ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

The Speccy's spritely young offspring. Discuss everything from FPGA to ZX
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ZXDunny
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by ZXDunny »

I remember, back in... oh. 2006 or 2007, being very very excited for the new Open Pandora console. I had a GP32 and GP2X and this was gonna bring linux/ARM handhelds right up to date. Powerful hardware in a portable package.

Pre-orders started in 2008 and I jumped in for a measly (as it turned out) £200. After many, many, many stumbling blocks with manufacturing, I eventually received mine in 2011. Three years after the pre-order, and six years after the initial excitement.

It was badly mismanaged by the project leader, and this compounded with issues due to plastics, board manufacturing and small problems with components led to delay after delay and people got really shirty about it. The UK arm of the company collapsed eventually leaving a huge number of pre-orders unfilled. The German side of things managed to keep ticking over but many people lost their pre-orders - the price of the unit went up, with the profits going towards filling those UK pre-orders, but this only filled a few. It was a shitshow.

But Michael Mrozek, the German chap in charge now, kept his integrity and worked as hard as he could. To that end, when he announced the DragonBox Pyra, a successor to the Open Pandora, he went slowly, with much discussion on progress, careful choosing of manufacturing partners and transparency that is not seen in the crowd-funded arena today.

The campaign started around 2014/15, with pre-orders opening in 2016. It's still not here - issues with the case, bugs in the PCB and other problems have gotten in the way. It's not going to be delivered to customers until 2020, and that's a conservative estimate. And people are not cancelling, people are not moaning about it. We've all been there before and we know Michael is a good guy.

By comparison, the Next has been up on KS since what, 2017? A little over two years. Created by a team that has little experience of this sort of thing, with an order base so small that most companies will either push them to the back of their priorities list or worse not deal with them at all.

With all this in mind, if the cased Next comes out in the next two years I'll consider them to be lucky and above all dynamic. It's just the way these things are - unless you're Samsung or Apple or Intel or... Well, things move slowly.

Personally I'm not getting a Next because it's not what they advertised, but that's another story.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

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Alcoholics Anonymous wrote: Sun Jun 16, 2019 6:58 am Whoever promised an update every two weeks made a mistake. Nothing happens in two weeks - it should be a regular update once a month even to say nothing happened, and extra updates for real news.
That would have been Henrique Olifiers himself in the Kickstarter Update dated April 2nd 2018 -
"...and from this update onwards, we’ll keep you posted every two weeks with whatever news we have on the case production."

If Mr. Olifiers is the only person who can post regular Kickstarter updates and is finding that tedious to do so then perhaps he needs someone else involved in the project to do it for him instead. Or at least write them for him to repost in his name.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by Alcoholics Anonymous »

ZxSpence wrote: Sun Jun 16, 2019 7:45 am "professional malcontents" oh dear, paranoid much? From what I've read there's a lot of tongue in cheek ribbing on the run up to the next promised update.
Are you new in the spectrum community? There is a small number of trolls who take every opportunity to attack for their own entertainment. This is not next-specific; it's across everything.

Asking questions, being legitimately concerned, wanting to know more is not being a "professional malcontent". It's actually reassuring that people show they are concerned - it only happens because people care. I hope it comes across that the people working on the project also care.

It is not acceptable that the composite keys on the keyboard, like DELETE, could be hit four times with three times coming up 0 instead of DELETE. The correction in the fpga would not have been acceptable due to the wide difference in time seen between the CAPS+0; the correction would slow the keyboard response perceptively. These things had to be redone otherwise they would have spoiled everyone's experience. We have to live with the fact each fix attempt takes 3-4 weeks. A manufacturing slot cannot be scheduled until the product is finished so we will have to live with lead times there being serially attached to the keyboard resolution. That's just how it is :-/
That would have been Henrique Olifiers himself in the Kickstarter Update dated April 2nd 2018 -
"...and from this update onwards, we’ll keep you posted every two weeks with whatever news we have on the case production."
I think he believed it was very close to being done and fix cycles for the keyboard could be done more quickly. Actually everyone involved has thought things were imminent for some time; the core and sd card contents have been frozen more than once.
Personally I'm not getting a Next because it's not what they advertised, but that's another story.
Maybe you will change your mind once you've seen one :) I think it's much better than what was promised - a traditional machine with a graphics accelerator in the pi that added sprites and produced hdmi video. Not really a "next" in my view. Now everything new is integrated into the spectrum architecture, the pi is optional and the system software extends the +3's. It does build on the +3.

