Next BASIC

[PeterJ]

Has anyone progressed well with Next BASIC. It's probably a mix of my age and the quality of the manual, but I'm really struggling, especially with layers, palettes, and banks. Also page 148 seems to indicate you can built a procedure to create a version of ATTR which works on all layers, but gives no details of this.

If you have any tips or short examples you have written it would be much appreciated

[llewelyn]

Peter I don't know if this is any help but page 24 of this file does talk about layers?

https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/file/Making ... Kd_OA_7QXQ

Damn! I just noticed its from the Files on the Next Facebook page and I know you dislike Facebook as much as I do. This 'Making the most of your NEXT' series was originally at the Next site. So perhaps I'll look again but I think they moved it.

[OldGamer]

I don't mind admitting I'm finding it very very hard going (because I'm old and dumb) and I've now decided to hold off on using next basic until there are some good beginner tutorials on youtube.

until then, I am using AGD.

[llewelyn]

Well Peter I'm older (73) and dumber, no doubt! I'm finding the manual infuriating to read, I'd like to convert it to RTF and use Word Pad to edit and do a complete reshuffle, trying to get all the relevant info into specific chapters. Its all very well it saying 'Graphics Chap 2' but not if certain extra bits of relevant info is scattered elsewhere.

The only solution for me is to take that route but as my Next doesn't arrive until next August (assuming I last that long) I have enough time to do this editing and possibly add any extra info gathered from the ongoing additions to the website such as I referred to before.

[PeterJ]

This is worth a watch [mention]llewelyn[/mention] and [mention]OldGamer[/mention]:

https://specnext.dev/tutorials/tutorial ... ext-basic/

[PeterJ]

Peter I don't know if this is any help but page 24 of this file does talk about layers?

https://lookaside.fbsbx.com/file/Making ... Kd_OA_7QXQ

Damn! I just noticed its from the Files on the Next Facebook page and I know you dislike Facebook as much as I do. This 'Making the most of your NEXT' series was originally at the Next site. So perhaps I'll look again but I think they moved it.

Thanks [mention]llewelyn[/mention],

I downloaded it and shared via Google Drive for anyone else who is not keen on Social Media. This work is by Neil Streeter:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PHsYrc ... sp=sharing

[PeterJ]

Hello,

I have updated the above post with the latest update by Neil Streeter. This update is from the 24th October and includes lots of information on layers.

[Alcoholics Anonymous]

Jim's tutorial series has started and it begins with basic.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

These are live every Sunday.

[PeterJ]

Thanks [mention]Alcoholics Anonymous[/mention], it's excellent that quality resources are available.

Do you know what has happened with Phoebus R Dokos? He seems to have gone quiet on the scene. Hope he is OK.

I've requested edit rights to his crowd sourced manual errata and no replies for ages. I've not seen anything from him on the forum or FB group either.

Hopefully the next update on the manual can be an improvement with all the corrections included. Please note that I'm in no way underestimating the work involved to produce version one, but just feel it should have been checked more before publication.

[MtM]

Thanks @Alcoholics Anonymous, it's excellent that quality resources are available.

Do you know what has happened with Phoebus R Dokos? He seems to have gone quiet on the scene. Hope he is OK.

I've requested edit rights to his crowd sourced manual errata and no replies for ages. I've not seen anything from him on the forum or FB group either.

Hopefully the next update on the manual can be an improvement with all the corrections included. Please note that I'm in no way underestimating the work involved to produce version one, but just feel it should have been checked more before publication.

Looking at the firmware update page, he seems to have last updated the Next firmware a week ago ...

https://gitlab.com/thesmog358/tbblue/-/commits/master/

So maybe he is still around just busy?

[Alcoholics Anonymous]

Thanks @Alcoholics Anonymous, it's excellent that quality resources are available.

There will be more coming too.

A brief technical document will come out that describes the machine completely -- this won't be a technical manual as that's for someone else to write (I am not really interested in writing some hundreds of pages of documentation ). This document will be adequate for people with technical knowledge already.

Another document will come out for best practice in creating new cores for the fpga. This will include re-usable modules and how to use the spectrum next physical hardware as intended.

