Spectrum Computing

I'm sure I'm not the only one here toying with the idea of getting a Next in the dying days of the second kickstarter.

So I'm trying to come up with good reasons to justify the purchase. One is "just because" I'd like one!

But realistically I think the Next would mainly be used to play the odd game and for Next game development on the machine itself.

That got me thinking about developing on the Next vs PC with Next emulator, which is free and may be a nicer experience/environment, with fast turn around times between assembling and testing, much like the cross assemblers of the past.

If you own a Next is it realistically possible to develop as efficiently on the hardware itself, or are you better off developing on a PC and sending code to the Next for testing/compatibility checks?

I'd be interested to hear arguments for one vs the other.

display size. everything else (including tools) could be created on Next itself. but sorry, i need alot of space with fairly big letters.

Thanks - I just went with backing a Next anyway. In the end it was futile to resist!

My initial development for steel ball, was done using a 48K, Zeus assembler and a DIV MMC, and it works very well, once you get used to it.

But it still as a few quirks, namely:
- being hard to move code around, i.e. renumbering blocks of lines easily.
- requiring to go back to BASIC to save (but with divMMC you can just save a quick snapshot)

Another issue I had was not enough memory for source code and assembled code at the same time in memory, which shouldn't be a problem on a ZXNext.

However, as far as I know the Zeus copy that comes in ZXNext SDCard is not in any way adapted to use banks, but since you can switch back to BASIC from Zeus, you can easily adapt your work environment to banks, once you know how ZXNext and Zeus works and how both handle memory.

It probably is easy to reserve a 16K slot for assembled code and eventually another 16k slot for source code and zeus loaded in it, and switch as many banks as needed into those. Note, however that I have not tried this.