If you're only into the classic machines, that's still there with the bonus that the machine is able to behave like a 48k, 128k, +3 or pentagon. The ula implementation for each of these three types is not quite 100% yet but it will get there. Maybe you want to help out in that department :) ?
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by Bizzley »

Alcoholics Anonymous wrote: Sun Jun 16, 2019 10:41 pm If you're only into the classic machines, that's still there with the bonus that the machine is able to behave like a 48k, 128k, +3 or pentagon. The ula implementation for each of these three types is not quite 100% yet but it will get there. Maybe you want to help out in that department :) ?
Do you need actual physical Spectrum Next hardware to work on these ULA implementations and test them out or can they be done via software emulators? Because if you need the hardware you can kind of see the flaw in asking people who haven't got it to do it.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

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A lot of people are helping out with knowledge and collaborating with people who do have boards. You might not personally want to get involved, but it’s not accurate to characterise people doing it as flawed.

Do you have anything positive to contribute at all, Bob?
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by Bizzley »

It's not the people that are flawed its the logic of asking people who don't have the hardware to contribute to the hardware that is.

I have positively contributed £185 of my own money to this project. I won't count the suite of graphic utilities I wrote for the Next in 2017 since they were for my own use and and been superseded by later developments. The collaboration with one of the stretch goal developers in setting up a comms link for the Next so they could speed up development wasn't much to write about either really.

Other than that, no, that's the sum total of my contribution towards development of the Spectrum Next. I'm sorry I haven't been more productive or positive, I shall try and do better in the next life.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

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The Zeus comms link works great btw. 2meg up and downlink over wired USB serial cable, and remote debugging. I collaborated with Simon on that one last spring, and did the early Robotron dev using it. Absolute lifesaver, given that the emulators were both at a very early stage then.

Of course it's ok not to contribute, nobody should feel they have to. But I have noticed you're very vocal in your criticisms on this board, which seem to be mostly of the "in hindsight, they should've done this" type. You should write another book, I'm sure it will be useful for people doing future crowdfunding compaigns.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by Alcoholics Anonymous »

Bizzley wrote: Mon Jun 17, 2019 1:15 am Do you need actual physical Spectrum Next hardware to work on these ULA implementations and test them out or can they be done via software emulators? Because if you need the hardware you can kind of see the flaw in asking people who haven't got it to do it.
It's largely a paper and pencil exercise and it would be helpful to know vhdl or something about digital hardware. But accurate emulator authors have another skill and that's knowledge about important sequences during the display generation to get that accurate emulation. Emulators are different from real hardware implementation and the language used to describe the display generation and how it's done in software does not, by and large, reflect what goes on in hardware. But being able to identify where something may not be quite right is a contribution that can solve the last 1-2%.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by ZxSpence »

Alcoholics Anonymous wrote: Sun Jun 16, 2019 10:41 pm
ZxSpence wrote: Sun Jun 16, 2019 7:45 am "professional malcontents" oh dear, paranoid much? From what I've read there's a lot of tongue in cheek ribbing on the run up to the next promised update.
Are you new in the spectrum community? There is a small number of trolls who take every opportunity to attack for their own entertainment. This is not next-specific; it's across everything.

Asking questions, being legitimately concerned, wanting to know more is not being a "professional malcontent". It's actually reassuring that people show they are concerned - it only happens because people care. I hope it comes across that the people working on the project also care.

It is not acceptable that the composite keys on the keyboard, like DELETE, could be hit four times with three times coming up 0 instead of DELETE. The correction in the fpga would not have been acceptable due to the wide difference in time seen between the CAPS+0; the correction would slow the keyboard response perceptively. These things had to be redone otherwise they would have spoiled everyone's experience. We have to live with the fact each fix attempt takes 3-4 weeks. A manufacturing slot cannot be scheduled until the product is finished so we will have to live with lead times there being serially attached to the keyboard resolution. That's just how it is :-/
I don't see anything from the guy who normally corrodes the discourse at all, but then I blocked him. So perhaps you could name names?

I don't have a problem with the reality of delivery, or where it's at. I do have a problem with seeing backers being jumped on for asking perfectly legitimate questions and making reasonable complaints. The attitude could be adequately described as "shut up or sell your pledge". Most of the time they don't get likes or backing from those working in the core team, but sometimes they do. It's not the right way to deal with people.