The user manual will be updated for the KS2 machines and this is meant as a beginner introduction like the original spectrum manual. A technical manual may also come.

On the software side many users are now writing blogs and whatnot as they learn the machine themselves. From the team itself you have the manuals, the tutorial videos by Jim and you may see compiled basic information, detailed c compiler information and maybe forth if that gets attention.

There are a couple of problems with producing these things. One is that it takes quite a bit of time to write documentation. The other is that the machine is not considered finished. There is a list of things to get done in the hardware according to the vision and nextzxos continues to evolve. The hardware is constrained by a finite size fpga so that will put a lid on how much further things can go.

Do you know what has happened with Phoebus R Dokos? He seems to have gone quiet on the scene. Hope he is OK.

He's in daily contact and has his fingers in lots of pies. He does the physical software for Rusty Pixels and graphics for a few games that are coming out among other things.

I've requested edit rights to his crowd sourced manual errata and no replies for ages. I've not seen anything from him on the forum or FB group either.

Discord might be a better place for that but at the moment the manual isn't being updated. It will be worked on closer to the expected shipping as there are still new things coming in the operating system and hardware.

[Alessandro]

Thanks for the link [mention]PeterJ[/mention]; although the booklet is incomplete it seems easy enough to understand at a first glance. I have been struggling to understand how the graphic modes of the Next actually work, the manual does not seem to be very clear about this, or maybe it's the language barrier, who knows.

On a side note, I find it very annoying that people share valuable information (or even software) only through Facebook, hindering everyone (like yours truly) who does not want to have anything to do with that from using it.

[PeterJ]

Thanks [mention]Alessandro[/mention],

I agree, it seems easier to understand than the chapters in the official manual. Hopefully there will be more updates over time. Do watch the videos from Darryl Sloan, and the recorded live streams from Jim Bagley.

I'm not a huge social media user, but try and remember to post here if I see anything which may be useful to our members.

Peter

[clebin]

On a side note, I find it very annoying that people share valuable information (or even software) only through Facebook, hindering everyone (like yours truly) who does not want to have anything to do with that from using it.

Me too, 100%. Even if you do log in, Facebook is an awful replacement for a technical forum. The platform is designed for transient, forgettable snippets of people's lives like what they had for dinner, not as a repository of knowledge.

The Next group is just a big long stream of consciousness where useful posts are vying with the same people writing "Sooo excited!!!" for the 100th time. There's loads of valuable information to be shared about this new platform and it might as well just disappear for all the good it is sitting in Facebook.

[PeterJ]

Whilst I fully agree with you, many would describe us as luddites!

Unfortunately the official Next forum gets very little traffic. I do sadly see forums becoming less and less prevalent with younger people. Forums are certainly far better for technical discussions.

By the way, I will be posting details of our new TikTok channel soon

[PeterJ]

[mention]Alcoholics Anonymous[/mention],

I had a good and positive chat with Phoebus on the FB group regarding my feelings on the first manual and the number of errors.

He has said the second version will be available for the community to check before publication which is excellent. I don't underestimate the huge amounts of work that go into good documentation.

[Alcoholics Anonymous]

He has said the second version will be available for the community to check before publication which is excellent. I don't underestimate the huge amounts of work that go into good documentation.

It was a huge struggle to get that even done on time. A lot of material had to be cut due to size limitations and then there was the problem of the operating system and hardware changing right up to the deadline (and afterward). It isn't a small job.

I too hate facebook but that is where most people are. There are 9400 members in the zx next facebook group and far fewer in the forums. The questions get asked there and they get answered there. Unfortunately, the same questions get asked over and over again because of the nature of the medium so it seems like you only reach a small number of people with each post and the depth of the questions don't increase.

The display modes are mostly fairly straightforward but the devil is always in the details.

You have the ula like on the original spectrums but it has been enhanced with modes from the timex scld controlled via port 0xff or nextreg. That information is available on the internet. The contention is optional on the Next and is not applied for speeds > 3.5MHz and the type is programmable (48K, 128K, +3). The ula screens can also be hardware scrolled by pixel, carrying the colour clash with it. The colours used pass through a palette lookup that by default behaves like the original spectrums but you can change the actual colours displayed by making changes to the palette. Both ulanext and ulaplus map onto this palette. The ula's display files are always located in bank 5 (or bank 7 for the 128k's second display file) as on the originals but the memory paging architecture of the zx next allows them to be removed from the z80's address space altogether or to move the display files to any 8K boundary including, eg, address 0. The lores modes can replace the ula (128x96 4 bits per colour as on the uno or 128x96 8 bits per colour).

