As it was raised previously in this thread and since I wrote the manual a few clarifications:
1. 50Hz HDMI
is NOT the same as a 50Hz PAL. The particulars have been explained in this thread ad-nauseam by [mention]1024MAK[/mention] and [mention]AA[/mention] and others so I won't repeat them one more time. The reason why 60Hz HDMI was originally selected as default is that ALL HDMI displays will do 60Hz but only some will do 50Hz. The same thing applies to VGA monitors. I live in Greece (a PAL country) and most of the VGA monitors here cannot do 50Hz. Granted almost all TVs in Europe can do 50Hz HDMI but not everyone wants to plug their Spectrum Next on their HDMI TVs. Some got wives with really strong arms and access to rolling pins
2. HDMI timings are "bent" regardless of 50 or 60Hz. That means that all multicolor effects and multicolor engines will
CURRENTLY have issues
UNLESS they were written with the Next in mind. (See note below)
3. The default mentioned by [mention]1024MAK[/mention] no longer applies and the relevant text will be removed from the second edition of the manual. Reason being that the TestCard serves the purpose of finding the best mode that works on your monitor and therefore
THERE IS NO DEFAULT anymore. I forgot to remove the text from the manual as I was rushing towards the deadline as the Testcard information supersedes it. So that's my bad. Sorry, you can sue me
![Cool 8-)](./images/smilies/icon_cool.gif)
(Not really)
4.
There ARE SOME monitors that
can do VGA timings while connected to HDMI. These are not many and are usually restricted to "good brands". For example my Samsung S27D39DH CAN as well as my Acer D321HQU for example. So users of such monitors can see using their TestCard (which they can force on boot) using VGA modes and these WILL HAVE perfect timings so the things that do not work with
WILL work on these monitors.
5. A very cheap "Mini brand" VGA to HDMI adapter will also do perfect timings (These go about 5 Euros on Amazon); they're a bit offset on HDMI displays however and that's why we do not recommend them
6.
There will be BOTH additional Spectrum Cores with PERFECT timing AND HDMI output(via display buffering but lacking Next features) observing the settings you set in your
config.ini and an improved HDMI timing setting in the regular Next core as mentioned about 30 times in this thread already. The former will arrive earlier than the latter. Multicore and passing of parameters, memory and settings to additional cores has just been completed and
is being tested NOW so expect this WHOLE discussion to be moot extremely soon anyway
7. As displayed in previous messages, despite the discussions about compatibility and claims that the Next is incompatible, it has been demonstrated that one way or another (be it with extra options in the TAP loader, by special patches, skewed timings and whatnot), the Next
is more compatible than any other Spectrum model that came before it. While we can argue until we're blue in the face and that's everyone's prerogative obviously, I believe (and I hope) it makes more sense to report things that may not work to the team so we can investigate the how and why and what's the fix rather than combat each other to the death. There's no point really. The ZX Spectrum Next is still being actively worked on and it improves with every iteration of the core, the firmware and the operating system. There are a lot more things being worked on that you know nothing about and I guarantee you will surprise you very much in a positive way.