It's true that committing to a two week update was a rod for Henriques' back, but having made it and failed to keep it and having no intention of keeping it anymore he should put it in an update. People tend to put their heads in around update time. Those in the know already have the answers and perhaps don't appreciate how it looks from the outside. So it might look like a small step to insiders to be frustrated with those asking how it's going from the present level of internal frustration. But from the outside it looks irrational, defensive, condescending and quite often just plain rude.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by Bizzley »

Seven.FFF wrote: Mon Jun 17, 2019 2:30 am Of course it's ok not to contribute, nobody should feel they have to. But I have noticed you're very vocal in your criticisms on this board, which seem to be mostly of the "in hindsight, they should've done this" type. You should write another book, I'm sure it will be useful for people doing future crowdfunding compaigns.
Unfortunately the second book just creeps along because all my time now is spent writing Dead Lights, the July issue is due in a fortnight and it has to be proofed and printed first. I don't think my written work would help crowdfunding much - any contribution I could give on that front would pretty much amount to "tell the people who's money you took what you're doing with it" but seeing as I give my written work away for free then I dont think that would carry much gravitas. Besides, what kind of idiots with all that money would take advice from an old coder operating in hindsight mode? :)
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

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Alcoholics Anonymous wrote: Sat Jun 15, 2019 5:45 pmThere is no update because nothing has changed
The change is the fact it wont be shipping by end of Q2 as promised, regardless of the issues that is an update in itself, and one that would take 5 mins to write and post. Not all backers are following every post made and I suspect many are still thinking it's going to ship in the next week or two.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

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Well, latest update is here and the new membranes failed so it looks like they're going with a brute force and maybe inelegant but 'foolproof' solution by just adding a couple of extra signals to the membrane, which currently look like they need to be hand soldered onto the board. Not great, not terrible? Anyway, looks like we may finally be getting our machines, so rejoice?
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by namco »

Godammit Doug - you know the rules.

Bizzley has to be the first for bitching when the updates come out! :P
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

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The board has a 2-tail connector socket. The hand-soldering is just awkward wording. It refers to the socket being fitted at SMS by hand in rework stations, as the assembly line board manufacture has already happened a long time ago.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by ZxSpence »

At last, sense has prevailed.

Then when it's done if there's still a problem the team will have to accept the problem was elsewhere all along. We've all been there!
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

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namco wrote: Sun Jun 23, 2019 7:21 pm Godammit Doug - you know the rules.

Bizzley has to be the first for bitching when the updates come out! :P
:)

I didn't mean to sound like I was bitching, I'm really pleased about the news and glad to see common sense has prevailed.

However, I'd be lying if I said my comment wasn't tempered to being less than positive to pander to the moaners
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by 1024MAK »

Ahh, good. I was never keen on the purely mechanical approach, as I said earlier in this thread...
1024MAK wrote: Mon May 13, 2019 3:26 pm The problem has been and always will be that a purely mechanical membrane keyboard system is never good at making two independent switch contacts at the same time. Even during the days of Sinclair. Far too often on my ZX Spectrum+ keyboards, I get the wrong action unless I press the key squarely.

The better solution would have been to do what Amstrad did with the +2A/+2B/+3/+3B and have a normal two layer membrane and perform the additional switching in a gate array (CPLD or FPGA) chip.
Let’s hope they can get the new membrane produced quickly and without any further hiccups.

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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by Ralf »

Ok, time for a silly (or maybe not) question ;)

Would anybody by able to explain in layman terms what's the deal with the keyboard here?

I believe keyboard manufacturing isn't a rocket science, especially in 2019. Chinese make hundreds of millions of PC keyboards
each year for a really little money. Plus consoles, plus calculators and so on. I'm currently typing on such a cheap keyboard and it
never failed me, it just works.

Why is the Next team struggling with the keyboard for almost 2 years? Don't we have a ready, working solutions how to make a keyboard?
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by DouglasReynholm »

Ralf wrote: Mon Jun 24, 2019 8:12 pm Why is the Next team struggling with the keyboard for almost 2 years? Don't we have a ready, working solutions how to make a keyboard?
My personal guess is that they went quite far down the original +/128k look route, which in and of itself informs the mechanical design, but also wanted to improve the 'feel' of it therefore making a rod for their own backs in terms of a custom design. I don't really know. Also I was a rubber key and +2 only owner and have never used the +/128k keyboards so never had a horse in the race in terms of feel, and the first thing I'll do is hook up an external anyway to keep it in the best condition I can! :lol:

Having said that I do appreciate the teams effort to make it the best they could, but having some experience of electronic design/manufacture I'm a little embarrassed for them the 'will deffo work' solution is the addition of a couple of signal traces, when the delay has been as long as it has.