Layer 2 is the one colour per pixel bitmap. Each byte is a colour that is looked up in the palette; by default the palette is initialized to be identical to the pixel value meaning the pixel value would have form RRRGGGBB but this can be changed at the discretion of the programmer. The resolutions are 256x192 (48K arranged as +1 increasing x +256 increasing y), 320x256 (80K arranged as +1 increasing y +256 increasing x) or 640x256 (4 bits per colour, 80K arranged as +1 increasing y +256 increasing x by 2). Layer 2 can be located anywhere in memory on a 16K boundary as its location is controlled by a nextreg. All or parts of layer 2 can be brought into the z80's 64K memory space using the Next's memory mapping ability. There is also a special memory mapping ability called layer 2 mapping through port 0x123B that can do things like read only or write only so that code can co-exist in the 64K space at the same time as layer 2 graphics. This mapping mode can be used generally and doesn't have to apply exclusively to layer 2.

Hardware sprites -- there are 128 of them of fixed 16x16 size and at least 100 of them can be displayed per line. In addition, sprites can be scaled by integer amounts x2 x4 x8 independently in the vertical and horizontal directions; if scaled horizontally this takes away from sprites displayed per line as it's the number of pixels plotted that matters. 1600 pixels per line is guaranteed. Individual sprites can also be linked together in the hardware in a parent - child - child -child ... relationship. If this is done, changes to the parent affect all the children. So moving the parent moves all the children with it and if the parent relationship is unified type (composite is the other) then rotation and scaling of the parent also applies to its children. This is how large hardware sprites can be formed from smaller ones. The sprite patterns are stored in 16K of memory on the fpga (you can think of it as private vram like the tms99xx chips have if you are familiar with those); these are source images for the sprites and each sprite can take any image from that memory. Features allow you to shift the palette so that sprites can share images but change the colours without occupying more pattern memory. The details are best described elsewhere https://wiki.specnext.dev/Sprites .

Hardware tilemap. This is different from the software tilemap called layer 3 (?) in the next basic now. Next basic's tiles are actually layer 2 images displayed in layer 2 and was created before the hardware tilemap was added to the hardware. Next basic will support the hardware tilemap in a later version. The hardware tilemap comes in either 40x32 or 80x32 character resolution with each character 8x8 pixels in size like a UDG. There are two parts -- the character map (also confusingly called the tilemap) which shows what ascii character 0-255 occupies each 40x32 or 80x32 cell and the UDG definitions of each character used in the tilemap. The hardware visits each character cell, finds out what ascii code is there and then looks up the UDG definition in ram to draw it. The character map can optionally have an attribute associated with each ascii code. This attribute can independently rotate or mirror the image among other things. If the character map does not have this attribute, then the attribute for all characters comes from a nextreg. This mode was developed for cpm (it does 80 column text quickly) and for fast scrolling backgrounds. The details are also best described elsewhere https://www.specnext.com/tilemap-mode/ .

These things are arranged in layers. Eg, SUL might mean sprites on top of ula on top of layer 2. There is a concept of transparent pixel so that underlying layers can appear when overlying layers are a transparent colour. Clipping also applies independently to all layers so that you can confine a particular layer to a rectangular box. All layers can also hardware scroll by pixel amounts. There are further details, eg, tilemap is attached to the ula as far as layer order is concerned (for now -- this limitation comes because the layer ordering was done a long time ago) and the ula/tilemap can be used in stencil or blending modes in combination with layer 2 but these are truly esoteric and not well used yet.

Finally, the copper is a simple co-processor that is intimately tied to the video generation. It can wait on a particular vertical raster position and a horizontal character position before making changes to the state of the machine. It can, eg, change scroll amounts, change layer order, change palettes, etc.

[llewelyn]

Tremendous amount of useful info, thanks AA.

