A is put on the upper 8 address lines.

Yes, a batch went out yesterday. Henrique said the other day: “Hi folks! We're shipping the first batch of the Accelerated units now. It's a lot of machines to ship, so it's going to take us a few weeks to do so -- but some of you will receive an email with tracking info tomorrow. We're now shipping...

You still have access to BASIC before you press the NMI button! I don't know why you thought you didn't, as the machine still boots to the 48K BASIC prompt. Do your OUT, then Press NMI, then load the game from the NMI menu. I just tried it with Atic Atac on my +3 and divMMC, and it works perfectly. ...

There’s been a slight pause while Accelerated Nexts continue to be made and tested, to get upgraded packaging (hard foam inserts) ready and to assess the current global logistics situation. The plans are to start shipping the ones made so far next week, if possible. If anyone needs to change their d...

The NXtel client also ships on the Next distro. The client, server and page manager are GPL-3 at https://github.com/Threetwosevensixseven/NXtel.

The Next has up to four layers with transparency, clipping windows, stacking priorities, stencil mode and blend modes (where one layer affects another rather than being itself displayed), and multiple colour depths and resolutions based around 128x96, 256x192, 512x192, extending partway into the bor...

Yes. The keyboard, Sinclair, cursor and Fuller protocols are active low, but Kempston is active high. It was a bad hardware design decision that’s way too late to correct. The best a game can do is monitor it for floating bus behaviour during startup, and only start treating it as actively connected...

The answer is almost always that real hardware is correct, and emulators fudge things. But these days people use emulators as their primary source of truth. It’s not even a question of how accurate/inaccurate a given emulator is. It’s a wider issue relating to the kinds of meta-functions that emulat...

Ha sorry. I added the “and” as a last minute thing without testing it.

CSpect (another dev emulator) also does this, btw. There is a log command you can type into the debugger, documented in the readme. This one goes to file, so doesn’t have the message pump issue if you log too much too quickly.

The way I did it was to open Zeus, and do File >> New to create a blank file. Type the following: zeusemulate "48K" zeusdatabreakpoint 14, "zeusprinthex(pc>=$4000, pc, addr, data)", $4000, $C000 Click Assemble button, which prompts you to save your source .asm file. Make sure Ena...

You can definitely do it in Zeus with databreakpoint expressions. I will post an example later.

I’m guessing Charlie might be interested in seeing the duff MDR file, to make sure it’s not a firmware bug.

Baggers and Flash are really talented industry veterans. They tend to knock this stuff out in mere days, too

You get a shipment notification email when it is shipped. All base model Nexts have shipped, and all the emails have gone out for those. 37 of those emails got rejected by the recipients’ email servers, and the team is trying to manually contact those people by other laboriously manual means. A very...

Just saying that when I wanted to get some (for another project unrelated to the Next) the main source (to consumers) in the U.K. was out of stock of the standard Pi Zero model. Pi Zeroes with a header were however still in stock (with a higher price of course). Mark The Zero W will work fine with ...

Cheers Woody!

What can new BASIC do? Accelerated modes? Etc first. I've not been fillowing all the development progress, so it'll be interesting to see we what stage things are at now. The downloadable version of the manual is temporarily unavailable, to avoid spoiling the surprise of what the cover looks like (...

Peter, A few people have inadvertently made two Kickstarter accounts, They logged in with an email address and password originally, then next time they logged in they click the ”Login with Facebook” button. Or vice-versa. If you login the way you originally did when you pledged, you should see your ...

Definitely, it's exciting times. There are also Victor's cores from his earler Multicore project (some overlap with the UNO cores, I think): https://gitlab.com/victor.trucco/Multicore I also know of someone working on a different QL core, and someone else working on a Science of Cambridge MK14, both...

There's an asm routine to do this (although it's not parameterised) in my Atic Atac mod. You could easily parameterise it, I guess. https://bitbucket.org/Threetwosevensixseven/aticatacmod/ https://bytebucket.org/Threetwosevensixseven/aticatacmod/raw/9809e4a19c4c377d6e4639b5f0a9c4c109a3ff25/images/at...

It will depend on the MISTer core. The MISTer FPGA is roughly the same size as the Next, but the MISTer also has other hardware on the board the Next doesn't have, and it has a different kind of RAM. So if a MISTer core uses any of those hardware features, it may not be portable without some comprom...

As promised by the original Kickstarter, the Next's FPGA sources are now public and licensed under GPL v.3.0. Core authors: Read the embedded documentation and fashion your cores per the repo suggestions as this will make maintaining everything much easier. Have fun porting cores! https://gitlab.com...