But, probably a lot of info I'm not privy to, so all hearsay and conjecture. I'm just really looking forward to getting mine now and after all the delay getting quite excited, when I put my pledge in I accepted there and then I might lose the money.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by 1024MAK »

Ralf wrote: Mon Jun 24, 2019 8:12 pm Would anybody by able to explain in layman terms what's the deal with the keyboard here?
It’s not a silly question.

The problem goes back to the original design of the rubber key model. The design only allowed for a maximum of 40 individual keys (not including duplicates). The original uses a 5 by 8 matrix (hence 5 x 8 = 40). If you want a modern ‘PC’ keyboard version of this, yes it is dead simple. However, I continue with the story...

So when Sinclair wanted to add extra keys as part of the ZX Spectrum+ design, they had to come up with a cunning plan. There were four obvious possibilities:
  • Redesign the keyboard, the PCB and the ULA so that a bigger matrix could be used (more matrix lines means more keys) - rejected presumably due to cost and compatibility.
  • Find a supplier that could provide proper keyboard keys including some with two sets of contacts (so that with the extra keys, they could operate and pretend to be two separate keys from an electrical point of view - same as the user pressing two keys at the same time) - again, rejected presumably due to cost.
  • Keep the ULA as per the existing 16K/48K rubber key models, but modify the PCB to have extra circuitry to handle a bigger keyboard matrix and use a membrane with two conductive layers like in the rubber key model, but with more keys.
  • Keep the existing PCB and ULA design and instead use effectively two membranes on top of one another. So that for the extra keys, when you press them, contacts on each of the membrane layers “make contact”. Hence one physical key can operate two separate circuits and hence electrically have the same effect as the user pressing two keys at the same time. There are ‘rubber’ domes between the membrane and the hard plastic key tops rather than metal springs. This was the cheapest so that’s what they went for, despite the poor feel of the keyboard.
Why was it a requirement to electrically operate two keys at the same time? Well that’s because most of the extra keys are performing the same function as that when the user on the rubber key has to press two keys at the same time. For example to delete a character, on the rubber key you push and hold CAPS SHIFT then press the 0 (zero) key. On the plus, the delete key closes contacts that make the ROM code think that both the CAPS SHIFT key AND the 0 (zero) key have both been pressed at the same time, hence the action is to delete a character.

One of the promises with the Next, is that of a better keyboard. The thinking was that for the extra keys, one physical key could operate two sets of membrane contacts at the same time, but only using a normal layer membrane.

But alas, the reliability of both these contacts making at the same time is poor and very dependent on the angle that the key is pressed. Hence various different designs being tried to no avail.

The solution is to abandon this daft idea of trying to reliably simultaneously operate two physical contacts at the same time. And instead add extra keyboard matrix lines. Then in the circuitry, have some logic to do the conversation.

This method, is, in my humble opinion what they should have done in the first place.

Note that modern PC keyboards are membrane types, but they have a very large matrix, and have a special microcontroller chip to scan the matrix and work out which key or keys are being pressed. They then send a signal to the computer with the details.
But in a ZX Spectrum, the Z80 microprocessor under the control of software (the ROM) does the scanning of the matrix. So from the point of view of the Z80 and the software, the signals from the keyboard have to look like it is a rubber key 5 x 8, 40 key keyboard in order to maintain compatibility...

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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by Ralf »

Thanks for the great explanation. I believe nowhere else I would find it exaplained with such details. And yes, it's simple and I understand it :)

So Sinclair used a hacky solution when going from Zx Spectrum to Zx Spectrum + to save costs.

And 35 years later, the Next team instead of doing everything in the standard, "kosher" way, tried to copy this hack but improve it at the same time.

And went into a blind alley. And required time to grow up to scrap their work and start again in another way.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by ZxSpence »

Sometimes you are too close to a project to see the way through.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by DouglasReynholm »

*Tumbleweed blows past*

ZX Next Kickstarter Update #49, first really good news in a long time but we're all studiously ignoring it?

*lone cricket*

2hr later edit: Just seems a bit odd is all. I'm quite pleased by the news, maybe others feel they have heard it all before. I don't know, but on the first good news in a long time, I would have thought (hoped even) some fireworks would be allowed.
Last edited by DouglasReynholm on Thu Jul 18, 2019 7:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

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There's news?
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Re: ZX Spectrum Next Discussion

Post by DouglasReynholm »

ZxSpence wrote: Thu Jul 18, 2019 7:39 pmThere's news?
You replied while I was updating the previous post.. :P

Yes, update #49 went out from Henrique about 8am UK today, via the Kickstarter backer emails. Keyboard all OK now, production starting as soon as next week I think?
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