Add me to the FB hater list, its not so much the cuteness of phony 'friends' that irritates me as the wholly illogical page layout and means of locating specific data without having to put up with the personal baggage.

[llewelyn]

As mentioned already, I got my Spectrum NEXT (Issue 1 Base model) on Monday this week and got lucky with the monitor difficulty (my wife refusing to let me hijack the TV) as I found an old monitor languishing in the junk pile and it has a VGA input as does the Next to my delight.

Glad as I was to have got a manual, its typeface is too small for me to read without a magnifier so I switched it to 48k mode which I prefer anyway being a fan of the single keystroke command entry. Besides I'm so rusty that I won't be able to use any of the more advanced Basic until I've approached learning the original command set anyway. I mean to be honest I might as well face the fact that I don't even know what most of the commands do anyway, I need to go back to school and I'm not as quick on the uptake as I used to be.

For example. I typed in the usual "Hello world" and it took me half an hour to locate the quotation marks because to my eye they looked like funny little brackets and they were in the wrong place. Flushed with success (!) II decided to Save it, figuring that I'd add to it later and I ended up searching through the old Plus 2 manual to find out what I was doing wrong when it wouldn't accept SAVE "Hello" . BAS. So I think that adequately shows how pitiful my knowledge/memory is of using Basic.

Determined to do the thing properly, I cleared out my old junk room, set up the Next and its monitor next to my laptop which is needed to look for info or ask for help and downloaded the manual from the Next website and then had to obtain Z7 to unzip it after which I promptly lost the file because although I sent it to C:/programs now I cannot locate that folder not with file explorer or search? My ignorance extends to Windows too...I'll have to do that operation again and send it to the downloads folder which is what I'd normally have done if the unzipper hadn't suggested Programs.

Frustration was the order of the day. Oh and last but not least, the bloody monitor isn't displaying properly and I never even saw the start page the manual shows to help in getting the display right. Mine is legible but the very top line is slightly distorted and shows a jagged edge on the top right corner whereas the screen is hard up against the left side of the monitor but still its readable so I'll leave it be for now.

DAY 1 of Mike's Adventures with Next Basic!

[Alcoholics Anonymous]

I would highly recommend joining the "Basic on the ZX Spectrum Next" facebook group. It's a fairly active place with people experimenting a lot with sprites, scrolling and so on, to give you some examples when you are ready to try more advanced things. The downside is it's facebook (I hate facebook too but I have to concede that's where most people are these days) and I'm a little disappointed it's a private group as most zx next groups are public on purpose so you don't need a facebook account to read them.

For plain Sinclair basic there is also "Basic on the ZX Spectrum" or just this forum for getting back on the horse.

I would also recommend you update your machine to the latest development build because that's what people are using for the new stuff. It's a matter of copying the files onto a fresh sd card and forcing an update on power up by holding down U until you see the updater come up. The files contain the operating system and other things and the updater uses TBBLUE.TBU to change the fpga hardware stored on the flash chip. I'm guessing your machine is a bit out of date.

That said, I would advise you to use NextBASIC instead of the 48K editor simply because things are much easier. For example, from NextBASIC hit the EDIT key and choose the "32/64/85" column option. This will put you into 64 columns for editing your basic. This screen mode only affects the editor so when your program runs it will switch back to the normal 32 columns. You can type one letter at a time and the line editing features are much better (see Paul Land's editor cheat sheet).

From NextBASIC, saves and loads are directed to the sd card. It's formatted as FAT32 so you have directories and filenames. For saving your work you'd probably want to make a directory, change there and then save. See a the current directory listing with CAT. Make a directory with MKDIR "name". Change to a directory with CD "name". When you save a file with something like SAVE "name.bas", that is a FAT32 file. The Next natively supports LFN so you can make names as long as you want. Each save with a different name will create a new file. I added the extension in the name to remind that it is a basic program. The browser also determines what to do with files by their extensions. You can also mount tap files for loading and saving but that is a more advanced topic. And you can save and load to tape if you are feeling masochistic.

If you prefer to edit on a PC or to download plain text files containing basic you can do that too. The dot commands ".txt2bas" and ".bas2txt" will convert plain text to tokenized basic and vice versa. Any such programs will also work on regular Spectrums as long as no special NextBASIC commands are there.

On your sd card under the directory docs/nextzxos there are brief executive summaries of the new nextbasic features in pdf form. It might not be the best way to learn but it can act as a reference. When you're ready, better might be to look at the programs people are sharing as they are quite often generous about explaining how things work:

https://kevman3d.itch.io/ranble

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAmQGELzPSE

Kev's download includes a pdf explaining the program line by line and having the nextbasic documentation open at the same time for reference would help. It may look a little alien at first but the price of progress is new things. For example, LET is optional, % will show up all over the place and that's because nextbasic has real integers and integer evaluation which % is used to introduce and then there's all the new things like sprites and memory banks.

Neil Streeter's introduction seems pretty good too. The first chapter is on original Spectrum basic.

These pdfs come from the facebook group which is closed so I've made them available from my google drive. The latest will always be found in that facebook group.

[llewelyn]

Thanks a lot AA!
I'm afraid that your advice is a bit too much for me to comprehend at the moment but I do appreciate the effort.
There's so much I don't know about even using my normal Windows machine, things like installing updated files on a card, I haven't got a clue.

Thats why I chose the 48k mode because at least I had some familiarity with it. I shall look forward to making use of the more advanced options when I'm capable of understanding them. Until then it must be baby steps for yours truly.

[Alcoholics Anonymous]

OK that makes sense You can still try entering normal 48K programs into the nextbasic editor -- those will still work.

About your VGA monitor: not all monitors are equal. If the monitor was originally made for PCs, it's quite likely it can't sync to video below 60Hz frame rate and that's a problem for the spectrum as the spectrum is a 50Hz machine. Some VGA monitors can sync close to 50Hz but not quite there. The hardware in the Next cannot do frame rate conversion (there's just not enough space on the fpga to do that) so instead it creates a live video signal just like the original machines. But the hardware for VGA is set up to produce frame rates from 50Hz (called VGA-0 and this is the exact spectrum speed) up to ~58Hz (called VGA-6). In order to do the ~58Hz frame rate, the hardware is actually sped up by ~14% so that the machine runs faster by that amount. All the internal timing is the same, it just appears as if everything is faster. You want a 50Hz frame rate as close to VGA-0 as possible. If your VGA monitor just won't do it or you find VGA-5/VGA-6 too fast, you can choose a 60Hz setting on VGA-0 that will run the spectrum at normal speed but with 60Hz frame rate. This will wreck the careful timing relationship between z80 and video so that spectrum programs that depend on that won't display properly (think multi-colour games, eg). It will actually behave a lot like the NTSC ts2068 video-wise. 60Hz is only meant as a last effort to get a display working if it is incompatible to spectrum timing. Note that the Next is a dual 50/60Hz machine and there are some cases where programs will deliberately switch to 60Hz. An example is RAMS, which is a lot like MAME for the PC, and it really needs to run the arcade games at 60Hz so that they run at correct speed.

Anyway, when you hold V while booting up, the Next will enter the video test card mode but only for VGA settings. If you don't hold V, it will try all video modes starting with hdmi so you won't see a thing for a while. As you have VGA, start by holding down V. The video card will step through VGA-0 50Hz, VGA-0 60Hz, VGA-1 50Hz, VGA-1 60Hz, ..., VGA-6 50Hz, VGA-6 60Hz and loop around. You can press N to skip to the next one quicker with an audible beep heard after each mode is tried. As mentioned you want to choose a 50Hz mode as close to VGA-0 as possible.

[PeterJ]

Thanks [mention]Alcoholics Anonymous[/mention],

I hope Neil completes his tutorial. I know he got COVID late last year. I've not seen him on.FB recently, but he did acknowledge one of my messages.

[llewelyn]

31 IF N$>=6 THEN GOTO 20

I'm getting a red flashing square on the T of THEN and I cannot understand why, In the manual Chapter 3 page 43 the same syntax is used on Line 50 of their sample program

[+3code]

31 IF N$>=6 THEN GOTO 20

I'm getting a red flashing square on the T of THEN and I cannot understand why, In the manual Chapter 3 page 43 the same syntax is used on Line 50 of their sample program

Try with N$>="6"